When it stops being relevant in the cultural consciousness.
One of the reasons people use Twitter is for up-to-date news and notifications on events. As official organisations move away from it and the user experience degrades, it will just fade away like MySpace.
You can already see this happening. My guess is that it will just go on slow decline. I would bet Twitter will not be nearly as relevant in a year.
When your local politicians and journalists start to use Mastodon or similar apps.
X.com returning 404 every time it’s visited
the exact reason I thought of, but you worded it much better than I would have
Twitter is popular because of the massive user base. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, where people use Twitter for the massive user base, which encourages more people to use Twitter. So escaping that spiral will require a mass exodus to something new. Because artists, musicians, celebrities, etc rely on that large user base to gain and maintain a following. So as long as Twitter has the users, that’s where the content will be.
Threads was a good indicator that people are willing to move if the new platform is available. Unfortunately for Threads, the launch was a fucking train wreck, so people quickly got tired of it and returned to Twitter. They didn’t even have basic functionality figured out. But as a proof of concept, it showed that people aren’t tied to Twitter specifically; They’re tied to the user base. If a new service manages to cultivate that user base, people will be willing to migrate.
Mastodon’s big issue so far has largely been visibility. People simply don’t know it exists, and the people who do know about it use it as a backup for their Twitter; They’re not using it to replace Twitter, but rather they’re double-posting everything to both Twitter and Mastodon. So the Twitter users have no reason to move to Mastodon, because the Mastodon users are still using Twitter. It’s a catch-22, where the Mastodon users need to use Twitter to maintain visibility, but then the Twitter users will never switch to Mastodon because everyone is still using Twitter.
You’re forgetting one very important thing.
In the virtual world, people can be in more than one place at a time.
Nobody “moved” to Threads, really, people just gave it a try to see what it was about.
There is no world or future that exists where something gets released that causes people to go through the effort of deleting their twitter account.
People are lazy and lean towards convenience, me included.
The hope I have in Mastodon is that more organisations realise they can host their own instance and control their user accounts themselves.
I don’t know that visibility is Mastodon’s biggest problem. I’ve talked to a lot of people who tried it but just didn’t find it easy to use and just bailed. I think people expecting it to be diet Twitter and getting frustrated when it isn’t as populated or user friendly is a bigger issue at this point.
Such massive and old platform won’t lose its userbase just because it undergoes a wild evolution. Look at .tumblr, facebook…
Instead, ask what it takes for eXTwitter to stop being any important.
I’m never going to quit it!
But only because I’ve never had an account. No thanks.
“I will never use Twitter in the future. I never did, but I never will, too.” - Mitch Hedberg, probably
What ever it is, Elon Musk is working on it.
People need to be able to use their brains. I see it difficult.
A better service.
It’s going to take a seemless to register platform that offers comparable features to Twitter and then massive accounts switching over and actually leaving Twitter behind.
Right now Threads seems to be the closest, but they lack the feature set Twitter has like search and hashtags so the big accounts only tried it out before running back to what worked for them. Not to mention they don’t have a usable web page for the platform either which alienates a lot of desktop users.
If Threads adds those things in, I fully believe more of the bigger accounts will transition over with their following and it’ll snowball to become a massive platform. Whether it stays a good site remains to be seen, it is Meta after all.
deleted by creator
It’s becoming less and less relevant, but corporations need to get off of it. I work in the IT industry, and the MECM community is pretty active on it. I wish there would be an exodus to something else. Unfortunately Microsoft and their engineers still use it heavily.
The longer it takes, the worse it is for every user on every (corporate-run) platform. All of the recent actions are openly and extremely hostile to the user base. The fact that people are still (generally) putting up with it has emboldened others (esp. Reddit) to take similarly hostile actions. They all (at least think) they have a free pass for all this shittiness, and the users will accept it.
We need massive 100m follower celebrities to start migrating. News will follow and content creators will adapt. Look at how Taylor Swift move army of people into stadiums globally. That’s the kind of swaying power it needs. But they’ll need proper incentive to actively talk shit about X and ditch it.
If the clowns who endlessly complain about Musk just stopped complaining about him on his own platform, the entire site would collapse.
