People Are Leaving Twitter for…the Matt Hancock App?

For those who might not be familiar with it, that app was launched by Matt Hancock, a British politician who resigned as the health minister after he was caught in an embrace during the country’s Covid lockdown. He came up with the app a few years earlier to connect with voters in his leafy West Suffolk constituency. Until recently it mostly contained pictures of Mr. Hancock doing the sort of things lawmakers do, opening grocery stores or posing with prizewinning pumpkins.

Now a wave of new users have signed up to exchange messages and follow each other on its chat function—and they like it.

“why is this the closest thing to an actual twitter clone I’ve seen so far??” asked someone going by “unfortunatalie.”

“it like…really is,” replied another, calling themselves “elonmusk.”

“matt is always ahead of the curve!” cheered “matt h 4evar.” “Just setting up my Matt Hancock,” wrote another user, “Andy Parmo,” a nod to Twitter co-founder

Jack Dorsey’s

first tweet.

Mr. Hancock, 44, who remains a member of parliament, couldn’t be reached for comment. At the moment he is sequestered on a reality television show in Australia’s rainforest, where he has said he is looking to raise awareness for dyslexia, and also for a measure of forgiveness while wriggling through cockroach-infested tunnels or nibbling on camel parts for points and an appearance fee.

His office didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In his absence, the app’s user base is growing. More than 243,000 people have signed up, many in the last few weeks, though only around 200 of whom actually follow Mr. Hancock.

Mastodon’s developer, Eugen Rochko, has meanwhile seen a surge of arrivals from Twitter, saying on the site he is exhausted by the effort to scale up his network to accommodate them.

He recently tooted (that’s Mastodon’s term for tweeting) that there are now a million more people using the site than the 380,000 who were on it toward the end of October.

Unlike Twitter or Facebook, Mastodon goes back to how the internet used to be arranged, in a loosely-connected federation of servers, some run by individuals, others by universities or other groups.

New arrivals have to choose which server to join, but can follow and interact with people across the wider network. Figuring out which server to join and where to find people to follow can be confusing, however.

After a look around, novelist

Eric Smith

came back to Twitter, tongue-in-cheek, to report that “It’s like when I tried to get into World of Warcraft a few years too late and couldn’t find any of my friends because they were on another server so I gave up.”

Software developer Gustavo Fontana said he tried Mastodon and it didn’t work out too well. “This is a great public experiment demonstrating that self-referential nerds on their own cannot make a product that humans will use,” he tweeted.

Other Mastodon users say it works just fine. They think the difficulty factor is a plus if it deters some arrivals from Twitter, where trolling and hate speech have been a problem in recent years. Lots of Mastodon servers have longstanding rules policing what can or can’t be said. Content warnings for hot-button topics such as U.S. politics are commonplace.

Yet the biggest factor keeping many people back from Mastodon and other smaller platforms is all the people they would be leaving behind on Twitter, which, despite the changes and controversies over who is or isn’t a verified user, hit an all-time high of active users on Friday, Mr. Musk said.

It’s the same issue that former President

Donald Trump

faced when he set up Truth Social after he was banned from Twitter following the January 2021 riot at the Capitol.

Until there is a broad consensus on where to go after leaving Twitter, many other social media users will likely stay there, too.

“As anyone who’s ever catered a wedding knows, it’s impossible to serve a dinner for 80 that will make everyone happy,” technology writer Cory Doctorow noted on his blog.

Even the apps that new arrivals like can be problematic.

Over on the Matt Hancock app, its boosters, or “cockers,” as they call themselves, are finding that Mr. Hancock’s team isn’t too keen on what’s been going on.

A number of accounts have been removed from the site in recent days, including the faux Elon Musk, a fake

Margaret Thatcher

and someone who had been presenting themselves as Mr. Trump. Those who survived the cull largely confine themselves to discussing Mr. Hancock’s appearance on the reality show, “I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!” posting images of Mr. Hancock taking a shower in the jungle, among other shots.

It’s too soon to tell whether the app or the reality show will turn around Mr. Hancock’s political fortunes after he was caught breaking his own lockdown rules.

“I’m looking forward to him eating a kangaroo’s penis,” chairman of his local Conservative Party association, Andy Drummond, told the London’s Press Association news agency. “Quote me. You can quote me on that.”

Indeed, Mr. Hancock is also now inspiring people to download another kind of app—the game show’s app, where viewers can vote on which contestant has to take on the most gruesome challenges.

Lawmaker Chris Heaton-Harris told LBC radio last week many of his colleagues now have downloaded it to their phones to make sure it is Mr. Hancock who has to rummage through offal or collect plastic stars from caskets of snakes to earn meals for his camp-mates.

So far, Mr. Hancock has had to chow down on fish eyes, and a number of other unsavory animal parts. He was also stung by a scorpion.

Write to James Hookway at [email protected]

For those who might not be familiar with it, that app was launched by Matt Hancock, a British politician who resigned as the health minister after he was caught in an embrace during the country’s Covid lockdown. He came up with the app a few years earlier to connect with voters in his leafy West Suffolk constituency. Until recently it mostly contained pictures of Mr. Hancock doing the sort of things lawmakers do, opening grocery stores or posing with prizewinning pumpkins.

Now a wave of new users have signed up to exchange messages and follow each other on its chat function—and they like it.

“why is this the closest thing to an actual twitter clone I’ve seen so far??” asked someone going by “unfortunatalie.”

“it like…really is,” replied another, calling themselves “elonmusk.”

“matt is always ahead of the curve!” cheered “matt h 4evar.” “Just setting up my Matt Hancock,” wrote another user, “Andy Parmo,” a nod to Twitter co-founder

Jack Dorsey’s

first tweet.

Mr. Hancock, 44, who remains a member of parliament, couldn’t be reached for comment. At the moment he is sequestered on a reality television show in Australia’s rainforest, where he has said he is looking to raise awareness for dyslexia, and also for a measure of forgiveness while wriggling through cockroach-infested tunnels or nibbling on camel parts for points and an appearance fee.

His office didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In his absence, the app’s user base is growing. More than 243,000 people have signed up, many in the last few weeks, though only around 200 of whom actually follow Mr. Hancock.

Mastodon’s developer, Eugen Rochko, has meanwhile seen a surge of arrivals from Twitter, saying on the site he is exhausted by the effort to scale up his network to accommodate them.

He recently tooted (that’s Mastodon’s term for tweeting) that there are now a million more people using the site than the 380,000 who were on it toward the end of October.

Unlike Twitter or Facebook, Mastodon goes back to how the internet used to be arranged, in a loosely-connected federation of servers, some run by individuals, others by universities or other groups.

New arrivals have to choose which server to join, but can follow and interact with people across the wider network. Figuring out which server to join and where to find people to follow can be confusing, however.

After a look around, novelist

Eric Smith

came back to Twitter, tongue-in-cheek, to report that “It’s like when I tried to get into World of Warcraft a few years too late and couldn’t find any of my friends because they were on another server so I gave up.”

Software developer Gustavo Fontana said he tried Mastodon and it didn’t work out too well. “This is a great public experiment demonstrating that self-referential nerds on their own cannot make a product that humans will use,” he tweeted.

Other Mastodon users say it works just fine. They think the difficulty factor is a plus if it deters some arrivals from Twitter, where trolling and hate speech have been a problem in recent years. Lots of Mastodon servers have longstanding rules policing what can or can’t be said. Content warnings for hot-button topics such as U.S. politics are commonplace.

Yet the biggest factor keeping many people back from Mastodon and other smaller platforms is all the people they would be leaving behind on Twitter, which, despite the changes and controversies over who is or isn’t a verified user, hit an all-time high of active users on Friday, Mr. Musk said.

It’s the same issue that former President

Donald Trump

faced when he set up Truth Social after he was banned from Twitter following the January 2021 riot at the Capitol.

Until there is a broad consensus on where to go after leaving Twitter, many other social media users will likely stay there, too.

“As anyone who’s ever catered a wedding knows, it’s impossible to serve a dinner for 80 that will make everyone happy,” technology writer Cory Doctorow noted on his blog.

Even the apps that new arrivals like can be problematic.

Over on the Matt Hancock app, its boosters, or “cockers,” as they call themselves, are finding that Mr. Hancock’s team isn’t too keen on what’s been going on.

A number of accounts have been removed from the site in recent days, including the faux Elon Musk, a fake

Margaret Thatcher

and someone who had been presenting themselves as Mr. Trump. Those who survived the cull largely confine themselves to discussing Mr. Hancock’s appearance on the reality show, “I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!” posting images of Mr. Hancock taking a shower in the jungle, among other shots.

It’s too soon to tell whether the app or the reality show will turn around Mr. Hancock’s political fortunes after he was caught breaking his own lockdown rules.

“I’m looking forward to him eating a kangaroo’s penis,” chairman of his local Conservative Party association, Andy Drummond, told the London’s Press Association news agency. “Quote me. You can quote me on that.”

Indeed, Mr. Hancock is also now inspiring people to download another kind of app—the game show’s app, where viewers can vote on which contestant has to take on the most gruesome challenges.

Lawmaker Chris Heaton-Harris told LBC radio last week many of his colleagues now have downloaded it to their phones to make sure it is Mr. Hancock who has to rummage through offal or collect plastic stars from caskets of snakes to earn meals for his camp-mates.

So far, Mr. Hancock has had to chow down on fish eyes, and a number of other unsavory animal parts. He was also stung by a scorpion.

Write to James Hookway at [email protected]