Elon Musk Is Running Scared From Mastodon; Cuts Off The Best Tool For Finding Your Twitter Followers There

from the trying-to-lock-the-barn-doors dept

People keep claiming that Mastodon isn’t scaring Elon Musk, but it’s pretty clear that he’s worried about the exodus of people from Twitter. With his bizarrely short-sighted decision to end free access to the Twitter API, driving developers over to Mastodon, some people realized that the various tools that people use to find their Twitter followers on Mastodon are likely to be cut off. It’s unclear if this was part of the motivation for ending free access to the API, but it did create a surge in people checking out those tools. But then, last night, just hours after the API announcement, Elon’s Twitter cut off API access to Movetodon, which was the nicest, easiest to use tool for finding and following your Twitter followers on Mastodon.

As when Musk cut off third party client developers, the company has not said what rule Tibor actually broke with Movetodon. And that’s likely because he wasn’t actually breaking any rules at all.

It’s just that Musk is running scared, because he knows people are leaving.

Either way, if you haven’t yet set up a Mastodon account, and you’d like to more easily find your Twitter follows and followers who have already moved over (and found it much better than Twitter), you should probably do so soon before Musk cuts off those other services as well.

The two other popular ones after Movetodon were Debirdify and Fedifinder. They seem to be working right now, but I’m assuming not for long. Almost certainly not after Musk institutes his fees for API access. So, even if you don’t plan on using Mastodon for now, it might make sense to set up an account before these tools disappear.

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Comments on “Elon Musk Is Running Scared From Mastodon; Cuts Off The Best Tool For Finding Your Twitter Followers There”

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Anonymous Coward says:

Ha! Science couldn’t even figure out the cause of obesity. I seriously doubt they can 1+1 mixing with mental illness on social caused mental illness in that generation (ie eating empty calories is just like reading empty data. It serves no purpose).

Its just like SPAM and email with twitters explaination. It costs nothing and its easy to automate bots.

The era of broken English only has the uneducated speaking broken English.

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

Ha! Science couldn’t even figure out the cause of obesity.

I am not sure why you’re harping on the obesity thing as if it matters, but scientists have managed to figure out that our sedentary lifestyle, coupled with all the food we eat, is a big contributing factor towards obesity.

But uh, you do you.

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
keithzg (profile) says:

And so we approach the end...

No bots that admit they’re bots (there’ll certainly still be bots), no third-party clients that make the interface usable, more and more people turning away from the service and thus sapping the lifeblood of Twitter . . . it’s really quite something, you have to work hard to untangle the network effect, but Musk sure seems to be managing it!

This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re:

TD is one of the few places where he can espouse his particular brand of “me, me, me and fuck everyone else” without getting booted and that means he get flagged on sight because people are tired of him shitting TD’s comment section up, it doesn’t really matter what he actually says any longer.

This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re:

They like flagging me because I unflaggingly oppose woke ideology, be it on cancel culture, gender, race, or immigration. It both smacks of desperation and is obviously useless, given that you read the post anyway. But woke ideologues try to censor as much as they can wherever they can. I’m used to it. They also do a lot of cursing at me. If I didn’t find all this fun, I would leave, but it’s actually quite amusing to repeatedly tell hare-brained, obstinate people that they’re wrong.

MindParadox (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:

yeah, cancel culture, or, as people in reality land like to call it “the consequences of your actions”

ya know, like, do the crime, do the time, i believe the saying was in the 70s 🙂

yeah, this woke thing, its so new! all the ideas from it go clear back to the like 1700s 🙂

(seriously, at one point in the 17-1800s being trans or homosexual was a death sentence in most of europe) 🙂

This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re:

That’s true, but many monopolies aren’t actually strict monopolies if you look closely enough. I think it would be fair to say that of the specific kind of thing Twitter does, it has a sufficiently pre-eminent position that even if it isn’t strictly speaking a monopoly, it has both monopolistic incentives and monopolistic means.

Which is close enough to a monopoly for the discussion section on a blog.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:2

Broadcast microblogging, I guess would be the most succinct way to describe it? You see Twitter embeds all over the internet; something like a direct Tumblr feed is much less common.

By analogy you could think about something like search, where there are very clearly flat out direct competitors to Google but Google’s market position is nevertheless monopolistic.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:4

It’s flatly incorrect that there’s ‘nothing stopping them’, because that kind of market share convergence doesn’t happen without barriers to switching, which can and does go up to simply having a product people are already used to.

And once you’ve captured a significant proportion of a market, and particularly in areas prone to natural monopolies via the network effect, you have monopolistic incentives that lead to monopolistic practices.

A monopoly doesn’t have to be enforced by government fiat in order to be very real.

Stephen T. Stone (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:5

It’s flatly incorrect that there’s ‘nothing stopping them’, because that kind of market share convergence doesn’t happen without barriers to switching

If Twitter went down tomorrow, that would not kill microblogging on the Internet. Plenty of options for that kind of social media experience already exist. Plenty of options for other kinds of social media experiences also exist (e.g., Tumblr). And plenty of options for any kind of communications on the Internet also already exist (e.g., Discord, email).

Twitter is not the be-all end-all of Internet communication. Continuing to claim it’s a monopoly when it clearly isn’t one in any way, shape, or form won’t make your argument any stronger.

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Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:6

What a silly response. Options exist even under fully regulated monopolies where an option is technically illegal, so if that’s where you’re hanging your hat no monopoly can ever exist in the first place.

What matters, here, is whether you can leverage market dominance in anti-competitive ways. Microsoft could, and did. Google can, and does. Amazon can, and does. And I would say that Twitter can, and does.

People are leaving now, because it’s finally become more painful to eat the costs of staying than switching, but if there weren’t costs and counter-incentives to switching it would’ve happened far sooner and Twitter would not have become the prominent system it is today.

The network effect, which I’m pretty sure everyone here is familiar with, is a primary example of what I’m talking about here.

You think that’s not a barrier to moving over to some new social setup? Come on. That a barrier isn’t some locked in contract or law doesn’t make it any less real.

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
Rocky says:

Re: Re: Re:9

That Twitter was popular enough to benefit from the network effect didn’t make it a monopoly in any sense since they didn’t in any way try to edge out the competition by using that advantage, ie just because a service is popular doesn’t make it a monopoly.

The action Twitter/Musk have taken recently doesn’t make it a monopoly either in any way but it was certainly anti-competitive in some sense, just like how any business try to silo their services to make it harder for users to switch to alternatives. But that doesn’t work if there are actual alternatives that provide the same or near the same type of functionality, especially if the siloing removes functionality people already had. In this instance Twitter’s action made the net cost of moving to an alternative media platform much lower which isn’t actually anti-competitive, it’s just bad for their business.

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

Hey Koby,

Considering that you thought Facebook could use §230 to dismiss a lawsuit against Facebook’s own speech…

Basically it tells me that you have no idea of what you are talking about and anything you say can be easily disregarded as a stinking pile of 💩.

Just sayin…

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
That One Guy (profile) says:

No more important rule

As when Musk cut off third party client developers, the company has not said what rule Tibor actually broke with Movetodon. And that’s likely because he wasn’t actually breaking any rules at all.

On the contrary, it clearly violated the most important rule of them all:

Rule 0: Don’t make Elon feel bad and/or stupid.

An app where the entire purpose is to make people leaving Twitter easier is a clear attack on Elon’s ego and as such must be stopped.

Stephen T. Stone (profile) says:

Banning bots from using the API is going to kill a good chunk of Twitter’s content⁠—especially news accounts and “[animal] every [timeframe]” accounts. The big players might pay, but the smaller ones won’t; when that content goes away, so will the users. Maybe they go to Masto, maybe not, but they’ll leave either way.

I’m more convinced than ever before that Elon is trying to kill Twitter on purpose. Only that could explain why he’s doing this shit.

That One Guy (profile) says:

Re:

I’m more convinced than ever before that Elon is trying to kill Twitter on purpose. Only that could explain why he’s doing this shit.

I’m still leaning towards dunning-kruger and ego as the explanation in that he thinks he’s way smarter than he actually is, fired anyone who might say otherwise and/or knows better and is incapable of admitting that anything he’s done was the wrong move.

That said given how petulant he seems to be I wouldn’t put tanking the company on purpose out of bounds.

Tanner Andrews (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:2 variety

Twitter is doomed to crash and burn just like every other ‘alternative’ social media platform

Not necessarily. I suspect that most other platforms do not make a practice of not paying the rent and pulling the plugs on racks full of servers. Twitter may just wake up one morning as a domain name that does not resolve.

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

just look at Netflix. WB/HBO/AT&T.

Musk thinks he has a golden touch. Everyone says so.

Hes following a standard american business strategy. The problem, is hes using strats that worked because he was the only realistic EV option, the only private company with reliable spaceflight. But he failed in solar and he’ll fail in social media, because he fails to understand that he has real competition in this space.

Anonymous Coward says:

New Techdirt backend question:

Is the backend treating all “anonymous coward” people as if they were one entity?

I’ve gotten a fair number of “429 too many requests” errors when hitting “post comment” after a couple minutes of writing a post (and maybe having previewed it once). … which seems strange if it was able to distinguish between the HTTP clients of cowards.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

I see that occasionally too. It’s probably not related to being an AC since that’s an http error (which likely has no clue about your login or lack there of).

Opening a page, reading the article, then spending a few minutes to post a comment is… too long of a time frame to legitimately be too many requests.

However I have no explanation other than maybe bad hosting service.

Tanner Andrews (profile) says:

Re: Re: at least pretty close

However I have no explanation other than maybe bad hosting service.

It might not just be the hosting service, but also whoever coded up the platform. M0nths later, preview and flag still do not work, at least with javascript turned off.

The coding is likely relatged to the hosting service, but there may be separate teams.

This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.

Matthew Bennett says:

I guarantee you no one is “worried” about Mastodon

Least of all Musk. Its initial “rush” was a pittance, and its lost active users over the last two months, not gained them. That kinda momentum once lost rarely if ever comes back.

The reality is Musk shut off all the APIs because he thought that should be monetized (perhaps rightly). He almost certainly doesn’t give a shit about this migration tool in particular except that, were he aware of it, what benefit is there to allowing it?

Stop trying to make Mastodon happen, it’s never going to happen. (And your pitiful reach would be unlikely to affect it anyway)

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
That One Guy (profile) says:

Re: Re: 'They just left rather than be harassed, that's not fair!'

Because it’s no fun being an asshole if you’re in a room with nothing but assholes, and if there are viable alternatives to Twitter then people will increasingly start using those instead and Twitter will turn into yet another failed ‘alternative’ social media platform where it’s just horrid people surrounded by others just like them and even they don’t enjoy that.

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

The reality is Musk shut off all the APIs because he thought that should be monetized (perhaps rightly).

Supposing that were true, Musk doesn’t seem very experienced with monetizing a social media platform, especially one which gained so much value from free third-party clients and utility bots.

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
Violet Aubergine says:

Re:

Given your pitiful reach here why do you comment at all? Because it’ll feed into your falsely victimized mentality every time people hide your nonsense for being nonsense? You have the right to say whatever you want and we have the right to tell you to stop wasting our time with your perpetual bad faith nonsense.

And speaking of bad faith nonsense, wasn’t it Musk who said putting up walls to keep consumers in place is for losers and yet he put up a wall before third party APIs. Which will, hilariously, cause him to lose more users when actually useful bots that used the API stop functioning and the people that came to Twitter for the information they curated will have nothing to come to Twitter for except for all those genius ideas that have been unleashed since Musk took over. You know that idea, umm, there has to be at least one good idea that has come about since Twitter was bought by Musk and the free speech revolution happened. You know, that lovely free speech where you ban people that criticize you because conservative bloggers sucked up to you and asked to ban them? That’s the epitome of free speech and you should be sooooooo proud of Elon for being such an avocado of free peaches!

Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

I’m not worried about Mastodon, Twitter, or any service.

I’m more worried about the people who use Twitter, though, and what happens if it does die.

And regardless of what you say or do (which is basically harassment according to ELON’S TWITTER), there are still a lot of other places where it’s hip to be social, including IRC, Blogger, Mastodon/ActivityPub instances, even email lists if I actually bothered to find some related to my interests.

Besides, if you’re so sure Mastodon is failing, why then do you have to keep saying it is, and then go on trying to harass one man who is just using his Twitter account to boost his Mastodon activity?

Maybe, just maybe, you’re a lot more insecure than the rich man who sucks up to autocrats who can and will murder him once he’s stopped being useful to them?

PaulT (profile) says:

Re:

“The reality is Musk shut off all the APIs because he thought that should be monetized (perhaps rightly).”

Which is further proof that he doesn’t understand what he’s doing. Most bots are already monetised. They typically provide content and/or features to the site that people interact with, which drives traffic and thus ads.

He apparently thinks that monetising directly will be more profitable. But, this is unlikely to be the case. Most people who use the APIs are hobbyists or non-profits. They’re not using the APIs because the are making money from them themselves. Charge for the APIs, some will pay but the vast majority will simply not develop anything using the APIs. So, traffic drops, and as useful “sticky” features are removed from Twitter it gives users more reason to go elsewhere.

“Stop trying to make Mastodon happen, it’s never going to happen.”

It is happening. It might never reach the number of users that Twitter has, but it’s much more useful than Twitter is in its current state for many people. Also, what you people seem to forget quite often is that Mastodon is more than the service branded with that name. Quite a number of Twitter alternatives are built on the software on the backend, including Trump’s.

We might not see “Mastodon happen” in the sense that everyone jumps straight to it from Twitter. But, it’s a more desirable outcome that different types of user go to services that suit their needs anyway, rather than trying to battle each other on another site attempting to be “one size fits all”, and most of those will be using concepts proven by Mastodon, if not its software as a whole.

mfellalaw (user link) says:

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https://www.mfellalaw.com

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