“See you at Mastodon, Space Karen”: users joke about the end of Twitter | Technology

Chaos has reigned on the social network Twitter since it was acquired by Elon Musk. The South African-born tycoon has shaken up the platform with every tweet he’s posted since he took over the company: service premium for eight dollars a month, change in content moderation policy, massive layoffs… But in the last few hours things have precipitated. Hundreds of workers have rejected the ultimatum that he gave to the staff and that expired on Thursday so that those who did not want to continue on the ship would leave. Many of these employees have posted videos on the social network as a farewell or expressing their discomfort with the new course of the company.

The protests and humorous comments have spread like wildfire through the social network. One of the videos that has gone viral in recent hours shows the projection of Musk’s name on the façade of Twitter’s corporate headquarters in San Francisco, followed by a series of adjectives that do not go down well. Among them, the term “Space Karen” has had a special repercussion, a mockery of their publicized intention to colonize Mars (a mixture of Space, for its aerospace company, Space X, and Karen, a pejorative term used to describe white women of middle-aged who complain about insignificant things).

Calls for emigration to other platforms such as Mastodon or Reddit-style forums abound. There are also numerous tweets by way of farewell to Twitter, as if it were to collapse imminently, extolling all the good and bad that it has brought us. The departure of so many engineers from the company is giving rise to rumors about the fragility of the platform in the face of possible attacks by cybercriminals or about its own viability as we know it today.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk remains apparently unmoved by the situation. His activity on Twitter, barely interrupted, suggests that he does not sleep: no more than two hours go by without a statement on his social network. He has said, among other things, that he is not concerned about the stampede of workers because, in his opinion, the best are staying.

He has also responded defiantly to public figures, such as US Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, stressing that he has the situation under control. In fact, she is sticking out her chest: in another tweet published a few hours ago, she asks herself: “How to make a fortune on social networks? Start by buying a big one.”

Twitter Alternatives

Twitter has more than 250 million users. However, if Musk’s intention to establish an $8 monthly subscription materializes, there may be a stampede of Twitter users unwilling to pay for the service.

Mastodon is one of the candidates to absorb these disenchanted users. Its operation is similar, although not the same: you can write messages of up to 500 characters that are public to all users of the Network. You can “like” and “share”. However, although its managers assure that its user base has tripled since Musk took over Twitter, the critical mass is much less than that of the bird’s social network (recently it exceeded one million, compared to 250 million of Twitter), so its contents are less interesting.

Other options are Reddit, Tumblr, or Discord. These are platforms other than Twitter, but which, unlike Mastodon, have a broader user base and are therefore more consolidated.

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