The motivations were pretty similar for people exploring Twitter alternatives, too. They didn’t like Elon, didn’t want to be associated with him, and branched out.

Then he started breaking shit, and more people branched out. Indeed, every bit of Elon cringe that came out for 3 months was accompanied by a wave of Twitter users hitting Mastodon servers for the first time.

The real difference, I think, is that Reddit users – and especially Reddit users who are going to be most impacted by the API circus – are used to a higher level of technical complexity than Twitter users. People aren’t necessarily groking the complexity here yet, but they’re open to it being complex, to rolling with the punches, and to just… playing with it.

Enough of us are, at least.

A lot of the Twitter users just showed up and basically kept asking “Why isn’t this Twitter?”

There were other issues, too, of course. Sociological issues. Mastodon had a relatively large established population, and that population was… I guess the word I’d use is “wounded”. And they’d established a culture and social norms that weren’t compatible with Twitter users. So, when Twitter users started showing up, they started trying to impose those norms in a way that was both confrontational and also just laughably ineffective.

The 400 or so tankies stirring up shit on Lemmygrad were never going to be an issue for Redditors, though. They weren’t when they were on Reddit, and they won’t be now, either.