Holy carp, that's handy! The only downside to moving to a new social media platform is curating a new set of people to follow and unfollow, which is more overhead than I'm willing to endure. But starting with a list like this means just having to unfollow people who take a "build a brand" approach via quantity rather than quality. So, thank you.
This is... fairly normal; possibly people forget because we have been in a period of relative stability for social networks, but this is how it usually works. It's basically how web forums reproduced, when those were the primary form of social media; forum starts to get a bit shit, people get annoyed, communities within that forum start decamping en masse for elsewhere (often a completely new forum). It's a fairly natural human behaviour; if the people you interact with go to X, you probably go to X, too.
I mean, what do you expect to happen? 20% to Mastodon, 20% to Threads, 20% to T2, 20% to Bluesky, 20% stay, to avoid being perceived as a 'hivemind'?
This is actually one reason I think it's rather unlikely that there will be a single Twitter-killer, with everyone from Twitter moving to Threads or whatever and then continuing on as normal. Threads will probably be the biggest (particularly if it manages to launch in the EU; that's a big problem for it right now), but I'd expect a year from now that there'll be Threads, a bunch of Mastodon instances (maybe more loosely federated than today, probably more community-oriented), maybe Bluesky (I don't personally _get_ it, but some people seem to like it) and a rump Twitter.
Many had automation that broke with the twitter api being rug pulled.
Others don't care for the way they systematically dismantled their trust and safety team.
And finally, some just don't like the direction the platform is heading.
Twitter has made it clear they don't care about their employees, their platform users or anything but frantically trying to extract a bit of money out of zombie company.
The tech community in general but especially the infosec community has strong representation from the LGBTQ community. It should be no surprise that Musk’s antics would drive that community off the site before others. The fact that they are more technically competent than other Twitter sub-communities (like sports or movies) means that the initial learning curve of Mastodon was not a blocker.
I think the reason is more practical. Mastodon is distributed, user-controlled, and easily managed. You can just choose to simply not interact with privacy-adverse systems rather than being forced to use a single centralized system.
But it is. Users chose infosec.exchange because it promised what there were after, but if the instance admins start misbehaving, it would be significantly easier to migrate again to another, or their own, Mastodon instance. The difficulty of search in federated spaces means users are more likely to centralize themselves, but the movement federation offers ensures no funny business on an admins part.
If most the infosec professionals consider the latest changes have made Twitter an inviable option, that alone speaks volumes of the quality of those changes.
Also, a highly changing environment (regarding security threats) makes strong networking a survival trait. You don't want to become isolated from a part of the community, and you can always keep both Twitter and Mastodon. In fact, keeping both accounts is a must, because many security companies and government institutions are still only on Twiller.
> As it stands now the "fediverse" resembles a collection of islands with various shifting bonds between coalitions where those from coalition A shun those from coalitions B and C.
Hrm, what makes you believe that? There are a _few_ largely disconnected instances, but, in particular, the vast majority of instances in terms of usership (excepting intentional islands like Truth Social and Gab, and that one Japanese one) do federate with the giant instances like mastodon.social and similar, tying the whole thing together. In general, if you're using a "normal" instance (ie either one of the big ones or one moderated in a similar way) you can see most other users and most other users can see you. It's only if you're on either a service which everyone wants to block (rare, mostly small Nazi-oriented ones or ones which tolerate cryptospammers) or a service who blocks practically everyone (overly trigger-happy; these tend to rapidly wither and die) that you're isolated.
> it would be far less damaging to the structure of the "fediverse" if that blocking was user-based instead of site-based
Both are options. Defederation, for most instances, is the nuclear option, not the first tool in the box.
I do think at some point it's somewhat likely that there'll be a Muskian 'free speech' shadow fediverse (ie the sort of place Mr Cat Turd would be proud to call home), which will be largely detached from the main one but will federate amongst itself. There's some indication this is kind of developing already (many of the instances that nearly everyone blocks do federate with _each other_). Lots of viable islands seems less likely, though.
1. Both high quality and high quantity posts instantly available
2. Reasonable API access, maybe not directly but they want their niche workflows to be supported
3. Clear and consistent moderation. Eliminate disruptive content while giving reasonable people a clear understanding of whether something will be removed before they post it.
Threads has made vague promises to these three but not yet delivered.
