[darawk]

> Twitter (and other platforms like it) self-impose those costs on themselves in order to maintain the feudalist structure.

No they don't. The site would not exist if they did not "self impose" those costs. By simple analogy, which self-imposed costs were paid by feudal lords?

> The fact that billions of people still choose to use Twitter instead of the sensible alternative shows that the feudalist gambit (using algorithms to make people angry and turn on each other) is working.

It shows that people prefer Twitter to Mastodon. It does not show anything about why they prefer one to the other. Your reason may be a factor, but there is no prima facie evidence that it is the dispositive factor. There is quite a lot of evidence that other factors are substantially more relevant.

[tmcb]

> By simple analogy, which self-imposed costs were paid by feudal lords?

Mantaining lords and knights, letting go of a parcel of their land so that they could accommodate enough serfs and their families (as in comparison to, say, slave quarters used in the Americas).

[red-iron-pine]

and running their manor, in a day to day sense in many cases. the point was to maintain a military and agricultural base, and they had sizable obligations to their bosses, up to and including dying in battle.

[exe34]

Shut down twitter for a week and people might move to mastodont and never come back - network effect.

[theGeatZhopa]

Not necessarily :) I wouldn't even notice if one or the other is shut down.

Then, you underrate the "homeing" feeling, the whole posts, the followers, your digital "brand" and all the work invested - you don't have to learn a new platform (it's peculiarities), you don't have to start from zero. So your motivation not to leave X/Twitter is quite high.

It's a wishful thinking by you. I don't know where and why it originates. But, being a rational human being, I wouldn't switch. Let alone the reach you get with X/Twitter compared to mastodon. Even the smallest blog shows X/Twitter embeddings. Where is that from mastodon? ... It would be an unwise decision to switch. Sorry.

[exe34]

Plenty of mass migrations have happened online, usually when the payment processors decide to go puritanical.

[theGeatZhopa]

Yes, you're absolutely right here. It's the way of money all of us following. May it be the payment processor goes rogue, or the platform itself. Or a competitor emerges (like tiktok did suddenly, like Facebook did suddenly at their start..)

it's a very easy equation: Time = money.

No matter if it's the right hand or the left hand of the equation, but one of the sides must be bigger than the other And the quotient have at best to go towards the positive infinity if you consider how much money/work you invested and how much time you spend on it .. (ROI)

So, big, mass migration actually never happened once. It rather happened slowly and over time. Consumers switching to platforms which have what they actually want and that are easy to use (time investment). If you want Facebook/meta to go down the river, then you need something that gives the consumers what Facebook doesn't give them. If you want Google to go down the river, then you need to offer some better experience. Like bing chat / Copilot. If I think about that, I didn't use Google search in the last 4-5 months. Because I can formulate what I actually want and if I need more in depth knowledge, I still use Copilot as a starting point for my things. It's a total different approach to search.

So, mass migration happens, yes. But not because some says "it's bad.. omg, musk is the CEO" or "oh no, they put the API behind a paywall" - idealistic thinking stops there, where someone must invest time/work to get where he/she/it already is. And that's what lures the consumers into a closed, walled system - in the end they get exactly what they want.

That's why f.e. mastodon is still somewhere .. let me say, behind the fence..

It's all economic thinking and processes ruling "who and how many go to"

Just take the influencers. They can't even earn money on alternatives. Why should they migrate?

[exe34]

The lack of money for "influencers" sounds like a feature to me, not a bug!

[theGeatZhopa]

But that would also be a problem for the useful content created by such. The most of the influencers can go and get a job, YES!! GO EARN YOUR MONEY WITH ACTUAL WORK!".

But a few creators are really entertaining and master knowledge transfer. I would miss something, if there's no "technical influencers" anymore (= the silicone valley superstars haha)

[mlrtime]

Reddit almost had this same experiment, other than a few anecdotes nothing changed.