[lokedhs]

Nowhere near "everyone" is on Twitter. I have to admit that I don't know a single person who is (I'm sure some of them are, it's not like I ask everyone if they use some specific platform).

The point is that a lot of media people is, and posting there gets you exposure. But as this group of people is much smaller than your proverbial "everyone", moving them off Twitter is a much easier affair.

I have often thought about what would happen if a small number of very high profile Twitter users with a wide reach to various different groups decided to set up their own servers (Mastodon perhaps) and asked their followers to go there. How many such high-profile users would you need before Twitter's momentum completely stops? I argue that that number is very small.

[prophesi]

That's fair. I don't even have a Twitter account myself (except back when the Nintendo Switch required a social account to export screenshots). But I am _viewing_ tweets my friends share on an almost daily basis as its become the media of choice for realtime news in my circles.

https://hntrending.com/domains/year/index.html

Seems to be the same for HN, though my guess is that Twitter's rise in HN exposure is due to the BLM protests, the Capitol incident, and Trump.

> How many such high-profile users would you need before Twitter's momentum completely stops? I argue that that number is very small.

Microsoft made that bet, and got Twitch's top 2 streamers on to their platform (Mixer), but it still died within a year.

There's a chicken-and-the-egg problem here. High-profile users have no financial incentive to move to a smaller platform. Maybe a platform that isn't as expensive as livestreaming, backed by someone as huge as Microsoft, could sign enough contracts to break the barrier of the network effect.

Another solution would be upending social media's toxic money-maker: blackbox algorithms for targeted ads. That'll give the decentralized Fediverse model a chance. We did see Gab fall under too much server strain, but it's essentially a centralized version of Mastodon.

[lokedhs]

> We did see Gab fall under too much server strain, but it's essentially a centralized version of Mastodon.

Mastodon is a quite heavy application and it's arguable that it was never really designed for high-volume traffic (it's supposed to be decentralised after all). Also, I believe Twitter had a lot of performance issues and it took them years to fix that, despite having a ridiculous amount of money available to them.

Gab could easily have embraced federation (but, I presume, only with like-minded instances since no decent instances would want to federate with them) but they decided they wanted to be another Twitter, but without the resources of Twitter.