Elon Musk’s Biggest Success Story: Convincing People To Try Out An Open, Distributed Social Network

 

A few months ago, I attended an amazing conference on decentralized social media and social media regulation hosted by the Global Freedom of Expression Program at Columbia University.

One of the speakers, Alison McCauley of Unfinished Labs, gave a very interesting presentation on the first day of the conference, October 3rd (please kindly praise my paper “Protocols, not Platforms”), talked about how is finally heading towards decentralization Social media. I found one slide of hers in the presentation particularly interesting.

It showed exactly what I thought was good for the world moving away from the internet giants and into a more open, decentralized, protocol-based world, but I spent years , I’ve thought of all the reasons that seemed unlikely, so this graphic felt a little too, pants midget for me.

It’s nice to have “disillusionment-inducing events” on the slides, but they certainly felt like the giant Phase 2 “?” of the Underpants Gnome project.

Many have said over the years that privacy scandals and other scandals would trigger a great awakening, but I never really saw anything happen, so I decided to call it that. Putting it in a slide made me feel like I needed something deeper. A discussion of what actually disillusioned people. Because so far it seems to be barely working.

The next day, on his second day of the conference, Elon Musk announced that he had no intention of closing any further deals to acquire Twitter and would proceed with the acquisition.

And while this immediately sparked a discussion in the hallway with other conference participants about what alternatives were available to deal with the influx of people, I still think they I didn’t expect things to change like they did.

On how much Elon has made Twitter worse in such a short amount of time, and how seeing how quickly Mastodon grew made me realize I wasn’t all that interested in centralized platforms. has already written and adapt.

Others notice it too. NBC has a somewhat derisively titled article pointing out that Elon Musk is building his social networks. This shows that Mastodon’s recent boom is driven almost entirely by Musk’s capricious (and often hypocritical) decision-making.

Every time Musk does something stupid like banning links to Mastodon, it just… drives more people to Mastodon. Elon Musk has become a “disillusioning event” for one person.

The Mastodon-powered website says from October 1st to October 26th, one hour There was an average of about 130 new registrations per month. After Musk took over Twitter on October 14, that number increased to 2,000 per hour 28.

Signups soared to more than 5,000 per hour after Twitter began mass layoffs a week later, and after employees resigned en masse following an email ultimatum on November 17, 1 It peaked at nearly 10,000 per hour. 4,444 New sign-ups rose again in mid-December when his Twitter suspended journalists who covered Musk and company, and Twitter shared links to their profiles on other major social networks. It increased again when I was suddenly prohibited from doing it.

Then you realize how random some of them are. Obviously, we’re not done yet. So many still believe Musk will fix his Twitter ship and all will be well. Or that mastodon growth will be limited in the near future. But the service has grown exponentially and has become incredibly useful.

Originally published at https://businessdor.com on January 25, 2023.