Many of you will have heard about all the issues and ... fallout ... from a recent change at Twitter. And if you haven't, hopefully this page can serve as a bit of a summary for you. And maybe also a little bit of information, direction, and ... steadying influence? against some of the flood of information (and dis-information) that is going about.
Before I get started, in case you have come here and don't know who I am.
My name's Terrence, but you might have guessed that :)
I'm an SRE (a Site Reliability Engineer) by trade, which is a fancy term for someone who works in Information Technology and specialises in designing and maintaining platforms (often in the Cloud) to ensure they are as highly available (and operational - the two are often not always the same) as possible. Industries that I tend to work in are those that have a need for such capabilities - so Financial services, hosted online platforms, games companies, and the like - but before I got into this gig, I worked my way through Software Development and started out in Infrastructure, running network cables as a youth (yeah, I'm an old fox, ok ...). So ... you might say I have a small amount of insight into some of the technical "stuff" going on behind the doors of one of the largest social media giants there is right now.
So, what has happened?
Well, it started on the 26th Oct when he "walked into Twitter HQ with the sink": https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585341984679469056 ... this was after he bought the company for a cool $44bn (which he tried desperately to back out on ... but failed to realise that it was all legally binding - contracts have a habit of being like that ...)
He then quickly moved to "curb the losses" at Twitter, by letting staff go. Starting with the contractors (all of them), and then ultimately starting on the engineering and technical teams. Over the following week two weeks, he cut around 30 - 40% of the technical teams from the full-time employees as well as ALL of the contractors. This is in addition to banning remote working as well as several other benefits ... resulting in a number of senior engineers quitting.
Then, week commencing 14th November, he issued a decree to the remaining staff. Sign on for a really tough contract change, expecting extreme working conditions with long hours, or leave. The only benefit was, all of those terminated were offered a fairly good package. And many chose to take it instead of stay and work for Mr Musk - and I actually can't blame them.
In total, it is now estimated that Twitter has lost up to 70% of it's original staff count of 7'500.
We have already seen some interesting ... mistakes ... being made.
Resources:
A timeline of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter (nbcnews.com)
Elon Musk orders software programmers to Twitter HQ amid at least 1,000 resignations | Fortune
What does all this mean for Twitter?
Twitter has lost a VERY large section of its functional departments. There are reports of accounting teams being entirely not present, technical teams missing (including all important Network Operations Centre and Cyber Security), chains of commands entirely blown apart ... and that is before you start to look at the moral damage all this has caused.
If you look at the technical risks alone - something as complex as Twitter is virtually *impossible* to recover if there is a catastrophic major outage on core components that bring it to its knees (a common situation with any large, complex, distributed platform - you hope to never have to "cold boot" them!), but unless something fails (or someone turns something off ... or breaches something), it's highly unlikely to go offline ... immediately.
There IS a serious risk of:
As an SRE, my largest concern would be on the failure vectors ... which are a *real* risk. Would anything that is happening stop me using Twitter? No. Would it make me consider an alternative, to start signposting people to follow me on? Hell yes. Because there is now a serious possibility that Twitter will eventually disappear in it's current form - even more so when you consider the actions of someone like the person now owning it ... who has been shown to take exceptionally erratic actions and may just terminate it.
What does this mean for you, a user of Twitter?
Honestly ... not that much right now.
But, be prepared for it going offline, getting unreliable, or ... eventually announcing that they are closing their doors (or even more disturbingly, changing their model, including selling your personal data even more than they used to - and they did, how do you think the adverts were handled?). There's a saying in the industry ... if you use a free product ... *you* are the product. Basically ... there is no such thing as a free lunch, and if you aren't paying for something, the company *must* be getting something out of it - usually you as an advertising target (in part).
It would VERY wise to ensure that you have alternative platforms in place, and there are several that might work for you.
Granted, it's likely that none will have the reach that Twitter had, especially it its heyday, but I think we can all agree even now that is past - interaction numbers have been dropping rapidly for months for many.
There is also a lesser (or it was until this past week!) known contender. Mastodon. And given it's not as well known, I thought it might be worth spending a little time explaining about this platform as many will probably confuse it as a Twitter-like platform and then be frustrated when they find it is different.
Mastodon is, I guess you could say, a cross between a limited Facebook and Twitter experience. But it has some serious selling points.
I do, however, think there are some key things that people should take into account ...
One of the KEY points about Mastodon seems to be the concept of diversity, having multiple instances that federate together to allow the loading to be spread around and not TOO centralised. So we need to think about what makes sense for where to create your "home" account. Accounts CAN be moved (redirected) on to another instance, but it's still a bit of a fiddle to do (if you ever get to this point and feel out of your depth, please do reach out and I'll walk you through it!) so you'll never lose your followers etc. UNLESS the instance goes offline. Which is a possibility given that instances are *individually* owned. With the MASSIVE influx of users onto some of the instances this is actually a reality; the users will put a massive strain on them, physically and financially in the short and medium term, and then most likely drop off as they give up on Mastodon (I'm taking a realistic view here, unless people are going to commit to trying out a new social platform!), but most users will probably not contribute to their instance costs. Instances that aren't prepared for that, will have issues; and it will appear in the form of slowdowns, outages and the like as they struggle to balance the influx of members vs the resources they can budget for. New users need to be understanding and accepting of this - things will get better.
So, what's the differences for users posting content on Mastodon?
This has to be one of the most significant things - and probably one of the things that seems to catch people coming from Twitter out the most.
Unlike Twitter, Mastodon does not use an algorithm to recommend content to you (or therefore other people) - so you NEED to use hashtags in your posts if you want them to be discoverable (and indeed, for you to discover content). You can search for a hashtag, and then follow it - but don't expect to always *immediately* see results if your instance is not entirely connected up to the fediverse.... it can take a day or two for it get all the links in place and start pulling results through for some tags.
You need to curate your own feed - go find your peers and friends and follow them. If you see content you like, boost it (this will repost the content to your own followers). This is how the content is spread around with no algorithm. There is no magic. It's just common sense.
This will likely evolve as the demand for discoverability appears - remember, back in the early days, Twitter was like this - discoverability was the same ... you had to know exactly who to follow, what to look for and everything. This is no different.
How do you find people you know? Well one of the easiest ways is to use the Debirdify webapp - this will crawl your Twitter Follows / Followers and tell you who is on Mastodon and give you a file you can import into Mastodon quickly to make things easier. Who knows, maybe there is more there than you thought! http://debirdify.pruvisto.org/
If you want to read some posts on etiquette (yes, things are a little different generally on Mastodon, far more ... controlled ... and the use of content warnings is more generally expected), then you can't go wrong from having a look through your Instance rules but also the Mastodon Migration account here: https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration
Some good stuff on Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse
I AM going to draw specific attention to their section on Cross Posting. If you cross post without interacting, or tailoring (curating) your content, be prepared for people to be unhappy. This shows a complete disregard for the community you are posting into, and an unwillingness to engage. (I'm actually going to reactive a project specifically to help with cross posting on multiple networks in a sensible way because the current ways are just scattergun and nasty ... and annoy a lot of instance owners!)
Looking for mobile apps? Tusky on Android, MetaText on iOS is where its currently at.
Blimey. You've read all the way down to here? What's next?
Well. I'd be completely remiss to now try and punt my Mastodon Instance's wouldn't I 😂🤷♂️
I currently admin one instancefor people, as well as run my own bits
| Instance | Description | Role |
| pixelfed.furryfandom.me | Image Sharing Furry Fediverse platform | Owner |
| furryfandom.me | Firefish private development instance | Owner |
| Many others for Pleroma, misskey etc | Development purposes! |
|
| furry.energy | Mastodon
(Glitch) Furry instance |
Administrator
|
| m.furryfandom.me | Mastodon (Glitch) Private Instance | Owner |
I do accept people I know onto my private instances but only if I know them well, so don’t be surprised if you do see different users at times on them.
I've given a commitment to run my instances for AT LEAST 3 months, as long as people are using the platforms, with a further three months' notice period if they are to be shut down (should people not be using it, and the costs are massively prohibitive). And above all, I'm more than willing to answer any questions you might have. I've already said, you need to ensure you are comfortable with the instance you create your account on, including their policies, which is why I'm completely transparent - where ever you end up, just make sure they are too!
Hopefully see you online ... somewhere ... in this new world that is forming!
Want to ask me a question? Sure! Send me a message. You'll find lots of way to contact me on my home page of this site, or drop me a message even on discord or telegram: terrencefoxfur