Submitted 1 year ago by Emperor@feddit.uk to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/9735e449-9517-45d9-b632-0fd5ac636d50.png
Graph showing a 30% drop in UK users on Twitter since September 2023, which, the commenter says is on the back of a loss of about a third in the preceding months.
Thanks for sharing. I deleted the X app many months ago, maybe over a year? But I think I’m ready to actually delete my account now. Contribute to the global Xodus stats and whatnot.
Cool stuff.
One thing that I thought was good advice was to delete your account, then sign up with the same username so no-one can pretend they are you. I’d bet bots are hoovering up such accounts during the Xodus and it won’t end well.
Ah shit.
Can I instead just kind of… “clean” my existing account? Is that possible? Delete everything automatically yet keep my account, as a now blank one?
We don’t suffer fascists easily here.
Who do you think you are kidding Mister Muskler?
Twitter user base is down to Musk, his alt account, Andrew Tate, bots, and the Proud Boys/KKK.
The site’s popularity with geezers who frequent flat-roofed pubs, however, has never been higher.
What does a flat roofed pub mean? (Serious)
Pub buildings built on the cheap or converted (i.e. single storey, flat roof) are almost always a reliable predictor for terrible beer, aggressive clientele, and a regular light dusting of snow on the bathroom sinks.
The kind with a German shepherd on the roof?
Can be substituted for a Rottie, or a couple of Dobermans.
Whaddaya wanna bet all those prominent upticks are bot account launches?
And the sheer number of bots on Xitter makes you wonder how many actual people are left. Considering Musk used bots in his (poor) negotiations, it’s funny this might be what he relies on now to keep his numbers up.
Keep going UK! We’re proud of you!
Repelled by the direction that both the site now called X and its owner have taken, an exodus from the platform is under way. That exodus — oh go on then, Xodus — has been particularly apparent in Britain, having gathered steam since Musk started posting things like “civil war is inevitable” during the riots that broke out over the summer. Many have left the platform entirely, while others merely lurk. “I have an answer to this, but discussion only on Bluesky these days am afraid [sic],” I saw someone reply on X recently.
Data from Similarweb shows active daily users in the UK have dropped from 8mn a year ago to only around 5.6mn now, with more than a third of that fall coming since the summer riots.
…
As disillusioned X users become, yes, ex-X-users, they are finding their way on to alternative sites. With Mastodon having proved off-puttingly techy for many, that tends to either be Meta’s Threads app, or Bluesky, the platform that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey helped to start. But while the former is winning in terms of absolute numbers — about 1.4mn daily active users of Threads in the UK, compared with just over 100,000 for Bluesky — it is the latter that has grown the most rapidly over the past six weeks, and that is cementing itself as the top choice for media types, policy wonks, academics and the broader chatterati.
Although they have to make it weird:
That there is a new place for such people to congregate is all well and good, but the problem is that the chatterati — very nice and non-conspiracy-theorising and non-overtly-racist though they may be — tend to coalesce around some quite similar viewpoints, which makes for a rather echoey chamber. I’m not sure I have ever felt more like I’m at a Stoke Newington drinks party than when I’m browsing Bluesky (including when tucking into Perelló olives and truffle-flavoured Torres crisps in actual N16).
Before carrying on:
An even more fundamental problem is that nobody on Bluesky seems to actually mind that they are in an echo chamber. When I told a friend, who happens to be an enthusiastic Bluesky user, what I was writing about this week, she replied “oh yes, but it is an echo chamber, that’s what people like about it, it’s lovely”.
Many enthuse about how like “old Twitter” Bluesky is, which is telling in itself: in the old days of Twitter, progressives far outnumbered their conservative counterparts in terms of how much they posted about politics on the platform, but that share has fallen dramatically since Musk took it over. According to the British Election Study, in the run-up to both the 2015 and 2019 elections, about 30 per cent of the most progressive Britons posted about politics on the platform. This year, while the most conservative Britons remained no less likely to post than before, the share of progressives posting on X had halved to 15 per cent; presumably that has since fallen much further, given that this survey preceded the riots.
It’s funny how people don’t realize that social interaction in general is largely a series of echo chambers. Your group of friends all likely share common interests and opinions, but no news correspondent is writing articles about how bad that is and how you should add a fascist or two to your New Year’s Eve party to balance it out.
Social media isn’t some public debate floor. It’s a platform for social interaction, and if nobody wants to listen to you, there’s probably a reason why. This obsession with neutrality and both sides-ism is poisoning our social relationships. Progressives not only far outnumbered conservatives in posting politics, they also far outnumbered conservatives in general. These platforms see a rise in conservative views (and then extremism) as they make more left leaning people feel unwelcome and drive them off the platform.
Lol, the author just has to panic about people enjoying a form of social media without nazis. Well, give it enough time and they’ll show up on the twitter alternatives too.
It’s too bad Mastadon can’t take advantage of this. Not sure why federation is so confusing to people, but people don’t like having to make choices about which server to pick.
this is why i wish people would stop it with the “oooh but it’s bad if everyone’s on mastodon.social!!!”
shit or get off the pot, if we want the world to benefit from an open platform it will have to begin with things being effectively decentralized. It’s in no way better for everyone to move to bluesky than it is for everyone to move to mastodon.social, and the idea that mastodon would take off without being effectively centralized at first is just utter fantasy.
He’s posting a range of graphs on Bluesky:
Pity the bulk is to Bluesky, not anything not Musk is a good thing for national discourse, although it could lead to worsening of echo chambers.
Naw, I love the blocklists of bluesky, I would rather have an echo chamber of intelligent conversation than the bigotry of the wild West.
You’ll notice the people who complain about the “echo chambers” are the ones that aren’t invited to the discourse.
That graph shows he lost 30%, not half.
By september of last year, we are now 3+ months on
If it took a year and 4 months lose 30% there’s no way he will have lost another 20% in 3 months.
Makes sense
gmtom@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Kind of misinformation. If X lost 30% of its original userbase between May 2023 and September 2024.
Even if we extrapolate on that that sharper decline at the end if the graph there’s no way they would have lost 50% of its original usrrbase by now.