Summary
Stephen King announced his departure from X (formerly Twitter), calling the platform “too toxic” and urging followers to join him on Threads.
King has frequently clashed with X owner Elon Musk over verification charges and political disputes, including Musk’s support for Donald Trump.
Other entities, including The Guardian, German football club St Pauli, and actor Jamie Lee Curtis, have also left the platform, citing concerns over toxic content, misinformation, and hate speech.
Rival platforms like Threads and Bluesky are gaining traction, with Bluesky reporting nearly 15 million users globally.
I can absolutely believe that an old guy like Stephen King has never even heard of Mastodon. It’s not like there’s a big Mastodon PR team being paid to advertise its existence.
Mastodon is like Costco. They don’t advertise much.
Lemmy is definitely its own little bubble. People here really misestimate the average person’s exposure to tech news or how much they can understand or care about operating systems and distributed protocols.
You’re all in here shouting about this to eachother and nobody hears you.
Relevant XKCD.
Yeah like the average person has never heard of enshitification. It’s not even an established concept in their mind.
They may have a vague sense that things are getting shittier on the big platforms, but probably don’t even consider smaller platforms or decentralization as solutions
Do you think people on Lemmy talking about Linux are trying to court non-tech people? It’s a discussion board, and it has communities for discussion of Linux. What do you think you’ll find when you go there?
That’s right, people discussing Linux. Wild.
I dont think that at all. I think when people ask “why not mastodon” it’s coming from a place of misconception. Their own exposure to this knowledge and information is disproportionately higher than the world average, but it’s so much higher they can’t really comprehend how low the average is.
Much like a billionaire thinks a banana costs $10, a lemmy user thinks people know about mastodon at all.
Someone should tell him
I can totally believe that he didn’t know about mastodon, but even Bluesky is like a reasonable platform. Threads… I see literally no upside to using threads. It’s on a timer from the beginning to turn into another X. Just look at how long Facebook has been a cesspool of Nazi propaganda.
I’ve been using Bluesky for a couple of days and I honestly think it’s okay. I’m not big on microblogging in general, but I can follow just my long-distance friends and no one else and only have to see other people’s crap if one of my friends shares it. So that’s nice. My only issue with Mastodon was one of the same ones I had with Twitter- if I followed people I was interested in but didn’t know, my feed just got too busy for me.
But that seems to work for a lot of people?
Or sometimes the PR team of niche and new tech are a bunch of insufferable twats.
Good point. Does anyone know an animator? I’ll write some promotional material.