Knowing what you know about Elon Musk, why are you still on X?

Inb4 fifty comments all saying "I'm not on twitter/x."

Hey, I'm not either, but we aren't who this thread is for, please and thank you

Please upvote this so people see it and think before making a shitty throwaway comment that adds absolutely zero to discussion.

Edit: fucking called it

I like how those people didn’t appreciate you taking away their circlejerk opportunity, so just downvoted you instead 😂
I swear half of Lemmy is just people talking about how they don’t use Twitter or Reddit.
- I feel like my comment is the only one that even attempts to answer the question.
  Pretty predictable though. Lemmy is even less mainstream than Mastodon so I would expect most people here to be way outside mainstream social media's target audience.
- Nothing but upvotes on kbin
- One third Trekkies, one third talking about how shit twitter and Reddit are, one third content.
This... Also, what a loaded and opinionated question. It implies that you shouldn't be on X because of Elon Musk, if OP was genuinely curious about why someone uses X, they could have asked a neutral question: "Are you using X? Why or why not?" or "If you are using X, why and how?". This currently just reflects the OP's opinion for validation I guess?
- Its 2024 and this isn't an unpopular opinion that OP holds
  Its AskLemmy, not a fucking serious news organization or something. Who cares if its loaded and opinionated? Validate OP's opinion away!
Then why didn’t OP say “For those of you still on X/Twitter, “?
- because it's clearly implied by the title and they said as much elsewhere in the comments
  but don't let that get in the way of you being a pedantic ass
Similarly to Snot Flickerman, I also believe that this thread will be filled with comments about not being on twitter, as that seems to be a common demographic of lemmy.
And also similarly to Snot Flickerman, I'll make use of this opportunity to become the very thing I resent in this thread by mentioning that I'm also not on twitter.
- Ah I see the pedantic asses are out in force today!
  Much like the "I'm not on twitter" folks, you're not nearly as clever or original as you think you are! Ta-ta!

Because Wayland is a hot mess.

Laughs in i3

gay furry porn

Porn is the best and possibly only reason to stay on twitter. In fact I wish everyone who deleted their account goes and makes a porn following account until the app stores hands are forced to delisting it and even less advertisers pay for spots. Plus there's some good ass porn there. Or at least there was last I checked, admittedly it's been a while.
I wish I had something more significant to contribute, but... yeah. Mood.
The only reason I still use reddit is because of its huge NSFW communities.
- That's one of the biggest reasons why I don't. I was angry I had to start logging in to visit those.

The furry porn community is still licking their wounds over losing Tumblr, and a lot of the big artists just don’t want to have to rebuild their community for the second time, so that’s where they are. I don’t like that I have to go to such a cesspool, but damnit, that’s where the furry porn is.

Thank you for your honest answer.
i feel like at this point, we could just build our own. It's not like we aren't capable lmao.
Licking their wounds is an interesting choice of words here lol
- Chosen very much on purpose. ;)

Sir this is lemmy

Darn it, all this time I thought I was on Lemmy!

I haven't been active on Twitter / X for years. My last proper tweet was in November 2022 when I asked people to follow me on Mastodon instead.

I still have my account though. Mostly because friends occasionally send me links to news tweets that X won't show me without being logged in. And because customer support for some service providers (especially DHL, GLS and some other logistics companies) suddenly gets a lot more helpful when you complain in public instead of calling them and they don't have Mastodon accounts.

Unfortunately Twitter/X is still the fastest way to find Japanese fan bases for almost everything. For example Baldur's Gate 3 just got its Japanese launch last month, and it's been fun to see their thoughts since they are not familiar with DND settings or CRPG all together. Many Japanese users I follow don't like what Musk's doing to Twitter as well, but they are also not sure about other platforms so it's kind of it is what it is situation now.

Can you summarize their reaction to BG3? You got me intrigued.
- They basically weren't aware of the game before it got GotY and some even got sour that it won more awards than Zelda. (There was even a forum thread named something like "[sad news] a game that no Japanese has heard of has won GotY" which was quite hilarious.)
  Then after the launch many players are surprised of how much freedom the game provides, and enjoy multiplayer sessions, classic big explosions, Talk with Animals, Scratchy the dog and Grease + fire combo, etc. There were some players that dropped the game with weird reasons tho, from "not anime enough" to "I thought this was an action RPG??" and even "I like RPGs but not TRPGs (??)" I'd say BG3 seems to be more like 50/50 in Japan because how its structure is different from JRPG's, but those who enjoy the game are really fond of it.
Post about lemmy.

For several reasons:

It's where people are. It's the whole fucking point of social networks! If the user base drops to a point where people are no longer there, I'll go to the next network.
If I were to boycott everything owned by a cunt, I'd probably live in a mud hut, naked in a park somewhere.
The self-gratification on here doesn't make me want to use Twitter any less.
For all it's faults, there isn't a legitimate competitor. Mastodon has no users and has a less intuitive interface than Twitter. BlueSky is...I couldn't even tell you what the fuck it is. Threads is basically a meme project by Zuck (another billionaire cunt) to toy with Musk, and it'll be dead within a year.

FWIW, I fucking hate Musk. I'm a software engineer, and one of the few big tech companies I wanted to work for was Twitter. Their branding was cool, they worked on cool tech problems, and I heard great things about their workplace culture back in around 2010-2012. Musk fucked up a company I liked.

I've long considered Musk to be a fraud, and to be honest Twitter is the least of his problems. He's clearly a very sick man that probably needs professional help above everything else.

If he were a normal person, someone would've cornered him and coerced him into medical detainment. If people thought I had a coke problem that affected my ability to conduct meetings and think clearly, I'd be out on my ass. Musk can get away with it because he owns his companies, and no one cares enough about him to help him. He's a dancing monkey that doesn't realise that people are laughing at him, not with him...

What cool tech problem has twitter worked on in the last decade?
- The infrastructure around sending small chunks of data around at that scale, at a time when people were sending larger files/messages around was interesting, enough so that even to this day "design twitter" is the canonical system design interview question.
  They were also initially behind some cool things in the front-end space, like Bootstrap.
Thanks for the reply. Serious question… why has a Twitter/X equivalent not been developed with all of the brilliant-minded people out there, including those laid off by Twitter and other companies? Would it be more about marketing the app?
- It has, but they don't have the users. I think that most social networks are a "right place, right time" phenomena. If Twitter or Instagram were to be released today, with all of its current features, it would probably be DOA.
  BlueSky and Mastodon are solid, technically, but neither have cornered a part of the market that speaks to the average person. BlueSky is "we're Twitter, but with no users", and Mastodon solves a problem that few care about.

Because my city deems it is still a good idea to post important announcements about roadworks and water interruptions/boil advisory there exclusively :/

With the small carve out exception of people who are fine with the antisocial behavior and management style of the owner, Inertia is the only reason. Governments, influencers, corporations- they all have a following and an established channel which involves minimum expense to maintain.
- I'd say that the vast majority of people on Twitter couldn't care less about Elon Musk himself. However, Twitter is actually going downhill now and the only ads I see anymore are either hardcore porn or scams. That's what's going to drive people off Twitter.
Ugh same here in the NL with WhatsApp. People act as if it's public infrastructure.
You don't need an account to see those posts, right?
- These days, you functionally do.
  You can only view a single tweet at a time when not logged in, which can be a struggle if youre trying to just see updates in general and aren't seeking a specific post.
  I know because I have a friend who still sends me links to make them useful I have to put them in Nitter.
- To view a specific tweet you don't, but as soon as you want to see more tweets by that same account without a direct link you get to a login page.
I wish my city works like this. But noooo our local government uses FACEBOOK. ONLY. Twitter is still the lesser of two evils
- If only more cities could provide a simple RSS feed..

I have an account for, eventually, marketing. It’s still widely used and so if I want my venture to be successful, I’d be foolish to avoid a place to be found, even if I find the owner to be distasteful at bare minimum.

I only have an account to bitch at my ISP whenever I have network issues. It's the only place where they actually do customer support for some reason.

They stopped showing their phone number on their website. The only other option is a piece of shit whatsapp bot that just tells you to restart your router.

Luckily I only run into problems I can't fix by myself like once per year at most. Don't have the app installed. Just go through Firefox.

I never had a Twitter account. I just joined mastodon a few hours ago

And Lemmy 4 days ago?
- Yes. I am getting into this fediverse thingy. So far, so good

Because they won't let me delete my account. It's been locked for like 3 years without any real reason. And I know people say that all the time but since 2017 I've made 4 posts, a dnd beyond giveaway and 3 gleam ones. Submitted request for deletion or unlock enough to loose track. When shit dick took over I figured itd be easier, what with all the horrible people gettin their accounts back an all, but still no.

they must have you as a scam account. It's pretty much guaranteed if you've ONLY done giveaways.
what about posting offensive stuff? "Slide your democrate dick into my feces! Oh, I like the Musk y smell!"
I'll work!

It is full of content. Like Reddit.

But mastodon is not very entertaining, because it is just a "new" feed. Also the twitter app works well. So I usually use Twitter instead of mastodon.

But the Reddit app is garbage. And Lemmy is a great alternative. So there I go for the more ethical solution and pick Lemmy over Reddit.

Comparing Lemmy and Twitter. They have different content. Hence I use both.

Knowing what you know about USA, why are you still living there? /s

To be fair, deleting an optional account and not using it is far easier than emigrating to another country.
So not really a great example for your point.
If you can tell me how to move to a better country with no skills and little money, I'd move next week.
That would actually be a really interesting topic in it's own thread. I'd be curious what people have to say.

Porn. Also there's no ads usually around porn posts. So really it just costs them more

Porn is everywhere though? I recommend noodlemagazine for free full porn videos. Or are you talking about amateur content? It's what I sort of miss from Reddit, but then again, most of it was just teasers for their shitty OF.

I'm not.

I left the day Elon took over, but there are a lot of marginalized/unique social groups still on X that haven’t migrated to other platforms. So I know some people stay because they can’t find the same thing on mastodon, kbin, blue sky, etc.

It's been long since I deleted my reddit account, but I occasionally still open up subs that matter to me, like my local city subreddit, and a few other niche places, despite not being logged in. Why? Because that's about the only place I can find them.

Your asking the wrong community. Go ask Reddit this question

because showing up in peoples feeds randomly and posting yiff is funny to me.

I am here to be a menace. Expect the unexpected always.

I just really like the content of Twitter. Yes there are many stupid fights and debates but some of my favorite source of memes comes from there. To summarize, memes and pretty fast general world news.

It’s one of the few places to keep track of new developments of covid mitigations, studies on long covid simplified for laymen, new open source air purifiers, safe and affordable far uvc developments, people calling out the CDC’s constant terrible job at public health, the fact both political parties in the US are pretending millions aren’t going to continue to die and become disabled the more we ignore covid and long covid.

Twitter and yes, TikTok, are the only places theres active people talking about this especially in ways laymen can understand and take action on. Theres some subreddits (some ive made) but i hate visiting reddit now.

Mastodon has a few people but discovery on mastodon is terrible. No one uses hashtags cuz hashtags kinda suck and nothing is filtered or recommended based on who you follow and what they like or who they follow so you have to wade through too much irrelevant stuff.

Off topic: I prefer chronological feeds but they should have a user customizable option to have some recommended posts in between the chronological timeline for discovery. The Mammoth app is doing this but only for the For You feed which is not what I want because its 90% news articles from big publications. I want a chronological timeline with some recommended posts based on parameters i set like “x likes by friends of friends”, “user was recently followed by x amount of people I follow”, “x number of posts by this user were liked by y amount of people i follow”.

That's good to know those conversations are happening somewhere as a non-Twitter user. Keep fighting the good fight, Nix!

It's the NSFW Content. TBH.

The artists who draw the art/topics/proportions I'm into, and the IRL models with those proportions, don't exist on Mastodon. If they do I haven't found them. So Twitter still gets my horny clicks cause that content doesn't exist elsewhere.

Well now I'm curious what kind of proportions you talking. Got a sample?
- Sure. Some non-nude examples
  https://files.catbox.moe/sfgvm9.jpg
  https://files.catbox.moe/4m0rxn.jpg
  https://files.catbox.moe/ieci3i.png
  https://files.catbox.moe/0g76xt.png
  https://files.catbox.moe/fuzg0f.jpg
  https://files.catbox.moe/kwkngg.jpg

i use companies that still put the little X button at the end of their posts as a filter to stop visiting them. I've found it very helpful.

I never had an account to start with.

Never really knew what it was for, and given the number of multi part parts and screenshots where you read bottom to top, no fucker else knows how it's supposed to work either.

It's just a shit blog with an arbitrary character limit.

I stopped posting but keep the account active because a lot of the Japanese artists I follow have stopped using other sites that were once pretty standard and never moved away from Twitter. There are also some people I don't want to lose touch with that never moved away.

I am still “on X” because my account was banned and I literally cannot delete the account… because it’s banned.

But since I know that’s probably not the type of use you were referring to, I know others that still use it for scientific communications (e.g. announcing publications from their group and following those from others) and generally don’t care much or think about the fact that Elon is heading the platform.

I follow numerous sources that ether only post on X or if they do post on masadon etc no one replies to anything / there is zero discussion.

Never used twitter, but tried mastodon a bit. There really is no discussion, right? People are basically talking to themselves. I tried some interactions but never got far
- Twitter/X and Mastodon are just bad RSS feeds to me not communities.

I'm not, but the PR guy at work still does most of his communication there. It's because that's where both news and rumors spread. If you're not active, you come back and suddenly everyone is convinced you've done, or have plans to do something horrible. You basically have to sit there and deal with the abuse, just in case you actually have done something horrible. He isn't a particularly happy guy.

I used to post amateur photography there. I do still miss the community. It was far more engaged and supportive than anywhere else I've found.

Not everyone has moved on to Bluesky yet

This might be the wrong crowd to ask as I suspect Fediverse users would favor Mastodon over X.

Question does not apply to them, only X users.

My account was locked, and I haven't the interest to unlock it just to get off Twitter. I never open the app/ website. I've had a nitter front end when I do need to see a meme from there. I haven't used it, lately.

I left a long time ago already, nothing of value to be found there anymore.

Still very active. More so than here. But I still use it for sports. Particularly NBA and NFL content. My fav NFL team has an amazing group of fans on there and it’s some really funny dudes.

All major sports news breaks their first and all the major beat writers still use it. There is no better alternative. I’m on mastodon and it doesn’t even remotely compare.

Reddit was my go to previously but killing third party apps I dipped and my X usage tripled. Reddit was just cross posting sports news that broke on X first anyways so it was better going to the source.

Took a bunch of curating my timeline but I get 0 political bullshit and 0 musk bullshit… strictly sports and in that capacity it’s great.

I'm not. Twitter was dead to me the moment Musk took over.

Because there's still a strong football/soccer community there, along with Reddit

I don't know why you're getting downvoted, I agree with you (at least on the Reddit part) The soccer community exists on Lemmy, but it's just not even remotely close to Reddit's
Yeah. Even the largest leagues and teams are basically impossible to follow on anything but Reddit and Twitter. For smaller teams? Nothing else exists…

I like low-end advertising

My best guess: Ignorance is bliss.

(As for me I deleted my Twitter account that moment Elon bought the platform).

A lot of youtubers and such only make announcements for content and streams via twitter, or their own services that kind of suck worse in terms of access. In order to stay on top of some limited access content, twitter is still "useful" in that regard.

Personally, I've never used it for that, I mostly ever checked twitter when a site I visit or game I play is down and they don't have a good way of conveying details otherwise. But I know of content creators that use it for that, so I'd understand people using it to stay abreast of content that way.

The only time I'm ever there is because it has information or news I need. Unfortunately a lot of industry folk use it to post information even though it's the worst fucking UI for it. I don't think I've ever browsed their front page.

Post the interesting stuff back onto Lemmy

Not me, but my dad.

The only reason he stays is because of the politicians and news outlets he follows. He knows Twitter is trash now, but if that’s where the people he’s following are staying, then he stays too. He has heard of Mastodon and looked into it, but it’s unfortunate most politicians won’t migrate over there.

Which is kind of ridiculous. I mean sure a politician is going to still post on twitter because there's more people there, but they could simply copy and paste their statements to Mastodon. They pretty much all have staff and they could reach a different audience for the time it would take to copy and paste some text.

I’m there to autoblock all of Elon’s advertising.

I’m there specifically to annoy you.

Also there are people using their real names sharing their real lives for me to give a shit about. The Maui community is strong there. People disappear from Twitter and I wonder what happened. If people disappear from here I wouldn’t notice.

Any time I make a sale, there's an automatic post made on X to help promote dem titties. Aside from that, I don't use it unless I'm following a link from lemmy.

I'm not

I can't even try using an alternative redirect because apparently all of them are blocked.

Deleting my account now means Musk wins.

How?
- With sarcasm, that's how.

Research. Many people I'm interested in still use Twitter. And I hate how Nitter instances globally have started to become rate limited or outright obliterated by Twitter API weirdness/

My entire fandoms are there. Also twitter is ok if you follow the right people, you don't depend on the trending list and you dgaf about follower count.

Thus pisses me off. The big fandoms and influencers could move. But all the people are on X. The users couldove, but all the fandoms and influencers are on X. It's a fucking loop where no one wants to make the first move
- I used to spend my lunches watching videos on reddit's /r/videos and for yeeeeeeeears they would just post videos of influencers talking about how they're getting fucked by youtube. I rarely go to YouTube, I rarely use most social media I just wanted to waste my 5 to 10 minutes of eating a sandwich and watching a silly video or something, But I suddenly was very knowledgeable about all the stupid YouTube drama and it felt to me like the solution was to go somewhere else, in fact I got so fucking annoyed by these constant bitching about a garbage website that I stopped this lunch tradition entirely (But not before posting a long rant like an old man yelling at a cloud). However if there was an exodus that would also be admitting that these influencers would have to basically start over or hope their followers would follow them. They're tied to their income I guess. I find it pretty despicable but I think that's the reason. These people make a wild amount of money and it's hard to walk away from it out of principle (for them, cause they scared lil b-holes).

My favorites artists are still on there, I usually spend 2 minutes on there to see what they're posting and leave, I wish they had mastodon account tho

There is literally no other realistic alternative too it; they're simply all too small. I still follow many trusted news sources and politicians on it as well as fandoms.

You are here.
- Lemmy's not an alternative to Twitter, it's an alternative to Reddit. It's not even terribly great at that either because of Reddit's sheer size.

Because I like the way Molly feels.

I don't understand, why should I care about what interchangeable capitalist owns the social media I use?

This particular capitalist is having a significant impact on that platform.
If that doesn't concern you (and it doesn't have to) then carry on with giving no shits.
- It seems like your problem is that he is vocal about his views. In reality he isn't much different in his effect then Zuckerberg, or Larry Page, or Murdoc, Huffman or anyone else that controls large platforms and enforces policies that shape the "acceptable" discourse on the platform. To put it bluntly, in a capitalist society you are forced to engage with Capitalists. Trying to be "ethical" in your consumption is waste of your time.

Really only to get notifications of weather stuff from my local NWS office.

UFOX and UFOTwitter hashtags. All other major social media are censoring the topic (including Reddit, which once was supposed to be open). Lately, Twitter started doing so too (it barely suggests ufo topics for me in the last month, even if that's the only reason I'm there), but the hashtags still work as expected. Unfortunately, on all the fediverse media, the topic is still laughed at (despite the various government admissions in the past year), and so there isn't any discussion about it. Twitter is where it's at, for that topic.

Edit: Proving my point, providing a truthful answer to the topic's question, and still been downvoted by the fediverse en mass.

Because there are a lot more people, breaking news, and content on there compared to anywhere else.

I don't have an insta, so I'm not on threads. there's no scaled up site to even come close to challenging twitter.

I'm still there because there is pretty much nowhere else to go. once one of these places actually starts being as active and engaging as twitter I'm going there.

I second this!
Even Mastodon is not even cutting it close.

I guess it's because a lot of local news channels and personalities still use twitter.

Because too few people link Nitter therefore I need to find usernames to plug in by going to Twitter. Don't have an account and never will.

I have the distinction of having made my current presence on there a literal 24 hours before Musk announced he was going through with buying Twitter. By the time he was shown to be the kind of person he was, it had already become an inseparable piece of my mind and creations. If he bans me for speaking out against him, that will be a sign. Maybe this will be my speed bump.

I don't think you totally get the capitalism thing or something? You don't protest a capitalist by giving them money.
- Who said I was giving anyone money?

I never used X. I use Facebook

That's... baffling, coming from a Lemmy user. Why are you okay with Mark Zuckerberg watching everything you interact with?
- I'm a bit of an exhibitionist and I'm glad that Mark is watching.

Knowing what I know, I’m not. Mastodon is good, but not the same. There needs to be a publicly run version of Twitter, with same algorithms.

Mostly because I like to occasionally fuck around with the conspiracy crowd.

Because I don’t care about how the owner of the service is.

I never used it even before he bought it.

There are a lot of friends which my only way to continue having contact is through it.

Also people can be pretty annoying on Mastodon (like many people in this thread as the top comment pointed out) and not a single one of said friends migrated to it