I mean that’s gotta be a given since they probably have 1000x more users right?
Not measuring per capita (estimated by daily active users or whatever) seems intentionally misleading. Ironic on a post about misinformation.
All levels of government need to stop using that shit.
I don’t want to be forced to sign up to a man-child’s vanity project so I can get updates on emergencies.
The government using it for bulletins, especially for emergency announcements, is such ridiculous bullshit. Like what in the actual fuck?
There is literally no reason this can’t be done with an RSS feed which is an open standard that has been around since 1999.
And it’s easier than ever before for governments to host their own Mastodon instance on their government domain.
I won’t even click links there anymore. No traffic if I can help it.
Even worse is that Twitter/X still has an air of mainstream legitimacy since others built it into a household name before musk decided to vaporize billions of dollars to be able to enshittify it.
It was never a good platform. Mainstream media just liked it because they could rationalize any shit take they wanted to push by saying “thousands of people on twitter are concerned about X problem”. Their audience didn’t realize that those thousands is the same as one belligerent drunk at a bar who won’t shut up.
they could rationalize any shit take they wanted to push by saying “thousands of people on twitter are concerned about X problem”
A lot of the time they don’t put any number on the people, and then it turns out they wrote a whole-ass article on what dozens of people on twitter are saying.
Yeah I was never really a user, or considered it particularly good. But I think the mainstream legitimacy was definitely there. Any company, media personality, celebrity, brand, etc was pretty much expected to have a presence there, and you’d see their @usernames displayed prominently even outside Twitter. Or even just the little bird icon so you knew to look for them there.
But we’re there any better platforms that people were using? The problem was that all the alternatives were doing next tot nothing for countering disinformation. Twitter was the best of a bad situation.
A lot of creators are still there, and outright dismissed even alternatives like bluesky, let alone Mastodon, which many of them call a “tech-bro infested hellscape” (most of the techbros moved back to Xitter the moment thez were allowed to say the N-word).