Since Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter, things have certainly changed at the social media site. A significant number of previously-banned accounts have been reinstated; both climate change denial and hate speech are on the rise; and the firing of a large number of content moderators has led to horrific things lingering on the platform for far longer than they should.
These changes have led what seems like a lot of Twitter users to explore alternative social media options, including Mastodon, Post News and Hive Social. Until now, however, the extent of Twitter migration hasn’t been entirely clear. Now, according to a report detailed by Insider, we have a better sense of what the exodus from Twitter looks like — though it might be more accurate to call it a potential exodus.
As some experts in the field of online security have pointed out, rage-quitting Twitter and deleting your account has some inherent dangers — including the way that Twitter allows the usernames from deleted accounts to be re-used. That’s why the report mentioned in the Insider article, from Dewey Digital, used a number of factors to explore dissatisfaction with Twitter.
Insider’s Isabella Zavarise writes that the Dewey Digital study measured “users who added alternative social media accounts to their Twitter bios, public tweets from users asking people to follow them on different social media platforms, and app downloads” for a month-long period running from late October to late November.
Among the takeaways from Dewey Digital’s findings? Mastodon is growing by a million and a half users per month, making it the fastest-growing alternative to Twitter. That’s still a small fraction of the overall number active Twitter users; at the same time, the fact that the number is on the rise points to a growing sense of dissatisfaction with Twitter. And if current trends continue, this could find Twitter in an existential crisis of its owner’s own making.
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