 A few years back, I deleted my Twitter account and moved over to Mastodon, and I know a lot of you guys that follow my channel, and you guys that are fans of free and open source software, and you guys that are fans of decentralized social networks, you're fans of the Fediverse, this federated network of social networking sites. One of the things you probably noticed in the last couple of days regarding Mastodon is many of our favorite Mastodon instances are being bogged down with millions of new user registrations. Many times you go and try to log in to your Mastodon instance, and right now, sometimes the server is down because they're just inundated with all these new users, because all of a sudden, Twitter users are wanting to find an alternative to Twitter, and many of them have now discovered Mastodon, so they're signing up to give Mastodon a try. Why are they doing this? Well, they're doing this in response to Elon Musk now owning Twitter. The deal was finally approved a few days ago. Now Elon Musk officially owns Twitter. He bought it. He has taken it from being a publicly traded company now to a private company, so you can no longer buy shares of Twitter, for example, on your trading platform or anything like that. It's a private company, and he's going to make some major changes, which is why he bought it. He didn't like the way Twitter was run. He thought Twitter probably could be more than what it was, because honestly, Twitter was kind of a dying company as far as stock price and things like that. If you've been following the company for a number of years, Twitter has really always kind of lagged behind of the major players in the social media space, lagged way behind players like Facebook and Instagram, for example. But now that Elon owns Twitter, you're seeing a massive amount of Twitter users leaving in protest, usually due to some kind of political ideology or whatever. They don't want to be associated with Elon Musk in any way. And Elon Musk, he's kind of a controversial person, because he's one of these eccentric billionaires. Not everybody loves billionaires. The other thing is he loves to talk a lot. He especially loves to talk at times when he probably should just be quiet. And he loves talking especially on social media. And of course, these kinds of people that talk all the time, especially when they shouldn't on social media all the time, they tend to piss people off. And Elon has had that effect. So a lot of people don't want to be associated with his version of Twitter essentially. So they're looking for a Twitter alternative. And these people now, they have found Mastodon. So in mass, you've got all these Twitter users leaving and signing up for these various Mastodon instances. And it's causing major issues because the Mastodon instances that are out there just weren't prepared for it because all of a sudden the server is down because honestly, you need a bigger server now with all these new users. It's like, it's like the Jaws meme, you know, that scene where Roy Schneider says, you're going to need a bigger boat, right, we're going to need a bigger server. And a lot of people in the Linux space and the free and open source software space or people that are just fans of decentralized social networks such as Mastodon, a lot of people are celebrating the fact that all of these millions of new users potentially are switching over to Mastodon. And I would love to join in that celebration, but I can't because I know the truth. I know the truth is 95% of the people that are leaving Twitter to try out Mastodon have absolutely no idea what they're getting into over on Mastodon. And they are going to be massively disappointed because they are going to expect Mastodon to essentially be a one-to-one drop-in replacement for Twitter. They essentially think it's going to be an exact Twitter clone. And of course, Twitter and Mastodon are nothing alike because Twitter is one site, one set of rules owned by one person. There's only one Twitter and Mastodon is this collection of thousands of different Mastodon instances with their own set of rules, their own admins, their own moderators, not all the instances talk to each other because they differ politically, ideology. There's a lot of strange stuff that goes on with Mastodon that Twitter users I think are going to be surprised at when they come over. I also think a lot of these Twitter users are going to try to bring in some of what was socially accepted behavior on Twitter. It's not going to be accepted behavior on most Mastodon instances because Twitter, of course, is filled with a lot of uncivility, uncordial discourse where people typically insult each other for basically being different. It's just a really mean and nasty place, Twitter. And a lot of these people, they hang out on Twitter to fight with each other. They enjoy it. They're negative people that enjoy that kind of bickering and infighting. And now they're going to try to go to Mastodon to basically have that same Twitter experience. And most of these Mastodon instances are not going to allow any of that stuff. So I would say 20 to 25% of these Twitter users are probably going to get banned within one week of signing up to Mastodon. And of course, once they get banned, they're just going to go back to Twitter. But really, I think, again, about 95% of these people, they'll try out Mastodon. They'll realize it's not what they thought it was going to be. And they're just going to go back to Twitter eventually. Now, let's say we keep 5% of these users that try out Mastodon. That's still going to be a massive increase of people on Mastodon, but it's not going to be the kind of increase that the free and open source software community envisions. Where now we're going to have countless millions of Mastodon users, and we're going to be a legit competitor to sites like Twitter, Facebook, and these other big social media sites, you know, the centralized proprietary social media sites. Now we can take that on, because now Mastodon is on an equal playing field. No, no, no. We're not even going to approach those kinds of numbers. And the reason I say we're not going to approach those kinds of numbers, why I'm kind of pessimistic here, is I'm just being a realist because I've seen all of this before. Because in many ways, these Twitter users exploring Mastodon in a lot of ways are kind of like Windows users that try Linux, you know, explore Linux, right? For whatever reason, they need to leave Windows, and they're going to explore an alternative, which typically will be Linux, and then they realize Linux is not what they thought it was. And a lot of those users, what do they do? They go back to Windows. It's the same thing, because I saw this, I saw a large migration of Windows users over to Linux back around the 2008 period, where Windows transitioned from Windows XP, which was a really minimal, light operating system, didn't require a lot of CPU or a lot of RAM. It ran on pretty much all hardware for like a decade or more. And all of a sudden, Windows came out with Vista, which had a new user interface that not everybody liked, and it had a massive amount of system requirements, much more so than what Windows XP required, a lot more CPU and a lot more RAM. So a lot of the machines that were running XP could not go to Vista. So what did these users explore? They explored Linux, and we saw, you know, many millions of users, you know, buy out Linux back then. Did all of them stay? No, probably most of them did not stay, because when they tried out Linux, they were expecting Linux to be Windows, right? They were expecting, again, a one-to-one drop-in replacement for Windows. And that's not what Linux is, Linux being free to open source software. It's not a corporate backed distribution or operating system, right? It's all community run. If you want support, you want to ask questions. It's all a community effort. You have to go to these online communities to get help. Some of these online communities for Linux are not the friendliest places, unfortunately, and it's just a completely different ecosystem. The Linux ecosystem, totally different than what you were used to on Windows. So if you were expecting the exact same thing, you were sorely disappointed. And these Twitter users that are exploring Mastodon are going to find that same kind of disappointment. So my advice to you guys that are on Twitter, you're a Twitter user, you're thinking about leaving Twitter to explore Mastodon. My advice would be, don't do it unless you're doing it for the right reasons. So the wrong reasons to leave Twitter for Mastodon would be, I don't like Elon, or I'm doing it because of political ideological reasons. I'm doing it out of protest. I'm going to stick it to the man by leaving Twitter and going to his alternative, you know, the Mastodon instances that are out there, because that's really going to show those evil people at Twitter what I think about their company. And that's the wrong reasons, because one thing, your reasons don't make any sense because you're really not accomplishing anything. If you're leaving Twitter as a protest vote, hey, if you think it makes a difference, I guess go ahead and do it. I don't think that makes any difference at all as far as Twitter as a company, because all of the users that Twitter is losing, they're also gaining new users too because a lot of the people that don't want Twitter to change and are leaving because they don't want Twitter to change. Well, a lot of people have left Twitter over the years. I mentioned how bad Twitter has done as a social network over the years compared to its competitors. A lot of people have left Twitter and now that it's under new management, a lot of those people that had left Twitter are probably going to try Twitter again, so you guys that are leaving are just getting replaced by new users. In the end, I think it's all a wash, but I do think that you guys should leave Twitter if you're doing it for the right reasons. The right reasons would be if you're concerned about privacy, right? If you're concerned about being on a proprietary platform that datamines you, that's always spying on you, that's logging everything you type, everything you say, then explore Mastodon. If you want to explore the world of free and open source software, then explore Mastodon. If you want to explore the world of decentralized social networking, explore Mastodon. Those are the right reasons to leave Twitter for Mastodon. So over the next few days or the next few weeks, we're going to see a huge new influx of Mastodon users. But don't worry, again, this is temporary. 95% of these people are not going to stick around for the long term. Right now, we just have to deal with it as far as the fact server downtime. Maybe you're going to have to do some server upgrades if you're a Mastodon admin to maintain your instance for all of these new users that are coming in. And for those of us that have Mastodon accounts, we're Mastodon users and we see all these new users coming in. Let's be civil. Let's be respectful. Even to these Twitter users that come in and they are not civil or not respectful, they come in with mean or nasty attitudes and they want to start all these political and religious fights. Let's again, let's rise above that and show them how it's supposed to be done. Be civil, be cordial, even when we have to correct them and point out the error of their ways. Hey, this is not the way we do things on Mastodon. That may have been the way things were done on Twitter. That's not the way things are done here. Ultimately, just follow the golden rule. Peace, guys.