Adios Twitter, Hello X! 

What’s with Elon Musk and the alphabet X? The same that Steve Jobs had for the ‘I’ perhaps! Be that as it may, Twitter users would soon bid adieu to that much-loved bird logo and instead see an ‘X’ in its place. Musk, who announced the change over the weekend, has gone live with it – at least on the website. 

In case you’re feeling queasy, here’s some more to make you feel worse. Musk also tweeted that his x.com would herewith redirect to twitter.com. To think that once-upon-a-time, any search query with more than one X in sequence was part of a black list, because it was suggestive of pornography. Weird logic, but then anything that Musk does has to stand out. 

Small mercies though that the tech billionaire confirmed that the ‘X’ was an interim logo, which means we can still hope for something better than his favorite alphabet. While the changeover did not create enough ripples in the media, what did though was a post from Twitter slayer Mastodon’s founder CEO Eugen Rochko that suggested a surge in monthly active users. 

Twitter’s loss could be Mastodon’s gain

Rochko said the number of monthly active users for his alternative to the world’s most famous micro-blogging site had climbed steadily over the past couple of months, touching 2.1 million, which is “not far off from our last peak.” The last time, active users had peaked at 2.5 million during October and November last year, when Musk officially took charge of Twitter. 

By the look of things, Mastodon’s future appears to be tied to Twitter’s moves, or should one call them its missteps? Longtime users had left Twitter following its acquisition by Musk and the changes that he brought in that included removing the blue tick as a mark for authenticity and replacing it with a paid version. 

Musk’s X-fixation is not the only reason

There were several other moves that put Twitter on the wrong side of its fans, including large scale layoffs, changes to long-held platform policies and product strategies and more. In fact, Twitter had recently admitted that its much-hyped and many times maligned subscription plan that devalued verification is creating a bigger problem as spammers now have a blue tick. 

In fact, Twitter also got into some trouble with Indian authorities though this happened before Musk’s takeover. That brought forth some young pretenders into the same space in the country with Koo being the most publicized effort. The home grown microblogging website, which had raised over $65 million from VCs including Tiger Global and Accel Partners, has reported a steady decline in active users. 

Though the company itself has said the decline is due to reduced spending on acquisitions, there could also be some truth in the rumors that Musk’s meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi could have had something to do with the shift. However, Koo responded by launching Koo Premium last month as part of an effort to allow monetization of content by creators. 

What’s driving Mastodon’s progress though?

Anyways, coming back to Mastodon and Twitter’s inverted association, the former lost active users at a brisk pace within a month of the upward spiral, though analysis indicates that many went over to other Twitter alternatives such as Bluesky, T2, Spill, Post and a few more. It is not quite clear if Mastodon is again benefitting from Musk’s X-fixation or whether active users are growing due to the interest in ActivityPub, the decentralized social networking protocol that powers the Mastodon network and several other apps. 

Of course, the biggest news on the Twitter front came from the neighborhood when Meta launched a Twitter rival called Threads. Not only has Meta committed to integrating with ActivityPub, but they’ve also raised awareness around Mastodon and the decentralized social networking landscape in general. 

However, there are those out there who would rather believe that Musk’s recent shenanigans were enough to frustrate more users and either reduce their activity or simply jump ship. To restrict the number of tweets that could be viewed was another move that is both inexplicable and idiotic when it comes to social media strategies. 

Let’s hope decentralization rules the roost

If one were to take Elon Musk out of this equation totally, the answer to Mastodon’s renewed glory could lie in the third-party clients that have come up to make the social network less complicated. There’s the TweetDeck inspired Woolly as well as Mammoth, a client made by the developer who created the Twitter app Aviary. 

The idea of decentralized social networking has also captured attention elsewhere with WordPress acquiring a plugin that allows blogs feeds into Mastodon. Medium, which launched its own Mastodon server is also playing a role as is Flipboard, which integrated with the network in its social reading app and also launched its own server to integrate with ActivityPub.