[blauditore]

It's not like Twitter was beloved before, and neither are people actually leaving the platform (except for the dozens who care a lot).

Like most content on Twitter, the discussion around it is mostly a loud minority complaining.

[d3nj4l]

People have left. A ton of the technical people I follow have moved mostly to mastodon. Dan Luu of HN fame regularly posts on mastodon but hasn’t cross posted on twitter as often (which is sorta funny because he used to work for twitter, and left before the Musk acquisition.) Some people are still “on” twitter but post much less than they do on mastodon, like Daniel Stenberg (you might know him as the maintainer of curl.)

To be honest, as someone who doesn’t care about the twitter culture war and still sees a lot of value in the site, mastodon is steadily becoming a better place for actual technical content. Twitter blue checks have insufferable opinions, and I did better when their existence wasn’t forced on me.

[wsatb]

Are people actually not leaving? I had not used Twitter in about a year and a half until last week. I went there and it took 20 seconds to load the web app, then after I logged in it was Elon getting promoted, ads that look like mostly spam, and everyone with a blue check mark. I left because I thought the platform was deteriorating then and it is much, much worse now.

[blauditore]

The question is always: What's the alternative? People who are either addicted to what they get from Twitter, or whose job depends on it, have no other place to go. Of course there are other platforms, but those only have a tiny fraction of the user base, meaning less content and less attention.

[notduncansmith]

This is like asking “what’s the alternative to nicotine?” - it may sound trite, but basic health is the alternative. A replacement is not the answer. You just need to quit.

[soneca]

I would guess that people who are addicted to it or whose job depends on it are not the majority of Twitter users.

I agree that even out of those groups, there are not a lot of people deleting accounts and moving to other places. But, my perception is that a lot of people are indeed spending much less time on Twitter. Twitter competitors are not only Mastodon or Threads. It is also YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Netflix and alikes, advocacy for consuming less social media overall, etc.

[prawn]

It was my favourite social network, and I had multiple accounts. I used it slightly professionally, but wouldn't say my job depended on it. Months ago, I deleted as many tweets as I could without paying to deal with more, and stopped using it. I don't feel like I've missed it all that much. The engagement when active never felt that great, so that probably helped. I've never used Facebook either.

I do feel a bit like "what's the alternative"; I like being an active contributor rather than a passive consumer, so falling back to just reading scraps on the net makes me uneasy.

[nacs]

A ton of people have moved to Threads from Meta which is the most direct competition.

Then there is of course Mastodon and the upcoming Bluesky.

[key8chev]

The userbase is the key to the entire platform. Any minority platform that has been created for small groups like Truth are just echo chambers of a single subculture. The wide range of individuals and subcultures on the Twitter platform is the whole reason people still use it.

[wbl]

Addictions can end. Make the experience unpleasant and people stop seeking it.

[dspillett]

> Are people actually not leaving?

It can be hard to tell, the published numbers and other people's guesstimates do not tell much of the full tale.

I think many are soft-leaving: using twitter and which-ever alternative they are considering in unison while they see how things play out. Perhaps more than one alternative. People will eventually decide because multiple contact points will be a hassle, at which point we might see a glut of people leaving twitter if one of the alternatives has enough momentum at the time.

A significant problem ex-twitter has is that much of the advertising that left has not returned while user and bot activity hasn't dropped by nearly enough to compensate for that so the on-going losses have grown despite all the staff cuts and so forth. Some advertisers are splitting their spend elsewhere, some are playing wait-and-see like users, and some have just realised that dropping (or reducing) twitter as a channel hasn't harmed their RoI on marketing budget so maybe it wasn't a great channel for them in the first place.

[caveat: I've never actually used Twitter, other than being sent links to threads occasionally and thinking “this is a terrible way to get across an idea worthy of more than one sentence”, so might know nothing – long before the recent kerfuffle I considered it “too full of the sort of people who consider twitter to be a good idea” and from what I gather indirectly it is increasingly home to a lot of the sort of people/content that I already get irritated enough by on other channels!]