Elon Musk’s Biggest Success Story: Convincing People To Try Out An Open, Distributed Social Network
A few months ago, I attended a wonderful conference put on by the “Global Freedom of Expression” program at Columbia University discussing decentralized social media and regulations around social media. One of the speakers, Alison McCauley from Unfinished Labs, gave a very interesting presentation on the first day of the conference, October 3rd, (which kindly praised my Protocols, Not Platforms paper), talking about how the world world would eventually move to decentralized social media. I found one slide in the presentation particularly interesting:
Even as it showed exactly what I think would be good for the world, to move away from the internet giants to a more open, decentralized, protocol-based world, I’ve spent years thinking through all the reasons that seemed unlikely to happen. So this chart seemed a bit too… underpants gnomes for me.
It’s great to put “events that trigger disillusion” into the slide, but they certainly felt like that giant Phase 2 “?” in the underpants gnome project.
Lots of people had been saying for years that privacy scandals or other scandals would trigger the grand awakening, but I’d yet to see anything actually happen, and so I thought that if you were to put that into a slide, it seemed like we needed a deeper discussion on what would actually make people get disillusioned. Because very little seemed to have worked to date.
The very next day, while we were at the second day of the conference, Elon Musk announced that he was no longer trying to get out of the deal to buy Twitter, and would go forward with the acquisition.
And while that prompted an immediate hallway discussion with some other conference attendees on what available alternatives there were that could handle an influx of folks, I still didn’t quite expect things to play out as they have. I’ve already wrote about how I’ve come around to now realizing that I’m just not that interested in centralized platforms, after seeing (1) how much worse Elon has made Twitter in just a short while and (2) how quickly Mastodon grew and adapted.
Others are noticing as well. NBC has a somewhat snarkily titled article, noting that Elon Musk is growing a social network — just not the one he expected. It highlights how Mastodon’s recent surge in growth is almost entirely driven by Musk’s whimsically stupid (and quite often hypocritical) decision making. From the article:
Basically, each time Musk does something stupid, such as banning links to Mastodon, it just… drives more people to Mastodon.
Elon Musk has become a one-man “events that trigger disillusion.” And it’s kind of incredible given all of the previous events and nonsense that failed to do so.
Mastodon-powered sites averaged about 130 new sign-ups an hour from Oct. 1 to Oct. 26. The number jumped to 2,000 an hour after Musk took control of Twitter on Oct. 28. Sign-ups rose to more than 5,000 an hour after Twitter began mass layoffs a week later, and they peaked at almost 10,000 an hour after employees resigned en masse following an email ultimatum Nov. 17.
New sign-ups spiked again in mid-December, when Twitter suspended journalists who had been reporting on Musk and the company, and again when Twitter abruptly banned users from sharing links to their profiles on other major social networks.
It makes you realize just how random some of this is. Obviously, it’s not over yet. Many, many people still believe that Musk will right the Twitter ship and everything will be fine. Or that Mastodon’s growth will hit limits in the near future. But, the service has grown by leaps and bounds and has become incredibly useful. I’ve almost entirely stopped checking Twitter when just a couple months ago, Twitter was my main way of keeping up with the news.
This isn’t the kind of “disruption” we usually talk about in Silicon Valley, but it certainly is… disruptive.