As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk’s favorite letter “X,” its open source competitor Mastodon is once again seeing usage numbers soar.
I can fathom no world where you’d want to trade away a multi billion dollar brand for a new brand you literally can’t SEO. What, you think your brand is gonna be more impressive that the generic variable, and a part of the alphabet?
“Follow me on Twitter” becomes “follow me on X”? “You should tweet that” becomes “you should X that”? The little blue bird on every shop window, website, and business card becomes a stylized letter that, hopefully, doesn’t look so threatening on the next iteration?
It’s a textbook case of brand destruction. I almost regret never making a Twitter in the first place, just so I could quit today, or at any of the hundred days in the past year where it got inexplicably worse without reason.
“You should tweet that” becomes “you should X that”
“You should X-create” that
The little blue bird on every shop window, website, and business card becomes a stylized letter that, hopefully, doesn’t look so threatening on the next iteration?
Haha, I know the most appropriate iteration, a red background with the X in a white circle.
Perhaps with each corner of the X at a 90 degree angle clockwise? You know, to add style points.
Its a terrible rebrand that pretty much comes because of Elon’s impulses, or in other words, for shits and giggles. Regardless of this hilarious trashing of such a powerful brand, I’ll have fun calling tweets “xeets” for a good week.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia spent good money to never have an Arab Spring again.
It must be so horrible working “with” him. You’re trying to build something and every morning you must be frightened to see Elon hanging on a ladder because he thought it was so funny to draw dicks everywhere on the building, which would have you cancel everything you are working on.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=UfOK0evCqZY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Yay, another week of higher than normal activity, until the fomo kicks back in and they leave yet again cause “everyone is on X/this is sooo complicated/I just wanna see the fallout/whatever excuse justifies their addiction”
Every time that happens the fedi retains a good chunk of users. There’s significant and stable growth throughout.
believe it or not its more likely they straight up ripped off U+1D54F MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL X:
𝕏
absolutely no creativity. at least threads drew the ring in @ clockwise instead of the usual anticlockwise
Saw this on Mastodon:
Important sets:
ℂ the complex numbers
ℕ the natural numbers
ℚ the rational numbers
ℝ the real numbers
𝕏 the set of fascists wannabes
ℤ the integers
Imagine a billionaire approving that “logo” despite how uncreative it is. Like get a better graphic designer I guess?
only difference between billionaires and normal people is that billionaires have a lot of money. best not to assume they have above-average logo appreciation skills. although they could hire some good advisors i suppose
I opened Twitter page and it shows login page with small x on left and big x in the middle. But only one closes the popup.
I just checked too. And if you close popup it takes you do another login page (also with an X) but that one can’t be closed. So apparently there is no way to browse Twitter without an account now, which you could before.
People always used to claim that getting banned from twitter meant you were cut off from important information. It’s highly debatable that there was any important information on twitter. That aside it wasn’t really true you were cut off entirely, you could still browse tweets, just couldn’t post when banned. Now it seems being banned does mean you’re cut off from reading it.
Twitter was really good for news media and it kinda still is. Where I come from legacy media have been bought off by plutocrats who are in bed with the government and only reputable source of news are independent media which don’t have enough funding or financial backing to appear on satellite TV channels. There’s also no incentive for the incumbent to let such media flourish since legacy media is doing their dirty work. So for people like me this is a huge setback.
I’m just here to spread the good word about old.lemmy.world
Honestly my favorite thing about Lemmy so far is that the web UI already has most of the things I wanted RES to have. And it’s all open source so we can just improve the UI directly. No need for browser changes!
Or Kbin! Kbin can do both microblogging and link aggregation/discussion. Tbh departing Twitter users coming to Mastodon, and reddit refugees are brought together on Kbin.
The “all-in-one” method acomplished by Kbin is a huge feat, especially when it’s built by a single person from scratch (ie; not based on lemmy codebase wise) and still much more ActivityPub compatible.
Kbin is sadly very underrated imo.
I feel that’s a feature of Lemmy to not do both. I don’t care about microblogs. I want the sites that I use to do one thing and do it as well as possible, so I can mix & match what I use, and not see what I don’t want.
It needs a mobile app to take off, imo.
Additionally, since it is just one guy (that I’m aware of), I’m not sure how sustainable it is for him. I believe he’s been surviving off some EU grant and donations, but once the grant runs out and donations slow, the server costs for delivering content to tens of thousands of users every day are going to start being pretty rough to handle. Has he explained what his plan is for long term sustainability?
@ArtemisApp is in beta right now. @hariette has been hard at work. I look forward to trying it soon. Hopefully. I’m not on discord, and that’s where most people are getting beta.
It was one guy until recently. But now if you look at the Kbin commits, it looks like 3 or 4 people. It’s growing.
