Regular readers of this blog will know that for more than a year from the beginning of 2022 onwards, I noted the addition of another 10,000 Twitter followers to my account every few weeks or so.
It has to be said that things have now slowed down considerably. So, for example, although Sunday's thread, which was reproduced here, got more than 700,000 views on Twitter (which remains something about which I continue to be astonished, when it happens), only 200 or so new followers signed up to my account, which now has about 247,000 subscribers.
What is more, that account does now see quite regular declines in the number of people following it. Some of that I can explain as the aftermath of the comments I sometimes make about Labour, but some would also appear to be due to people leaving Twitter, or X, or whatever else Elon Musk now wishes to call it.
Precisely because of the level of impact that Twitter provides me with, I will not be giving up using that platform. I can see no sense to that when I can reach more people using it than I can in any other way, but I am curious to know how readers here have reacted to the developments at Twitter over the last year, and so this is my question of the day:
How has your Twitter use changed in the last year?
- I do not use Twitter (47%, 114 Votes)
- I remain a casual observer on Twitter but not an active participator (20%, 49 Votes)
- I have quit Twitter (13%, 31 Votes)
- My Twitter use has declined (12%, 30 Votes)
- I use Twitter as much as ever (6%, 15 Votes)
- Twitter is fundamental to my use of social media (2%, 4 Votes)
- What is Twitter? (0%, 1 Votes)
Total Voters: 244
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Twitter is now so toxic and shows me so much that I don’t want to see, I simply no longer look at it. Although no lover of the Facebook guy, I now use Threads, which I think is much like Twitter used to be. Kinder, friendlier and more informative.
I only sed to read Twitter through your blog. That is now blocked so I no longer bother.
I left Twitter as soon as Musk took over. My mental health immediately improved significantly, and I don’t miss it at all. Now I get most of my news from Mastodon, and I enjoy my interactions there immensely more.
I quit Twitter and deleted all my content there (had to do it twice because it was restored). Once login was made mandatory to see a tweet I no longer follow any links to the site.
Many of your followers are bots sold to advertisers. You’ll get more real engagement on Mastodon.
I am also on Mastodon and every post here is posted there
But I will not get anything like the engagement I get on Twitter and it’s pointless pretending otherwise
Still look at Twitter occasionally but it gets worse all the time. The latest pile on of right wing abuse against Humzah Yuesaf the Scottish FM for his support of the Palestinians was disgusting. I use mastodon.scot more now
I was already in the causal observer category. My usage was about a 1/10 it is now about 1/100. My causal observation is even less because you can’t read the responses without an account.
I deleted my account a bit over a year ago. The only thing that bothers me is that local transport use twitter to post network updates. But if I look at twitter without an account, it won’t show chronological posts, so it’s effectively useless. If you want to try it yourself in a private browser window, you can see that the feed of https://twitter.com/scotrail without an account provides no help whatsoever. I now get nothing of any use from twitter, and I really wish public service bodies would stop using it.
I too use mastodon now.
You raise an interesting point. It was moving towards universality. Now it is not. The Commons have been lost and thete is nothing to replace it/them.
ActivityPub seems to me to be the best option going forwards. The underlying technical and political idea is sound. The mastodon network itself is open and growing. Zuckerberg has expressed interest in making it available to Facebook users through threads. Major operators like the blogging platform WordPress are on board. There are new apps like pixelfed (an instagram clone) which use the same underlying ideas.
But I appreciate that for the majority of organisations, and many individuals, overcoming the initial hurdle of setting up a or choosing a compatible server is too great a barrier for little return, and you need to re-grow the network from scratch. It becomes a chicken and egg problem of where to best put your effort.
The BBC are currently trialling use of mastodon, and hopefully they will make it available to staff generally at some point, which would increase general understanding of the benefits of the system, which journalists could then communicate more widely. I could imagine a body such as Transport Scotland running a server available to companies offering transport services in Scotland, which might be a good way to kickstart reach and accessibility.
As it is, we at least still have websites, such as your blog which I feel works well. And we still can access main transport operator’s websites, but compared to the quick update speed, reply times, and ease of use that microblogging offered, for some cases it doesn’t feel the same.
Thanks
@LonM
As you say, now that Elon Musk has deliberately disabled the former public utility of Twitter by compelling users to sign up and sign in, it is no longer a viable service for informing the general public of timely information. 🙁
Fortunately there is a free service run by nittter.net that allows one to work around this issue.
If you got to https://nitter.net/search and enter the username of any twitter account,
it will give you back links to a nitter.net interface to browse those twitter messages.
It also provides optional message threading, which I find useful because it is you can chose to use it if appropriate.
So in your example go to:
https://nitter.net/ScotRail
Hope that information helps someone. 🙂
Thanks