{"id":1244802,"date":"2022-11-05T18:27:21","date_gmt":"2022-11-05T18:27:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/11\/05\/twitter-chaos-mastodon-grows-and-whatsapp-launches-communities\/"},"modified":"2022-11-05T18:27:21","modified_gmt":"2022-11-05T18:27:21","slug":"twitter-chaos-mastodon-grows-and-whatsapp-launches-communities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/11\/05\/twitter-chaos-mastodon-grows-and-whatsapp-launches-communities\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter chaos, Mastodon grows and WhatsApp launches Communities \u2022"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.<\/p>\n

Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by the pandemic has decreased. But overall, the app economy is continuing to grow, having produced a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the latest year-end reports. Global spending across iOS and Google Play last year was $133 billion, and consumers downloaded 143.6 billion apps.<\/p>\n

This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place, with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and much more.<\/p>\n

Do you want This Week in Apps in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here: techcrunch.com\/newsletters<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Twitter is dying, long live Twitter?<\/h3>\n

Has it really only been a week since Elon Musk bought Twitter? It seems like a lifetime.<\/p>\n

The Tesla and SpaceX exec has wasted no time making the bird app his own, beginning with the almost immediate layoffs of the Twitter executive team, including CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, General Counsel Sean Edgett and Head of Legal Policy, Trust and Safety Vijaya Gadde, before moving on to cut upper management, and then the widespread layoffs of staff. (Which he\u2019s now being sued over, in fact, as the required 60 days legal notice wasn\u2019t given.) Twitter is expected to cut 50% of its staff, or some 3,700 jobs.<\/p>\n

The roles being cut span areas large and small, from the mission-critical moderation,<\/a>\u00a0trust & safety<\/a>, ethical AI and curation<\/a> teams \u2014 just ahead of a major election, worryingly \u2014 as well as those working on more experimental features, like Communities<\/a>, and in all sorts of business and tech areas like marketing, sales, policy, research, partnerships, accessibility, data science, machine learning, social good, communications and more, including core engineering. Twitter\u2019s Developer Platform lead is out and the developer conference Chirp was also canceled.<\/p>\n

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Employees are already warning that such significant cuts combined with cost-cutting in areas like cloud hosting will lead to difficulties in maintaining Twitter\u2019s infrastructure, The Verge reports.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Advertisers are growing worried about what the significant job cuts in key areas mean for brand safety and began putting their campaigns on pause until they know how this all shakes out. Twitter\u2019s chief customer officer, Sarah Personette, who managed the company\u2019s relationships with advertisers, also departed last Friday as a result of the takeover. Musk, of course, blames \u201cactivist groups\u201d pressure for the advertiser situation and not his own actions.<\/p>\n

The Twitter product is also rapidly undergoing a change, as Musk plans to cut new features like Revue and Notes, and revamp the Twitter Blue subscription to make the blue check now a paid feature. He\u2019s also been thinking about rebooting Vine.<\/p>\n

To say the changes are coming at a chaotic pace is an understatement. Employees were let go via emails and often still working when suddenly their access to Twitter\u2019s internal resources was cut. (Not being able to log in was a clue to go check their personal email to find out if their job was eliminated.)<\/p>\n

Musk never communicated with staff before the layoffs, reports said. But his message, nonetheless was clear: Twitter is being reformed and it\u2019s not going to be the same place it was ever again. The question now is, will users stay for it?<\/p>\n

Mastodon benefits from the Twitter exodus<\/h3>\n

As it turns out, some people decided they won\u2019t be sticking around for whatever Twitter is turning into.<\/p>\n

The open source, decentralized social network Mastodon is one platform that has benefitted from the Twitter takeover. In addition to seeing a record number of downloads\u00a0for the Mastodon mobile app this past weekend, the\u00a0nonprofit company also this week announced a new milestone. In a post on Twitter \u2014 where Mastodon has been successfully marketing its app to those now considering leaving the service \u2014 it noted that 230,000 people have joined Mastodon during the last week alone. Thanks to these new sign-ups, as well as people returning to old accounts they had set up previously, the network now has 655,000 active users, the post said.<\/p>\n

This is the highest number of users Mastodon has seen to date and follows on news that the network\u00a0had gained over 70,000 new sign-ups<\/a> on Friday, October 28 \u2014 the day after Musk\u2019s deal to acquire Twitter had closed. From Friday through Sunday, the Mastodon mobile app also saw around 91,000 new installs, third-party data from Sensor Tower indicated \u2014 a 658% increase from the 12,000 installs it saw the three days prior.<\/p>\n

This rapid growth had some downsides as the largest service mastodon.social experienced lags and outages due to the sudden influx of new users. Plus, some users came to Mastodon without a full understanding of how a decentralized social network works and have found the process confusing or overly technical. They may have already given up and moved on to another platform, despite how this week was the prime opportunity to convince them of decentralization\u2019s perks \u2014 like how Mastodon can\u2019t be sold to a person like Musk.<\/p>\n

Soon, another decentralized social app will come for Twitter\u2019s user base. Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey is launching Bluesky, a decentralized social protocol and app that intends to build a Twitter-like product in a different way. But the open source community has been frustrated\u00a0with the Silicon Valley exec\u2019s decision to go his own way with Bluesky, instead of using established protocols like ActivityPub,\u00a0which powers Mastodon<\/a> and others.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the fact that @Jack sold Twitter to Musk to begin with, so would anyone ever trust him again?<\/p>\n

Substack takes aim at Twitter, too<\/h3>\n

Another company hoping to capitalize on Twitter\u2019s upheaval is the newsletter platform Substack. The company openly targeted Twitter\u2019s user base over the past few days and then threw its hat into the ring as a more direct competitor with the launch of a new feature, Substack Chat. This addition allows Substack writers to communicate directly with their most avid and loyal readers right in the Substack mobile app.<\/span><\/p>\n

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With Chat, Substack is not only taking on Twitter, where many back-and-forth threaded discussions between writers and readers already take place, but also other online communities where writers have been building out networks of their own, like Discord, Slack and Telegram.<\/p>\n

The company says the new Chat feature will eliminate the need for its writers to \u201cfrankenstein together different software tools and cross-reference subscriber lists,\u201d its announcement read.<\/p>\n

Chat is not a Twitter clone by any means \u2014 though there is overlap with how writers have used Twitter in the past.<\/p>\n

For starters, the Chat feature will be opt-in, meaning not every newsletter may have chats enabled at this time.\u00a0Publications will have to first enable the feature on their Settings page or by simply starting a new thread in the Substack app. The user interface is also not a timeline to scroll, but resembles a traditional chat app.<\/p>\n

However, the launch could relocate some of the discussions that would have normally taken place on Twitter to a more private networking space going forward.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

WhatsApp launches Communities<\/h3>\n

WhatsApp this week officially launched Communities, the new feature offering larger, more structured discussion groups\u00a0that first entered into testing\u00a0earlier this year.\u00a0Designed to help organizations, clubs, schools and other private groups better communicate and stay organized, Communities bring a number of new features to the messaging platform, including admin controls, support for sub-groups and announcement groups, 32-person voice and video calls, larger-file sharing, emoji reactions and polls.<\/p>\n

Communities themselves can support groups of up to 1,024 users and offer end-to-end encryption.<\/p>\n

Some of the features developed for Communities,\u00a0like emoji reactions,\u00a0large-file sharing\u00a0(up to 2GB) and the ability for\u00a0admins to delete messages, had already made their way to the WhatsApp platform ahead of today\u2019s launch. Now, the company says polls, 32-person video calls and larger group sizes will also be supported on WhatsApp more broadly outside of Communities.<\/p>\n

At launch, group admins will have the option to move their group to a Community if they choose. The feature will reach the wider WhatsApp user base worldwide over the next few months, on both Android and iOS.<\/p>\n

Platforms: Google<\/h3>\n