Some day, we’ll have a technology sub that isn’t polluted with Twitter “news”.
It’s a tech company that is burning itself to a ground. Hard to take your eyes off of a slow moving car crash.
Sometimes it’s fun to just sit back and watch platforms combust due to their own arrogance.
We’ll save you a seat, but you’ll need to bring your own popcorn.
Anyway I’m glad this shitshow happened because it was a much needed boost for federated software like Lemmy.
These were weeks where decades happened.
Remember the old memes? Those were the days…
In AD2001, memes were beginning.
*laughs in Cats*
Turns out X is giving it to itself. Ironic.
Fuck waitin’ for you to get it on your own
X gon’ deliver to yadeleted by creator
And remind ourselves that it find very easily happen to the fediverse! All it takes is mass defederation, some vulnerability, anything ego driven… humans still run this platform and it wouldn’t take much to bring it down.
the Fediverse is growing, but still small. If anything (as much as I’m personally enjoying it) at this stage of growth, it would be still statistically likely to fade to irrelevance in a few years, so it would not even be big news. Seeing a couple of the Big Socials being dismantled this way at the same time is… something else. I’m getting tired too of all this coverage about Twitter and Reddit and start wishing Lemmy had filtering by keyword, but rationally I know it’s granted.
I believe some of the apps do have keyword filtering, but idk which ones.
Might be worth looking into if it’s something you want to avoid.
thanks, I was starting to look into some of the apps, but so far I haven’t found one that works better for me (on Android) than the mobile web version. I have never looked specifically into keyword filtering though.
I definitely can’t log on without hearing about how any even remotely popular instance is actively working to create an echo chamber for the right by defederating anything that might even consider allowing a community to the left of centrist dems.
I think, given what I’ve seen so far, is that there’s going to basically be faschie status quo lemmy and then everyone else lemmy.
Because capitalism is so great and superior if you let it’s adherents so much as think there’s literally any other option it all crumbles to dust immediately 😂
Elon calls them Rapid Unplanned Disassemblies.
Never understood why we call them tech companies to be honest. There is nothing technologically interesting at twitter. And if there is… it is never the subject.
So I think the main thing is scale—they’re tech companies (in the category they’re in) because of the engineering required to build & maintain something that operates at the scale they do
And IMO at least in the early years it was pretty impressive what Twitter was capable of in terms of technology.
If I remember, tech companies are generally those whose primary products are digitally based. And technology these days has essentially become synonymous woth the internet.
Let’s hope “X” continues down the path to it’s own demise.
I’m still waiting for any article that talks about the tech that Twitter is supposed to be so famous for.
What Twitter did well I think was handle the non-trvial problems of scale, and did a fairly credible job of content moderation. I can find fault with a lot of how they handled that but they did honestly try. Becoming the dominant platform is always largely luck, but had they not adequately handled scale and content they would not have lasted for so long. Content moderation is a people, process, and technology problem.
Twitter like it or not has been pivotal for connecting people around the world especially those with less developed infrastructure. The Arab Spring events would not have happened without it. Which is why I think the Saudis were happy to give Elon money. They knew he’d either make it more friendly for them, or kill it and they’d have a hold on him because of the money he owes.
Content moderation is a people, process, and technology problem.
Their content filtering/categorisation was also quite good. They’re one of the few sites I can think of that had a bit more clarification than a basic “NSFW/Sensitive Content” tag, even if it came rather late, so if something was marked correctly, you could get an idea of what kind of NSFW content it was, without unblurring the image.
They made the popular CSS framework Bootstrap, which led to thousands of new websites for a while looking the same. 😅😬
This is a bit of a learning experience though.
The big tech companies advocated during 2020 that they were not biased and should not be held responsible for policing the Internet.
Since then, FB swapped to Meta to cover up the documents showing FB is intentionally causing psychological damage our children because it gives them more clicks/view time.
OpenAI scraped the Internet, legally and illegally to power ChatGPT.
Twitter, a social media company known for free speech, was bought by Musk, a former Trump associate. Trump was reinstated during this period and dissent was banned.
Google decided to push web DRM to force us to use their software or else we can’t access the Internet.
Sounds like they very much want to police the Internet. We just aren’t putting the pieces together in a collective way.
OpenAI scraped the Internet, legally and illegally to power ChatGPT.
I’m not a huge OpenAI fan, but it’s not yet been determined that they acted illegally. I believe the matter is still being pursued in court.
I think people are too focused on the scraping, which is clearly not illegal, but is what the roch people who own the websites are hollering about because they wanted to make money off of selling the posted content they did not actually own
Open AI’s implementation of image creation in the style of a particular artist using copyrighted works is going to be the big outcome.
It’s not illegal for a person to learn things online. That’s one of the original purposes of the “world wide web” when it was opened to universities.
It is illegal to copy someone’s brand and use it to make money. These chat bots are literally charging people to take input like “write a story in this author’s style” and outputting a story that is a poor mimicry. The main problem is they are charging money based on someone else’s trademark. Not that they write a similar story.
This feels like Andy Warhol’s art combined with TPB’s court processing.
Andy earned money buy making art using other’s art and TPB sold ads while telling you where you could aquire content illegaly, while never actually hosting any of the content.
Where does the line go? If I write a book the is similar to someone else’s book, is that illegal? If I use a tool to help me write? Which tools are allowed and which are not?
It is going to be interesting to see how this plays out.
Immorally then.
Illegally, maybe. Immorally, probably not. It’s fine for a human to read something and learn from it, so why not an algorithm? All of the original content is diluted into statistics so much that the source material does not exist in the model. They didn’t hack any databases, they merely use information that’s already available for anyone to read on the internet.
Honestly, the real problem is not that OpenAI learned from publicly available material, but that something trained on public material is privately owned.
but that something trained on public material is privately owned.
Is that really a problem? Is a create something new based on public knowledge, should I not be able to profit from it?
I learn to paint from YouTube, should I paint for free now?
I’ll admit that the scope of ChatGPT is MUCH bigger than one person painting.
I’d say that was a more controversial opinion. From a purist perspective I tend to believe that intellectual property in general is not ethical and stifles innovation.
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Well, I suspect since free money is gone, everyone’s looking at private “donations” which also have private incentives.
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Higher interest rates. Free money means you can spend a lot on trash projects that generate hype but no money. Expensive money means every dollar needs revenue.
On Reddit I’ve found most of the news about the big social networks is posted by only handful accounts, they also don’t post other interesting things, so you can just block them.
I’m hoping that’ll work on Lemmy as well.
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Click on their name, on the upper right of the page you end up on will be two buttons, “Send Message” and “Block User”. Hit the latter.
And welcome aboard! (I’m a fairly new Lemmy immigrant as well)
blocking is there , go to user profile
an example of spammers is this https://lemm.ee/post/2676046 , that user made 593 posts in 80 days , 7.4 each day
People tend to call everything fediverse “Lemmy” which causes some confusion.
Kbin has the options to block people, magazines/communities, and entire instances. Hopefully Lemmy will get the block feature because it is awesome for the few times it is needed.
I’m not confused. You can block people on Lemmy.
Can you also block communities/magazines and instances on Lemmy now?
I probably grouped the three together when it was one or two of those levels.
Yes, you can block communities. Instances are a little more complicated since that’s defederation and happens at the instance level, but since you won’t see posts from communities you aren’t subbed to that’s less of an issue.
I have seen posts from instances with communities I’m not subbed to on the kbin “All” list because someone else on the same kbin server subbed to it. It makes discovering new communities very easy since I don’t need to do all the leg work on my own.
there’s a tampermoney script to block whole instances
You can block communities and users on Lemmy. You can’t block instances, but that wouldn’t make sense since you don’t see their content unless you go there or subscribe to a community. Maybe blanket blocking users from an instance would be useful.
On connect for lemmy we have the option to block instances.
Lemmy has apps.
Not sure if Lemmy is the same, but my understanding of the fediverse structure was that if someone subbed to a magazine/community on another instance then it would show up in All for everyone logged into the same instance. On kbin I have never needed to sub to anything on lemmy.world or beehaw or whatever because someone else subbed to it first and it just shows up on my All feed.
A mild example of blocking an instance would be if there was one that was entirely in a language I don’t know then I have the option to block the instance instead of playing whack a mole with each magazine/community to hide the content that I can’t read.
That’s just true of social media in general. 1% of the accounts generate 99% of the content.
Does anyone know where the normal people are going though? I suspect Mastodon and tiktok? At least the young ones.
All this, Ryan said, explains why the trolls “are getting more extreme and desperate.” The pool of people available to get attention from is shrinking, so the only way to keep the engagement rates as high is to say wilder and nastier things. But eventually, there will be so few people on Twitter left to aggravate that even white nationalist dogwhistling and Holocaust denialism won’t work.
Mastodon would be my personal preference, but Bluesky seems pretty noisy to me, which seems like what people want from microblogging sites (I’m more of a reddit/lemmy/kbin style person, myself.) The question is whether Bluesky pulls a Google+ and stays invite-only for so long that they miss their own hype train.
So you tried it? I haven’t known anyone that have tried it. A journalist said that the existing users are rude about newbies because they want it to themselves but I’ve seen a lot of bad reporting about Lemmy. Did you find it cranky about new users?
Keep in mind that I barely use it and only follow a few people I followed from TwiX.
People seemed friendly enough but there is a lot of self-serving navel gazing, and it seems like the “Discover” feed is full of inside jokes/references that I don’t use the app enough to get.
My first day the big thing was complaining about how terrible and bigoted the devs of bluesky were, for something they said that I never did figure out, and the subsequent complaining about people complaining about the devs. Very dramatic.
To be fair, I’m sure if you just followed the people you cared about, and avoided the discover feed, it would be pretty Twitter-like.
Also, there’s a character limit and you can’t edit. These aren’t technical limitations anymore, like they were for Twitter at the beginning, so they must be design decisions.
If I had an invite left I’d give you one.
Also, there’s a character limit and you can’t edit.
That kills any interest I might have had. I make embarrassing typos often enough that editing is a must-have feature.
I would expect that to be an upcoming feature, similar to how Threads is bolting on things like DMs. That’s probably part of why it still requires an invite.
Thanks for the invite possibility, I’d rather someone else go into the trenches since I’m really happy here, lol. I just wondered if there was a trolling pattern going on or maybe a journalist issue.
I have tried all the things! And I recently saw that article you’re referencing.
In my own experience, I haven’t seen one single person being rude or mean or blowing off newcomers. I suspect the bar to entry is slightly higher because you have to get your head around how the fediverse works, so the types of people coming here trend more patient. It’s also a slower pace here, which can be good or bad depending on what you like.
The nicest feature for my use is that you can follow just about anyone anywhere. On kbin especially. There you can follow users from any Lemmy instance, or an entire instance, as well as users at Mastodon. The downside is that it can be a little tricky at first to figure out how to follow someone who’s on another instance. It’s not hard, but it’s something new if you’re coming from a single entity site like Twitter.
It’s also no big deal to make an account on multiple instances if you’re not sure where to go. My approach with all of them was to browse the local server (e.g., lemmy.world, mastodon.social) rather than the federated feed. The local feed gives you an idea of who’s on that instance, what topics come up a lot, how the users act, etc. I’d also check out the “about” section. That will show you who the moderators are and what their focus and approach is. Some are laissez-faire and others are much more curated, so there’s something for everyone.
The neat thing about this system is that you can find more niche instances if you have a particular interest – gaming, software development, climate, science, memes, etc. You can make that your main instance and still see everything going on across all instances. That helps eliminate a lot of FOMO.
I was never on Twitter and not on most social media except Reddit, which I thought I’d miss. But I’ve enjoyed using Mastodon, Firefish, and Lemmy/kbin a lot. It’s a smaller group but still plenty to see and lots of interesting people and topics. Everyone has been very nice, but it’s easy to mute or block people or subs that you’re not interested in. After that you won’t see them in your feed at all.
I meant Bluesky, but you would be an amazing welcome committee on Mastodon. You could #newuser or something.
Ha, sorry! I guess being on them hasn’t improved my reading skills. :-D
No apologies necessary, I love seeing the enthusiasm. I wrote it a little wonky as well.
existing users are rude about newbies because they want it to themselves
Huh. The irony, considering that this is basically what people who jumped to BlueSky said about Mastodon.
They weren’t strictly wrong about entrenched Mastodon users, but turning around to pull a reverse-Uno card about the whole thing is entertaining to me.
It was because most instances were invite only. It wasn’t because they weren’t wanted, but because most instances are humble small servers paid or run by individuals. Unlike the massive data centers that most social media companies have at their disposal. Only a few instances had the capacity to receive the waves of massive exodus. The limitation was technical, not ideological. Guess they took it personal and confused why something was being done.
No, there was a lot of pushback against new users coming in and “acting like it’s Twitter”. General interest instances grew, people, for the most part, operated within the rules of the instances they were on, and a bunch of the old guard got on peoples cases over things like content warnings, language policing, and threats to defederate their small, niche instance that no one was going to miss from big and growing servers (which, when you have absolutely no idea about the lay of the land, sounds really threatening and consequential).
People who were used to having almost the whole yard as their own tailored safe space did what they could to try and make the new folks get in line and adhere to the social conventions they were accustomed to, attempting to hold sway over behaviour on servers they didn’t really want around anyway. It made the space hostile for new folks coming in.
And it was meant to.
I didn’t experience any of that, and I’m in a rather small instance that grew exponentially. People posted customary reminders of etiquette. But I’ve never ever seen anyone hostile or drama stirring about culture policing. But I guess it helps that I was never into the whole Twitter’s rage baiting circlejerk that people liked to participate in.
People are insane to not want tech like the Fediverse to grow. I guess people have their hang ups though.
I wonder if this is just all PR combined with trolling so people don’t try new or competing things. It sounds too cookie cutter but I guess people could want to keep it the same like beehaw did (no issues with beehaw doing what they did, just saying they’re an example of this).
Looking at who’s involved with blue sky, though, I can’t help wondering how many times the users need to be taught the same lesson.
I have come over a few Reddit communities who moved to Discord of all things. I don’t get why. That isn’t even remotely the same type of discussion platform.
I’m really not a fan of Discord. Why would anyone use a platform that’s not accessible without making an account and requires an invite to each group? If it wasn’t branded towards gamers I don’t think it would have much appeal.
Imo it’s because sites like reddit make communities too open. It’s common knowledge that once a sub regularly makes it to r/all, it loses all identity and joins the vague soup of r/all content which everyone upvotes with no regard for the source.
A lot of people don’t want one big page with all the biggest communities thrown together. They just want to follow what they like and nothing else.
That said, the chat room format of discord is a pretty awkward stand-in for a forum type of community.
Discord has its uses but it’s very much not the same. I often can’t even find my question I asked an hour later.
At least for me, Mastodon replaced Twitter and Lemmy replaced Reddit. But then, I’m not “normal” and find the Fediverse to be endlessly fascinating.
I mean i moved to misskey/firefish which was awesome, but in my friend groups many of them just quit twitter & spent more time on discord, instagram, tiktok, etc. other places which they engaged w/ ppl 🤷🏿♂️ (fg age range: late millenial/gen z)
Most folks I follow went to Mastodon. I even met some new folks, including some that are local!
Some are still on twitter even though a small number of us begged/pleaded with them.
One went to blue sky.
Most folks I follow went to Mastodon.
I like hearing that.
This is speculation but I suspect people are already oversubscribed to social media and just spending a bit longer in other places they already go. So if they’re on Discord, they’re probably just spending more time there.
Don’t forget Threads.
People stayed there?
Imo reports of the death of threads are more hype and sensationalism. “Threads is booming” was a good tech headline, “Threads is dying” was a good tech headline. It would be perfectly expected for a ton of people to check it out at first and then use it if they want, or not. It reminds me of how in the lame city I lived in Olive Garden opened and was reservation-only for 4 months. Just because they didn’t stay reservation only doesn’t mean their launch or normal business was unsuccessful. Meta has a huge advantage in using the IG account base.
Personally, I haven’t been on FB in years, only go to IG to message people, and the content there is good for one account I have and so awful for another one. I have no interest in another meta product but what has stopped me from even looking at it is the lack of a full web interface. I will not install their app. 95% of people don’t care about that, though.
We’ll see, how is Meta’s metaverse doing?
Absolute crap obviously, because it was a very dumb idea and never even started to gain popularity. People don’t really want to buy a $400 strap-on game console to play a substandard video game where you don’t do anything. A Twitter rip-off was a much better idea for them.
I just think they shit the bed again with threads, it wasn’t fully functional when it was put out. If it’s a start up like Lemmy and ran by hobbyists, we’re a lot more forgiving.
It definitely seemed rushed. Not sure why they couldn’t have thrown another 100 engineers and another month or two at it. Seems like an FU at Musk as much as anything, which is fine with me.
That’s never even reaching booming status
It’s fun to snark on threads but yes, it had 100 million signups in a week and 50 million people still using it.
First of all, does anyone trust threads to tell us real numbers? How would anyone check? Second of all, no way am I ever using them and I blocked them on my Mastodon account. If they every come to Lemmy, I’ll block them here as well. I’m not shitting on threads, the parent company has always been full of shitty people.
I don’t support Meta and they’re not a good company. I was merely answering the question about where people went.
Meta is a public company though so they could get in legal trouble for false reports, and there’s also a bunch of ways advertisers can check metrics.
A big chunk of those would be bots/fake/spam accounts, ie not real users. Marketing companies have already started selling fake followers for Thread influencers.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/yes-already-buy-fake-followers-145053836.html
Meta is a public company though so they could get in legal trouble for false reports
They sold our info to the Russians, I doubt they worry too much about false number reports. https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-gave-russian-internet-giant-special-data-extension/
How many people do you think are on lemmy compared to threads lol
Idk, do you have a source outside of meta or lemmy that can accurately tell us?
“Normal” people who use Facebook will use Threads.
That’s true, but I don’t see too many people using Facebook anymore except for loose contact with friends. Maybe I’m being in my own bubble.
It is pretty dead in my social circles and age group, but I also know people who still use it. Old people are a major segment. Also after meta was lamenting that it was dying with Gen Z, oddly people younger than that are using facebook in surprising numbers. Another thing though is that it’s popular in other countries. Meta isn’t just about facebook or instagram, though, they also have a gigantic asset in WhatsApp - it’s huge in South America, Africa and India.
Offline?
If your main social network is on fire, you’re probably just going to put the phone down and do something else, especially if you’re not on another social network.
The learning curve with getting used to a new one might be a more than what most people really want to do with their time and energy, so they might just be curbing their Twitter use.
I thought it was the same thing that happens with these “content creator” in every niche. Over saturation requiring these greater extremes to get more attention.
Always remember to never feed the trolls. It’s a very basic Internet rule that we should have continued to follow. Block and move on
i think in this case we also want to consider…
do not click a twitter link
… as the article states, it is the traffic, itself, that they want.
Even better. Don’t click on Twitter and don’t engage with trolls in any format.
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Don’t they want to reduce traffic since they can’t pay their bills?
It’s not just block and move on though, I can’t find the article that explains a study of it. If the person is a simple troll, then yeah, do it that way. But if they’re a nuanced, giving false info, and sound convincing troll, give one response and then stop engaging and downvote. That gives a person who doesn’t understand that the troll is full of bs a counterpoint to at least not take it as fact. It’s a counter to the “get there first” strategy of trolling.
You have to stop though, if you’re explaining then everyone is losing.
Sounds like a surefire way to get Donald Trump elected again.
Ignoring the trolls caused 2016 to happen. At that point, it became clear that the trolls have gathered in power, have organized politically and have explicitly made their methodology into the leading political force for the Republican party.
Ehhh… more like the opposite. The mainstream media engaged the trolls on a mass scale and the golden turd won.
Exactly. Don’t feed the trolls
All the ignoring you or I did does nothing.
Why do you think the media will ignore Donald Trump in the next election? We all know what’s happened and where things will go for round 2. But if you stick your head in the sand and yell “don’t feed the trolls” whenever that orange buffoon is mouthing off, you’ll only cause them to grow in power.
Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t inspire civil rights by ignoring his opponent’s arguments. Ignoring others is probably the worst possible move you could do on a political level, because they’ll just catch the attention of the media and monopolize upon the attention.
That concept isn’t what got Trump elected.
Cambridge Analytica got him elected. The superior data they had got him elected. He went out and promised the rust belt, among others) exactly what they wanted, and they took a chance on him after decades of being lied to by the Democratic party. Then combine that with the blatant gerrymandering, and you have a win for the greedy morons.
While that was happening the Democratic party was on a fools errand to try and flip Texas blue.
Good theories. But it doesn’t match the present reality. Why is Donald Trump still the frontrunner today for the Republican Party?
Koch backs others. DeSantis has plenty of backers. Etc. etc. Its certainly not money or data anymore.
Donald Trump IS a troll. He’s a master troll. You can’t ignore him because he sucks in the world and with his discussion style convinces plenty of people to follow him. “Ignore the troll” is the stupidest piece of advice you can give for someone like Donald Trump. He doesn’t give a shit about you, his allies or anyone else. And people LIKE him because of that, because people like asshole leaders in practice.
Then combine that with the blatant gerrymandering
While the electoral college does give less populous states and outside influence, but you can’t gerrymander presidential elections without changing the borders of states.
There are probably ways to counter misinformation without giving the bad actors involved any additional platform.
They already have a platform. Its called Twitter.
They’ll have that platform whether or not you post a reply.
But posting a direct reply will give them additional attention, from your own followers and from algorithmic boosting.
If simply replying to bad actors with facts and demanding decency helped in any way, they wouldn’t have gotten as relevant as they are.
That’s all good theory or whatever, but you ain’t gonna stop Donald Trump (or DeSantis) from getting boosted to the top. Certainly not when Elon is in charge of Twitter.
Of course, because these already have a whole established follower base. But it can prevent upcoming reactionary outrage mongers from gaining momentum.
Keep in mind that I didn’t say to ignore them entirely, I said that replying directly is a bad approach. Because the people who already follow them likely won’t listen to reason, and it might only highlight it to potential targets to be radicalized. But bad rhetoric can be countered and refuted without direct attribution. You could instead reply to a screenshot with the handle cut out or just speak on the topic without bringing up who is stirring shit this time around.
Salon.com articles always sound like a 21 year old Redditor wrote them.
“The grifters that make up the troll-industrial complex are not okay.”
Who writes this lmao. Do they spin a wheel of buzzwords and just write a sentence with whatever comes up?
It made sense to me and I didn’t even look twice. Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Jordon Peterson, etc. = the grifters that she talks about in the article, and the “troll-industrial complex” are their paid followers or their suckered in fan boys. It’s been a thing since 2015 at least.
Yeah I mean if a 4 year old talks to me I can usually decipher what they are trying to say.
Amanda Marcotte is the author, a reasonably distinguished and well known figure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Marcotte
Guess she just knows her audience is buzzword-craving 21 year old Redditors then.
If you write for salon.com, you are not distinguished. It’s a basically a left wing tabloid and should not be misconstrued as a news website.
Could you elaborate exactly what you find problematic about that wording?`Those terms seems to be a pretty accurate description of the phenomenon.
It’s cringe and embarrassing to me. That’s all I’m saying.
I kind of like the “troll-industrial complex”, but agree on your over take on the writing. Gone are the days when writers could produce great alliterations like “nattering nabobs of negativity”.
The escalation may have nothing to do with the slow demise of Twitter. It may be the case that the liberals have gotten used to one level of trolling and ignore it. Trollers then have to become even more extreme to get their attention.
Twitter also recently started paying users who get more engagement like quote retweets, thus, people do would normally bash trolls via QRT are less likely to keep doing it
The escalation may have nothing to do with the slow demise of Twitter. It may be the case that the liberals have gotten used to one level of trolling and ignore it. Trollers then have to become even more extreme to get their attention.
