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by kodapoda 958 days ago
It's resilient due to the wide prior adoption. For example, I rarely see Threads or Mastodon embeds in new articles, it's still mostly Twitter. Changing that will take years.
2 comments

Yep, network effect.

The numerous competing platforms that want to replace it are all competing for users, which prevents a migration to a single alternative platform.

And that buys time for X to improve, which IMO it is. I may be wrong but I think long term it’s going to come out on top. At this point it’s getting tough to bet against Musk.

Counterpoint: I can bet that in the past three months there has been noticeably more mastodon threads hitting the front-page of HN than twitter.
You really think that? In any case I would take the bet if you want money bet.
A quick search on Algolia is showing a lot more links to twitter, but only a minority of them with enough points to have made the front-page. By contrast, the majority of links to fosstodon.org and hachyderm.io have front-page worthy scores, and mastodon.social is 50/50.

Not to sound like a gatekeeper, but it feels Twitter is still appealing for the /r/startups crowd, "indiehackers" influencers and wannabes. The center of "real" tech talk has moved away from twitter.

I don't know if that's true yet, but there are a lot of FOSS and infosec and other software people on Mastodon. Centrist politics seems to be gradually migrating to Threads; lefty politics seems to be going to Mastodon. I'm starting to see Mastodon and Threads embeds where you'd expect Twitter embeds on mainstream sites.

Twitter isn't dead yet, but it's no longer the universal town square, and the longer Musk controls it, the further away from that it will get.