Such a business genius to just completely trash well known name branding that most companies would kill to have. Twitter was a household name, the bird instantly recognizable with the brand, and "tweet" and "retweet" as common words.
Such a brilliant display of Vision™ by Musk.
not only that, heaps of cultures associate birds with rumours and news (a little bird told me that ...). I was genius marketing and top tier branding
And here we are, more than a year later, and any time anyone actually calls it by its new name, it’s always followed by (previously Twitter). Hilarious. Because the new name is fucking nonsense
and also it had the bonus that being commonly used in language still posed no risk of genericizing the trademark.
people say kleenex to mean tissue, xerox to mean photocopy (xerox famously put out ads telling people not to use their trademark name in generic context)...
... but never twitter to mean any social network or even microblogging. or tweet to mean a post on facebook or even mastodon. tweet is almost always used to mean a post on twitter specifically.
so it was not only universally recognized and thoroughly integrated in language, but also specific enough to be safe for the trademark. an absolute dream for any brand.
and what did the genius do? throw it away for a single letter that's used to mean unknown or generic (great brand strategy btw), but only when it's not used to mean porn.
seriously, since I'm a graphic designer and interested in these things i've seen some bad rebrandings before but this has to be the absolute worst.
he did it on purpose, it was literally an attack on progressives.
what? how?
It was the single platform where scientists and the politically active could interact, safe from regressives via twitters moderation policy. Essentially, a place where verified experts could share opinions to a receptive audience.
By taking over, the verifiablitiy went, the voices of the uninformed were weighted the same as the informed, and whatever (mostly left-leaning) communities existed there became fragmented as the twitter experience went down as the UX became more hostile and ad-ridden.
The progressives are recovering, and finding their communities again, but mostly via bluesky/mastodon
you give him way too much credit. he's a fucking moron and he didn't even buy twitter on purpose. he thought could back out of it just like he backs out of everything he says but was forced to go through with one of the worst purchases in history.
also the rebranding is not to ruin twitter but to pivot to the everything app he's been trying to make for a long time. the name X is also something he always liked because he's a child. he tried to name PayPal X too, and also named one of his children X. none of what he does is 5d chess. he's just a loser idiot who has been failing up for too long.
Collectively we keep forgetting this and it's so important. This isn't 5D fascist chess, this is a guy who got so high on approval from the masses on Twitter he lost his fucking mind. Everything he does these days is for approval from people. The crowd he has decided are the cool kids, who laugh at his shit jokes, are fascists. I don't even think he's a fascist, I think he's an irresponsible egotist with no stable sense of self-worth who deep down knows he's a fraud.
he's not some idiot being propped up by rich backers for the purpose of political disunity: he is that rich backer that props up others.
Do not mistake public theater for incompetence.
he has demonstrated incompetence so many fucking times it's incredible that you are even saying this. he is most definitely an idiot.
Why bother when we have Mastadon?
As I understand it, Mastodon doesn't federate like Lemmy/K-Mbin does (and Sublinks & Piefed too!), where in order to follow someone you need to be on the same instance? Or something? Anyway Mastodon needs some work before it could be a viable replacement.
Edit: I did not phrase this well at all. Oh well, it led to an interesting discussion so I'll leave it here for posterity, but it's incorrect. I think the only correct part of the above is that if you try to leave a Mastodon instance, then like a Lemmy one, you can't really take your account with you (only your settings, but people who followed you before will have to now follow you again in the new location, it does not automatically transfer). So it "federates" but it's not "freely transferable" as people were over-selling it to be.
there are 2 sides to the AP-connected fediverse.... microblogging (tweets/mastodon) and the threadiverse (federated forums/lemmy). mastodon is 100% microblog. lemmy is 100% threadiverse.
mbin is both.
i can easily follow/be followed by mastodon, universodeon, etc as well as fully participate with lemmy.
Thank you for the explanation!:-)
But can someone follow you from a different Mastodon instance than the one you are currently on? Or was that something that changed in the last year? Maybe I misunderstood or it wasn't explained to me well, but I definitely get that people don't want to switch instances bc they will lose all their old followers, but is that the main impediment to people using Mastodon - they just don't want to switch to using it? If so, it's enough, bc as we have seen, these large entities like Twitter are a lot more fragile than people used to believe.
mastodon is a federating micrblog platform.. so anyone on any other instance of any kind that also speaks AP/microblog can interoperate. instance is just an address.
the main thing keeping people from leaving twitter are their own egos. as you point out, 'ive got x followers! ill have none in the fediverse!'
even your correction is wrong lol. you can move accounts on mastodon taking all your followers and follows with you, just not your toots.
Hello from Mastodon
Cool! Consider the receipts delivered, and with my thanks for the gentle correction:-D.
Incorrect. It's just a different kind of platform. There's no really simple way to make a twitter-like site and a forum site mesh fluidly, but Mastodon users can see Lemmy posts and comments and like and reply to them, and I believe even post. Lemmy users can interact when Mastodon users come into Lemmy but are limited in discovering other Mastodon content.
but people who followed you before will have to now follow you again in the new location, it does not automatically transfer
It's possible to leave a redirect information on the old profile. Normally all your followers are informed about this and automatically follow the new account.
Anyway: this means that you depend on your old profile and server to work at that moment. If the server completely vanishes or if you're banned by the admin for whatever reason you can't set that redirect information.
By the way it's worthwhile to consider that in the case of Bluesky at least right now the whole portability of profiles is depending on some kind of centralized Meta server in the background that manages the identities. Bluesky claims that this won't be necessary in the future, but right now it does afaik still work like this.
If you migrate, people will automatically follow you on the new account, I've done it cca month ago.
Does elon still own the twitter trademark?
Couldnt we just make a new site and call it twitter and make it the same as twitter used to be?
It would really piss on his ego.
If he's actually serious he should also sell the domain so someone could host a mastodon instance on it
It would still have to be some sort of social media site but I think so, yeah. The point of trademarks is to make sure you don't confuse consumers. In theory you could make a restaurant called Twitter and be fine.
trademarks have to be protected and used. Its likely you could reasonably win a trademark battle with him since he's rebranded
It was always shit. Musk made it shittier. But as always, stop giving it oxygen.
What's butterfly icon? Did Xitter get a new one?
That's Bluesky. It's supposed to be a federated social media, but right now there's only one kind of software for it and you can't yet self-host it (although you can self-host your data). The open-source protocol, known as AT, was created by Twitter back in the day, and Jack Dorsey and a bunch of staff were able to rescue it when Musk took over.
AT does not federate with ActivityPub, but users of either protocol can appear on the other using Bridgy; and some Friendica instances have basic support for AT. The equivalent of "fediverse" is "ATmosphere" (with the first two letters capitalised).
Since it became public (as opposed to invite-only), Dorsey left the platform and went back to Nostr (yet another microblogging platform, this time built around blockchain :-P).
It's actually quite a nice place, in my opinion, with a vibe similar to a combination of Twitter and Tumblr.
Sorry for going into this much detail. I just really like explaining things.
EDIT: Turns out, the word being thrown around in place of "tweet" was also slang for cum. I have removed it, as this was probably originally a joke.
So do you guys not know what skeet means or....
I'm dying, we really out here trying to convince people to leave Twitter for a site that uses the word "reskeet"
I've just looked it up on UrbDict, and I think that might have been a joke that I just didn't understand. I guess we just use "post" and "repost".
Ah, fuck.
Well, thanks for letting me know. Believe it or not, it's not the first time this sort of thing has happened.
Thank you for taking into so much detail. I feel pretty well informed now.
Armin, i mean seymour skinner
Go away, there's no Armin Tamzarian and there never was!
But there's so many furries
Yeah, we kinda make the internet go
Best deal with it 😎🐺
They keep the internet running, they can stay.
The internet would go down in a day without gay furry hackers
Why is that a problem?
twatter, i says
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
