Like much of what has happened in recent years, the possibility of Elon Musk taking over and actually managing to destroy Twitter had the quality of a fever dream: something that would probably be a disaster but would almost certainly never happen. It felt likely that, even in the most dramatic case, he would succeed only in making an already bad platform slightly worse. Which is why the last 10 days have awed even Musk’s harshest critics: since he took over Twitter on 27 October, after firing thousands of staff and the company’s entire board so that he became its sole member, the site has truly begun to tank. By Musk’s own admission, the company is losing $4m a day – reportedly in large part due to advertisers fleeing.
In the few days after Musk’s takeover, more than a million people are believed to have left the site, many in pursuit of an alternative Twitter-esque platform. While there are several popular existing sites that allow users to create text posts shared to an online message board (like Discord, Reddit, and Tumblr), the emerging favourite is Mastodon: a social networking site which uniquely operates as a nonprofit, effectively pitching itself as “Twitter, but nice”. However, the idea that you can recreate a version of Twitter without Twitter’s pre-existing problems is a pipe dream. It won’t happen on Mastodon; it most probably won’t happen anywhere.
