I see a lot of pundit speculation and debate that goes something like, “well, only the hackers and cybersecurity people are moving to Mastodon - and everyone else is just going to stay on #Twitter “, but the thing the folks saying this do not understand is that we are a canary.
We watched Twitter get rid of qualified #cybersecurity people who we personally knew. We understand the implications of privacy teams and lawyers being fired has on our data. We hollered about the way the new blue check system would be abused days before billions were lost by a couple companies. We understood the implications of rapid and haphazard terminations. The bottom line is:
1) We know our login data, DMs, and private posts really aren’t secure at all anymore due to lost competent staff and disgruntled employees,
and
2) Twitter probably won’t just shut down this month or next month, but it’s going to start having some serious and unpredictable financial and technical problems due to the people who were let go as well as Elon’s apparent instability and lack of checks.
So, we migrated. Other communities don’t necessarily have this inside baseball, and they understandably just feel like Twitter is too big to fail. We will see if stuff that happens over the coming weeks pushes more folks here, or to other social media sites. Depends a lot on our outreach and what we do with this community.