ML2 @mathlover@social.cleverlibre.org

@marialiv@mastodon.social @Gargron

I posted the following over at my handle on blob.cat, in a conversation with @shebang about the Musk takeover. I have reproduced the Markdown formatting with minimal modification.

The thing is that Musk, *despite* his claims to free speech absolutism, *loves* to suppress critics of Tesla and of himself. He’s also a narcissistic con man and is going to be incompetent at running Twitter, and his treatment of workers at Tesla suggests that a mass exodus of staff isn’t unlikely either. I honestly wouldn’t trust him to run a small forum without it going down in flames.

Thus, while this first wave has a large number of people who are simply unhappy with Musk’s stated intentions—and yes, often for stupid reasons—rather than how things are actually likely to play out, this likely isn’t going to end. Unless hell freezes over and Musk backs out before taking control, other waves will follow. Here’s my idea of what the saga of the Twitter exodus will look like, with a focus on people entering and exiting the Fediverse:

The first and current wave, where the Twitter board has agreed to sell itself to Musk. [The graph of this can be seen here.](https://storage.gra.cloud.ovh.net/v1/AUTH_011f6e315d3744d498d93f6fa0d9b5ee/qotoorg/cache/media_attachments/files/108/204/629/947/643/002/original/6669206cbd9f02c8.png) In the past 48 hours about 50,000 users have joined Mastodon, and the current join rate is 1000 new users per hour. The join rate has been moving between 500 and 1500 daily, possibly according to day/night in the US. While this is not as high as the peak of 2500/hour on April 25, it’s still around 10 times higher than normal. This wave will peter out if the story dies down, as Musk is not going to actually get the reins as Twitter owner for at least a month, and possibly longer. But this assumes the story is allowed to die down: Musk has been tweeting his plans for Twitter in the meantime, with increasing bombast, and Twitter staff are restless and unhappy at the possibility of having the boss of Tesla change worker culture and treatment at Twitter, meaning that there may be enough drama over there to keep this wave alive.

A month or more from now, barring the board changing their unanimous agreement to sell Twitter to him, Musk will actually take control of Twitter. This will spur the second wave. First, a lot of people are holding out hope because they do not think Musk will go through with this, or that he will be stopped, or that this is all a plan of his to stoke drama/get more money/etc. (Unfortunately, nothing is going to get Musk more drama and attention than owning Twitter, and I think he craves that far more than he craves money, so he will not back out willingly). Once this comes to pass, we will get another exodus. Second, Twitter employees — who are again probably more unhappy that the guy [runs Tesla plants like this](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/18/tesla-workers-factory-conditions-elon-musk) than anything else — are going to quit, and there is also the possibility of layoffs of parts of the workforce Musk doesn’t think are needed. This will raise the possibility of sabotage of the site itself, which if it happened would add to the exodus. Furthermore, depending on who quits and how many people quit, we could see Twitter suddenly having to train qualified staff, possibly with limited ability to do said training. This could cause increased issues with fixing and preventing site issues, and could make sabotage and hacking even easier to pull off. This wave will be like the first wave, in that it will have a lot of people upset with the ideals the new management is preaching rather than what he is actually likely to do. However, it will be larger as a lot more people will be concerned this time around now that Musk actually has followed through and succeeded in controlling Twitter.

Following the current wave and the next wave is where I think most of the users are coming in. Musk, as I have said before, is incompetent. He is a con man who got Tesla through a large amount of corporate politics, and most if not all of the credit he has been given has been stolen from others, particularly those working under him. He constantly makes promises that he fails to deliver on, and while Tesla may be doing quite well now, the same cannot be said of hyperloop or Neuralink. My impression is that he’s less of a CEO and more of a giant walking billboard of delusion sustained by a massive personality cult of fans, simps, and other morons. He is not going to be able to run Twitter well, or adequately, or merely badly; he is going to run it straight into the ground. Every major bad decision he makes in running the site, from silencing critics, to allowing his fans free reign in spite of TOS, to making all accounts require verification, to whatever else he may do, will lead to more users fleeing. At least portion of said fleeing users will come to the Fediverse each time. These waves will not be like the first wave. They will be more like the average Twitter user if Musk supporters are removed. They will also be much larger: most of Twitter’s userbase aside from Musk bros will be fleeing to the exits from that site.

To be honest I’ve been pimping Mastodon on Twitter myself for about a year, (though most people I interact with aren’t the whining moron type) and will probably continue pimping it since Musk is absolutely going to drive that site into the ground, leaving a gaping opportunity I absolutely **want** the Fediverse to take.

@kojote@mastodon.bayern Oddly enough, this would be simply weird in the US. Here we instead would have self checkout, using automation rather than employing people in third world countries to take the role of customer service, with the alternative being the usual manned cash register.

@marialiv@mastodon.social @Gargron It will get very bad on Twitter, and I expect the site to die from it.
I posted a lengthy post about this on my Pleroma account, which I may boost or even copy here because apparently some instances block that instance.

@gme @mastodonusercount The counter is *just* tracking Mastodon.

I should get to work. I've been putting off stuff all day.

@Sphinx Hope you recover quickly and have no lasting symptoms

@protodrew Also, you said this was the *largest* migration ever? Interesting!
Because if my predictions are correct about what's going to happen to birdsite, this wave may actually be small compared to waves to come.

@protodrew If anything, he's done a relatively good job in this respect. The only instance that's really having issues now is his own, and assuming he doesn't restore those two timelines at some point, most of those people will probably leave for other instances over time.
Meanwhile the new people coming in *now* are all going to instances that *aren't* that instance.

@protodrew
To be fair, it's not like you can currently sign up to mastodon.social at this point. You're redirected to joinmastodon.org instead.
He also did this relatively early on in the wave.

@Liberonscien @trinsec @freemo @cy@mstdn.io
I can add a third reason: **Markdown support!!**

@atomicpoet I know I'm getting old because I meet people online in the US who are too young to remember life before 9/11/2001.