The moves Elon Musk has made since purchasing Twitter in October — resulting in hundreds of employee resignations — have many either fleeing the platform or looking around for alternatives such as Hive Social or Mastodon, with the latter gaining more than a million followers over the last month.
I checked out Mastodon early on. It’s fine. But for now, at least, it lacks something vital, which has made me reluctant to leave Twitter even as Musk replatforms notorious characters from Twitter’s version of Arkham Asylum.
Twitter’s design allows diverse voices who have been shut out of traditional media structures to build influence via networks. That capacity, and its implications for wider democratic discourse, are at risk in a mass migration. Diverse creators and journalists — some of whom spent years building reputations that bring their work more attention — are already watching their Twitter networks fall apart.
