The Twitter Takeover: As Told By Mastodon

Mastodon might be a Twitter alternative for some users, but not me.

Why it matters:

I've spent the last 15 years building a tribe and participating in healthy discussions with a community of like-minded people on Twitter. I know many of them personally. I know their families, watched their kids grow up, graduate college, launch careers, and attended birthday parties, events, baptisms, and so many other life events. I've been to Tweetups, Blogworld, and SXSW in the early days. I even founded the Silicon Valley Tweetup over a decade ago with Jennifer Leggio and Gabriel Carrejo . Wow 10 years.

I don't have the energy or desire to start over again. There's no need. I surround myself with positive people. I filter out negativity and political discourse. Twitter is my "go-to" social network for just about everything–what to watch on Netflix, which router, printer, microphone, and webcam to buy, sports updates, replays, and of course, baggin' on sorry Dubs fans.

Mastodon has too many syllables to be a social network. I can't.

Is the Twitter migration real?

When I first saw Mastodon trending in my feed, I thought it was just another Nicholas Cage movie on Amazon Prime. After some digging, I learned that it's a decentralized social media platform that’s been around since 2016. A group of developers created it as an open-source project inspired by other decentralized platforms like Diaspora and GNU social.

Over the last two months, it's been hyped by the media as the next Twitter alternative.

Mastodon is not a made-up word. It's a large, prehistoric mammal that went extinct over 10,000 years ago. It looks like an elephant. It's also the name of a heavy metal band. I had no idea about either. Maybe I was absent the day they taught that in school because it was all news to me.

What's all the hype about, anyway?

It depends on who you ask. Living in Silicon Valley is living in a bubble. People in my network repeat the same talking points over and over and over. Share the same articles over and over and over. I do it too. It's not a good thing or a bad thing. It's just reality.

There has been a "de-platforming" conversation for years. The idea of decentralized networks makes sense, as it gives more control to the community. Look at Blockchain. But it's hard to de-centralize something that was never really been centralized in the first place.

More attention has been given to Mastodon over the last two months, given Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter. There are concerns with content moderation, verification, free speech, censorship, and everything else that goes into political talking points from both sides.

The Guardian bragged that Mastodon gained 70,000 users right after the takeover, stating that "no one billionaire can control it." But let's be real for a second. 70,000 new users shouldn't make headlines. And last I remember, every social network today is owned by a billionaire, multiple millionaires, other countries, and probably the Illuminati.

TechCrunch also reported that Mastodon reached 655K total users. Mastodon also confirmed this in a Tweet, stating, "The number of people who switched over to #Mastodon in the last week alone has surpassed 230 thousand, along with many returning to old accounts bumping the network to over 655 thousand active users, highest it's ever been!"

My only issue with this language is that "switching over" insinuates that users are abandoning their Twitter accounts for Mastodon. Creating new accounts or returning to old accounts doesn't equate to widespread adoption. For context, I still have an Ello account I created 8 years ago. I haven't logged in since.

My perspective doesn't matter. Let's see what the data tells us about the hype.

Since October 1, there have been 15,867 articles written about Mastodon globally, spanning business, tech, marketing trades, and consumer lifestyle media outlets.

There are outlets like Fast Company that think Mastodon is too complicated to replace Twitter. Some outlets really want to like the platform, but don't. Others, like Business Insider, are just reporting on the growth potential of neworks like Mastodon and Tumblr (yes, Tumblr). But when scanning the headlines, most media outlets seem to advocate that users migrate to Mastodon for various reasons.

Below is a small sampling of the top media publications covering Mastodon. The media outlets are plotted using three variables:

• Volume of Coverage: The X-axis represents the total volume of articles mentioning Mastodon.
• Resonance: This Y-axis represents the average engagement per article.
• Size of Bubble: The size represents the reach of the media outlet.

You'll notice that the data spans tech, consumer, business, and global media outlets. It's important to point out that not all of this coverage is exclusive to Mastodon. In fact, a very small percentage of the coverage mention Mastodon in the headline. The media narrative revolves around Twitter, Elon Musk, and the chaos from behind the firewall. They tend to mention Mastodon as an alternative "to the chaos."

More data sources = more context

In most projects, I will run the media coverage data through text analysis. This approach helps to understand the context of the coverage and uncover any hidden narratives if they exist.

Instead, I used Infegy – Consumer Intelligence to analyze two alternative data sources-the Mastodon Subreddit and Twitter. Thank you Zo? McCarthy ????.

You'll notice that most of the Reddit conversation is about onboarding and education. This makes sense, given that it is in fact a Mastodon subreddit. On the other hand, on Twitter, you'll notice several small clusters that aren't interconnected. While many topics overlap, the conversations are disparate and less connected than on Reddit. This also makes sense because of how Twitter works. It's open for anyone to Tweet anything about any topic.

If I had to summarize the Twitter conversation in its purest form, there are groups of people rallying behind Mastodon and urging others to do the same. There are open-minded individuals that have attempted to use the platform, but find it confusing. And then there is a group of others that don't really care. I'm in this boat.

I was kidding about the Illuminati.

So, what does all this mean?

Here's my takeaway for you, in case you struggle to read between the lines. When doing an analysis, it's a good practice to isolate your data sources. It will take longer to finish the work, but the insights and observations will be worth it.

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