The second tweet is even worse. I can't believe a full grown adult, whoss got more money than 99% of the world thought a literal dick measuring contest was a good idea.
The second tweet is even worse. I can't believe a full grown adult, whoss got more money than 99% of the world thought a literal dick measuring contest was a good idea.
I listened to a podcast that talked about his childhood (well before he came out as.. quite this bad). Apparently he was horrifically bullied as a kid and very very lonely. I sympathise with that,...
I listened to a podcast that talked about his childhood (well before he came out as.. quite this bad). Apparently he was horrifically bullied as a kid and very very lonely.
I sympathise with that, but I have never seen a more clear cut case of 'you really should have gotten therapy for that to deal with it'. The man is a billionaire with 9 kids and three companies and he is still trying to prove he is better than his bullies.
I would take everything he says with a huge grain of salt. We have seen how they constantly lie about everything, e.g. to sell this image of a self-made billionaire, like “having crossed the ocean...
I would take everything he says with a huge grain of salt. We have seen how they constantly lie about everything, e.g. to sell this image of a self-made billionaire, like “having crossed the ocean with barely any money”, when in fact the connections alone he has due to an insanely powerful and wealthy family is enough to land you basically anywhere simply due to nepotism..
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it were just another “like me more” advert at this point.
Yeah, I think this is the correct instinct. One of the most famous examples of Musk being "bullied" was that he claimed "bullies" pushed him down a flight of stairs as a kid. His dad later...
Yeah, I think this is the correct instinct. One of the most famous examples of Musk being "bullied" was that he claimed "bullies" pushed him down a flight of stairs as a kid. His dad later revealed that it was one kid, and the kid pushed him down the stairs because Elon was making fun of his dad who committed suicide.
It's a podcast from Wondery called Imagine Life. It's an interesting angle, in that they tell a life story from one persons perspective, but don't reveal until the end who it is. They did one on...
It's a podcast from Wondery called Imagine Life.
It's an interesting angle, in that they tell a life story from one persons perspective, but don't reveal until the end who it is. They did one on Maya Angelou, one on Princess Diana, one on Mohammed Ali, one on Elton John etc. There is one episode telling the story from the eyes of Elon Musk. It's older, so it mostly ends with him setting up Space X and Tesla. Probably for the best, it makes him sound a lot nicer.
Elon's episode is called The Outsider, it's still available on my podcast app so hopefully you can find it!
Unfortunately you just don't hear about the happy billionaires quietly living their dreams. They're still out there, exploiting us and paying off politicians and everything but they rarely get...
Unfortunately you just don't hear about the happy billionaires quietly living their dreams. They're still out there, exploiting us and paying off politicians and everything but they rarely get scrutinized because they don't make headlines the way degenerates like Musk do.
Oh, I'm aware. I like to think that all of them are deeply unhappy because that much money and powers just eats at your soul, but they're probably still happier than the average American...
Oh, I'm aware. I like to think that all of them are deeply unhappy because that much money and powers just eats at your soul, but they're probably still happier than the average American struggling to pay their rent.
Probably the smartest move. You make that much money and you don't need to care about the public eye. Especially when hot sectors like tech are more than happy to take that attention for you
Probably the smartest move. You make that much money and you don't need to care about the public eye. Especially when hot sectors like tech are more than happy to take that attention for you
Call me old-fashioned, but I liked billionaires better when they weren’t trash talking. Or constantly blasting idiocy from megaphones that are impossible to avoid. Sure, I have more serious...
Call me old-fashioned, but I liked billionaires better when they weren’t trash talking. Or constantly blasting idiocy from megaphones that are impossible to avoid. Sure, I have more serious grievances with billionaires too, but at the moment I just want them to shut up.
Not a surprise at all. If I recall, Twitter previously blocked links to Mastodon as well. Just one more temper tantrum in the face of a threat to their business, I suppose. Though this threat...
Not a surprise at all. If I recall, Twitter previously blocked links to Mastodon as well. Just one more temper tantrum in the face of a threat to their business, I suppose. Though this threat actually seems real unlike whatever thread Mastodon may have posed some months ago.
I find Yaccarino's claims of booming traffic pretty funny though. It's certainly a strategy...
Traffic might be up in the short term because it started working again? If you're not logged in, you can at least read a tweet. Also, searching for posts by the people you follow started working...
Traffic might be up in the short term because it started working again?
If you're not logged in, you can at least read a tweet. Also, searching for posts by the people you follow started working again. (That is, the realtwitter.com redirect, which is what I use to get a chronological feed.)
Mastodon is more reliable than Twitter these days, but if people can at least use the website, that's something.
I'm pretty sure the primary reason Mastodon didn't eat Twitter's lunch was that Mastodon didn't want Twitter's lunch. The cultures are very, very different, in ways I'm not familiar enough with...
I'm pretty sure the primary reason Mastodon didn't eat Twitter's lunch was that Mastodon didn't want Twitter's lunch. The cultures are very, very different, in ways I'm not familiar enough with either to clearly elucidate, but which are IMO pretty obvious. (I tend to come around to this example as highly illustrative.)
Threads, on the other hand, exists for the sole purpose of eating Twitter's lunch, as soon as it became obvious that Twitter's lunch was emphatically up for grabs. And given that Twitter is currently run by virtually the personification of getting beat up for your lunch money, they're unsurprisingly experiencing a great deal of success in their venture.
I hate zuckerberg. I always have. But Zuck has a big advantage over Musk, he doesn't seem to care if you hate him (I mean people have been hating him for a long time, it's not like he has fostered...
I hate zuckerberg. I always have. But Zuck has a big advantage over Musk, he doesn't seem to care if you hate him (I mean people have been hating him for a long time, it's not like he has fostered a lovable image). Musk is a total narcissist and I think it eats up at him any insult/hate he hears. I don't think Musk can even help himself honestly. When things are going well he can make himself look great but soon as one slip up happens and people start criticizing him, he cannot help himself and digs himself further.
Sadly we have a large group of people in the US who if you tell them what they want to believe, will totally ignore or excuse what you do and Musk (and Trump) have found them once they pissed off the original group they were trying to fit in. So the group encourages their shittyness and they get shittier cause the group wants to hear shitty things. And some how their inability to contain themselves if everything isn't going well doesn't sink them cause this group will keep them afloat.
There's plenty of instances and frontends that don't. The culture is really the issue here. No one wants to join a social network where no matter where you land, you'll likely have issues...
There's plenty of instances and frontends that don't. The culture is really the issue here. No one wants to join a social network where no matter where you land, you'll likely have issues following some of your friends due to various instance blocks. That is unfortunately the situation with Mastodon. It's workable but a very high barrier of entry for most people.
Meta knows that mobile apps are far more addictive than websites. They want the ability to be accessible at all times and to gain access to phone data.
Meta knows that mobile apps are far more addictive than websites. They want the ability to be accessible at all times and to gain access to phone data.
Its development was also extremely rushed. As-is, it exists as a minimum viable product. I would expect we'll get a more feature-rich app and some kind of web interface in the future.
Its development was also extremely rushed. As-is, it exists as a minimum viable product. I would expect we'll get a more feature-rich app and some kind of web interface in the future.
The fediverse (Kbin, Lemmy and Mastodon users) are up-in-arms about Threads and have vowed to collectively defederate from Meta's offering if they ever decided to join ActivityPub, mainly out of a...
The fediverse (Kbin, Lemmy and Mastodon users) are up-in-arms about Threads and have vowed to collectively defederate from Meta's offering if they ever decided to join ActivityPub, mainly out of a fear that they'd do what Google did with XMPP and cannibalize an open standard.
Meanwhile my sole gripe with Threads is that there are no hashtags or trending topics to browse.
The thing is, XMPP isn't dead and one of the main reasons Google and Facebook cut support for it is because you can't really moderate spam on a platform that isn't yours. A lot of spammers were...
The thing is, XMPP isn't dead and one of the main reasons Google and Facebook cut support for it is because you can't really moderate spam on a platform that isn't yours. A lot of spammers were abusing it.
The fediverse is experiencing a similar problem right now. I can almost guarantee that a lot of the daily signups that have been breaking records have been from bots and spammers waiting for the opportunity to astroturf the shit out of Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon.
Spamming Fedi is relatively expensive, as you need to pay for a new domain name for each operation. Instances can (and often do) close their registrations when flooded with spam, and due to the...
Spamming Fedi is relatively expensive, as you need to pay for a new domain name for each operation. Instances can (and often do) close their registrations when flooded with spam, and due to the distributed nature of the platform this doesn't cause major issues.
Speaking of which I always thought XMPP would be insanely cool to build a federated social network on, so I was happy to discover movim.eu which works exactly like that and is surprisingly decent.
Speaking of which I always thought XMPP would be insanely cool to build a federated social network on, so I was happy to discover movim.eu which works exactly like that and is surprisingly decent.
I have just assumed (without any attempt to verify) that Facebook, Google, TikTok and others are blocking a variety of domains that might be competitive under various guises. So I guess the...
I have just assumed (without any attempt to verify) that Facebook, Google, TikTok and others are blocking a variety of domains that might be competitive under various guises.
So I guess the question is: is Twitter really unique in blocking direct links to competitors? I honestly don't know.
"Free speech absolutist" just means "I want to spout my xeno-/homo-/trans-phobic b/s unimpeded while blocking everyone who looks at me funny even once".
"Free speech absolutist" just means "I want to spout my xeno-/homo-/trans-phobic b/s unimpeded while blocking everyone who looks at me funny even once".
Because (edit: absolute/unrestrained) free speech is not something which is desirable – you have to draw the line somewhere (my belief is that for any reasonable individual there always exists...
Because (edit: absolute/unrestrained) free speech is not something which is desirable – you have to draw the line somewhere (my belief is that for any reasonable individual there always exists some content which is so obscene they would ban it).
It is unfortunate that absolute views on free speech give rise to the equally harmful view that free speech should be abandoned. Free speech is most certainly desirable in a democracy, as long as...
It is unfortunate that absolute views on free speech give rise to the equally harmful view that free speech should be abandoned.
Free speech is most certainly desirable in a democracy, as long as it is strictly understood as the right to be free from undue government persecution.
Freedom of speech is not supposed to protect people from consequence and opposition.
The right for private entities to determine what is acceptable on their platforms is actually protected as a form of free speech.
Oh I definitely agree that we should have free speech to a degree, but I do think there are classes of speech which should be prohibited (obscene content, defamatory stuff, threats/incitement...
Oh I definitely agree that we should have free speech to a degree, but I do think there are classes of speech which should be prohibited (obscene content, defamatory stuff, threats/incitement etc).
What I mean to say (which I should really have written in the previous comment) is that online communities need moderation, otherwise the tail of antisocial users will cause problems.
Maybe I’m not a reasonable individual, but I support the existence of things like Freenet which is explicitly designed to resist any form of censorship.
Maybe I’m not a reasonable individual, but I support the existence of things like Freenet which is explicitly designed to resist any form of censorship.
On the one hand I think that things like Freenode and also Tor are good, because they make it possible for journalists to expose abuses of power. On the hand, there is definitely a problem around...
On the one hand I think that things like Freenode and also Tor are good, because they make it possible for journalists to expose abuses of power. On the hand, there is definitely a problem around things like child pornography and other such content being distributed over such networks.
Of course, I don't think we should ban Tor or Freenode, not least because pedophiles aren't exactly going to continue with pedophilia but be sufficiently scared of a ban on encryption (as some governments seem to favour currently) because it's illegal.
I have honestly never used 4chan, but I was led to believe it's just a lawless zone of free speech where literally anything goes. What "rules and things" will get you banned from there? And how do...
I have honestly never used 4chan, but I was led to believe it's just a lawless zone of free speech where literally anything goes.
What "rules and things" will get you banned from there? And how do they even ban you considering it's all anon anyways?
Without accounts, 4chan goes by IP bans, and they don't allow pedophilia, loli, doxxing, generally anything illegal within the USA, and there's a number of board-specific rules that I believe are...
Without accounts, 4chan goes by IP bans, and they don't allow pedophilia, loli, doxxing, generally anything illegal within the USA, and there's a number of board-specific rules that I believe are mostly organizational.
There's rules, but depending on the moderator on the clock... it's more like guidelines, really. And there's The Infamous Board where it pretty much is a lawless wasteland. eh they're on the front...
I was led to believe it's just a lawless zone of free speech where literally anything goes.
There's rules, but depending on the moderator on the clock... it's more like guidelines, really. And there's The Infamous Board where it pretty much is a lawless wasteland.
What "rules and things" will get you banned from there? And how do they even ban you considering it's all anon anyways?
eh they're on the front page or whatever. And it's not that anonymous; they can ban via IP.
Musk gets flak here because he used his "free speech" nonsense as a justification for why he needed to buy Twitter in the first place. And as much as I hate to defend corporations, Twitter corp...
Musk gets flak here because he used his "free speech" nonsense as a justification for why he needed to buy Twitter in the first place. And as much as I hate to defend corporations, Twitter corp was doing a pretty good job of providing a stable social media platform.
Twitter hasn't really added any new features since Musk took over. Just Blue and a host of controversies. There hasn't been anything that's improved Twitter as a platform. Blue and the removal of...
Twitter hasn't really added any new features since Musk took over. Just Blue and a host of controversies. There hasn't been anything that's improved Twitter as a platform.
Blue and the removal of actual verification has led to a very noticeable and sharp decline in quality. The top replies to anything that manages to get any reach are dominated by far right, crypto, and tech bro takes that get elevated thanks to their blue checkmark. Crypto scams used to get buried under everything else, hidden away behind a "hey there's nothing but low quality garbage past this point" button. Now it's elevated straight to the top. And besides banning links to other platforms and the half-rolled-out subscription features, that's all the technical changes to Twitter we've seen.
So you're saying that Twitter are doing a good job of providing a stable social media platform right now? Whether or not 'community notes' are a good feature, I wouldn't call Twitter stable right...
So you're saying that Twitter are doing a good job of providing a stable social media platform right now?
Whether or not 'community notes' are a good feature, I wouldn't call Twitter stable right now. It used to be stable, now it's not stable.
You mean apart from some of their servers going down every so often? Well, recently they limited the tweets you can view without logging in, which broke a bunch of my bookmarks of tweet-chains....
You mean apart from some of their servers going down every so often? Well, recently they limited the tweets you can view without logging in, which broke a bunch of my bookmarks of tweet-chains.
Musk has even explicitly acknowledged their stability problems, but blamed it on Twitter's codebase claiming it's "like a rube goldberg machine". So there undeniably is a problem, and whether that problem will stick around depends on what the cause is and how much you trust Musk's technical expertise.
So, how trustworthy is Musk's technical expertise?
I seem to remember Musk making a claim about Twitter's software architecture and criticizing one of the twitter devs, and then when said dev replied with 1) a statement that Musk was wrong, and 2) instructions for how any Twitter user can personally verify whether Musk's description of Twitter's architecture was accurate (it verifiably wasn't), Musk responded by firing him.
In the more long-term, Musk seems to have fired large numbers of software devs and system maintainers, which you could claim is Musk just knowing a whole lot about what's "actually necessary", except that Musk wants to implement stack ranking based on lines of code written.
Measuring performance based on lines of code is utterly idiotic, and stack-ranking is utterly ruinous because it involves firing employees regardless of how productive the team is, while rewarding any individual for having unproductive co-workers (which can be most easily achieved by subtlely sabotaging coworkers on your team, or by deliberately hiring useless people as meatshields). Microsoft abandoned stack ranking in 2013 due to these exact reasons wrecking their company culture (cough), so Musk unironically supporting stack ranking shows he can't be trusted to manage competently.
Speaking of competent management, I have one bookmarked about the most empirically-verified source of dev productivity: getting a full night's sleep. Tweet chain here. So when Musk declares that he actively wants devs to work 80-hour work weeks, I again question his competence in managing software development.
So since Musk has decided that lots of Twitter's debts are optional and has stopped paying e.g. his office rent (while simultaneously decrying WFH), I can't just assume that Musk is some genius with a brilliant secret plan here - it's probably just what it looks like, which is Musk doing reckless things.
So in summary: even Musk agrees there are stability problems today, and he doesn't seem able to solve those problems in the future. He could right the ship, but stability is whether we can rely on him righting the ship.
I have seen more stability problems using Reddit than what you find on Twitter, comparing them does not justify how Musk manage the stability of Twitter but most of the time Twitter has been...
I have seen more stability problems using Reddit than what you find on Twitter, comparing them does not justify how Musk manage the stability of Twitter but most of the time Twitter has been working fine.
I really, really dislike Zuckerberg, but I won't deny that I do have schadenfreude observing Musk right now. Ideally I would prefer that mastodon would replace both.
I really, really dislike Zuckerberg, but I won't deny that I do have schadenfreude observing Musk right now.
Ideally I would prefer that mastodon would replace both.
Correct me if I'm wrong since I don't use threads or twitter, but Is it not threads.com? I tried threads.net and get a black screen so if threads.net isn't the website then of course it isn't...
Correct me if I'm wrong since I don't use threads or twitter, but Is it not threads.com?
I tried threads.net and get a black screen so if threads.net isn't the website then of course it isn't going to show up.
Edit: Ok after further checking I'm guessing it requires the app to view these sites? Either that or something on my side is preventing them from loading. So if twitter has some kind of broken link filter, it's possible these sites are just being flagged by crappy programming and need to exclude the domain.
EditEdit: Nvm, firefox's facebook containers was blocking it - thanks Nastharl for pointing that out. :)
Primary domain (threads.net) only has a qr code and a galaxy loading in the background, and individual posts do load when linked, and profiles were only brought online yesterday or the day before.
Primary domain (threads.net) only has a qr code and a galaxy loading in the background, and individual posts do load when linked, and profiles were only brought online yesterday or the day before.
That was it! After allowing it in Facebook containers it loaded the QR code and spinning galaxy picture (I did select all to see if there was anything hidden and you can see the square picture...
That was it! After allowing it in Facebook containers it loaded the QR code and spinning galaxy picture (I did select all to see if there was anything hidden and you can see the square picture spinning lol).
Welp, nothing wrong with the site so that soundly defeats my attempt to play devils advocate. :)
I'm pretty sure Musk bought Twitter intentionally to destroy it. Threads means it doesn't matter. Competition is always good for us. Without it they have very little incentive to do better.
I'm pretty sure Musk bought Twitter intentionally to destroy it. Threads means it doesn't matter.
Competition is always good for us. Without it they have very little incentive to do better.
To be fair, Elon started blocking links to competing platforms, like a 12 year old's cartoon fandom forum in 2009, shortly after he took over Twitter. So it's no big surprise, especially since he...
To be fair, Elon started blocking links to competing platforms, like a 12 year old's cartoon fandom forum in 2009, shortly after he took over Twitter. So it's no big surprise, especially since he recently, like a 12 year old, insulted Zuck and demanded a dick measurement contest. Just after he, like a 12 year old, announced that "cis" is now considered an insult on his website and excessive use will result in consequences. Just after he, like a 12 year old-
"elon musk is what happens when the ghost of a 14 year old who died in 2011 and the ghost of a 19th century oil baron try to possess the same body" - peanusts@twitter (2018)
I have to say that it’s very entertaining to observe these clowns hash it out on the internets like a bunch of 12 year olds. It also makes me realize how social networks have degraded really quickly.
I have to say that it’s very entertaining to observe these clowns hash it out on the internets like a bunch of 12 year olds. It also makes me realize how social networks have degraded really quickly.
Elon Musk actually tweeted ‘Zuck is a cuck’?
I don’t keep up with the antics, but that seems pretty cringe worthy, even for him.
The second tweet is even worse. I can't believe a full grown adult, whoss got more money than 99% of the world thought a literal dick measuring contest was a good idea.
If there's any consolation to the fact that people like Musk are billionaires is that they're clearly an unhappy class.
I listened to a podcast that talked about his childhood (well before he came out as.. quite this bad). Apparently he was horrifically bullied as a kid and very very lonely.
I sympathise with that, but I have never seen a more clear cut case of 'you really should have gotten therapy for that to deal with it'. The man is a billionaire with 9 kids and three companies and he is still trying to prove he is better than his bullies.
I would take everything he says with a huge grain of salt. We have seen how they constantly lie about everything, e.g. to sell this image of a self-made billionaire, like “having crossed the ocean with barely any money”, when in fact the connections alone he has due to an insanely powerful and wealthy family is enough to land you basically anywhere simply due to nepotism..
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it were just another “like me more” advert at this point.
Yeah, I think this is the correct instinct. One of the most famous examples of Musk being "bullied" was that he claimed "bullies" pushed him down a flight of stairs as a kid. His dad later revealed that it was one kid, and the kid pushed him down the stairs because Elon was making fun of his dad who committed suicide.
What was the podcast?
It's a podcast from Wondery called Imagine Life.
It's an interesting angle, in that they tell a life story from one persons perspective, but don't reveal until the end who it is. They did one on Maya Angelou, one on Princess Diana, one on Mohammed Ali, one on Elton John etc. There is one episode telling the story from the eyes of Elon Musk. It's older, so it mostly ends with him setting up Space X and Tesla. Probably for the best, it makes him sound a lot nicer.
Elon's episode is called The Outsider, it's still available on my podcast app so hopefully you can find it!
Unfortunately you just don't hear about the happy billionaires quietly living their dreams. They're still out there, exploiting us and paying off politicians and everything but they rarely get scrutinized because they don't make headlines the way degenerates like Musk do.
Oh, I'm aware. I like to think that all of them are deeply unhappy because that much money and powers just eats at your soul, but they're probably still happier than the average American struggling to pay their rent.
There was a study that actually came to the conclusion that wealth actually impacts your mental processes in a similar way to actual brain damage.
Probably the smartest move. You make that much money and you don't need to care about the public eye. Especially when hot sectors like tech are more than happy to take that attention for you
he had to buy a social media to keep feeding his addiction to the attention he never got as a kid.
This is trash talk. Not to be taken seriously, or even bothering to report anymore.
Call me old-fashioned, but I liked billionaires better when they weren’t trash talking. Or constantly blasting idiocy from megaphones that are impossible to avoid. Sure, I have more serious grievances with billionaires too, but at the moment I just want them to shut up.
They won't. We can't control what they do, only what we do. We can choose what we talk about on Tildes.
Well we did make a thread and are commenting. I guess we made our choice.
I liked billionaires better when they didn't exist.
Trash talk typically isn't a cry for help from my understanding of it.
It wasn't a cry for help when Trump did it either, or any other troll. They enjoy it and like the negative attention. It helps them.
Everyone is going to Threads because Elon is an absolute donkey. Elon wants to make a better product, but it ultimately does not matter.
Not a surprise at all. If I recall, Twitter previously blocked links to Mastodon as well. Just one more temper tantrum in the face of a threat to their business, I suppose. Though this threat actually seems real unlike whatever thread Mastodon may have posed some months ago.
I find Yaccarino's claims of booming traffic pretty funny though. It's certainly a strategy...
Traffic might be up in the short term because it started working again?
If you're not logged in, you can at least read a tweet. Also, searching for posts by the people you follow started working again. (That is, the realtwitter.com redirect, which is what I use to get a chronological feed.)
Mastodon is more reliable than Twitter these days, but if people can at least use the website, that's something.
IIRC they also didn't want people to mention the "M" word either. People just put their handle into their Twitter nick instead.
I'm pretty sure the primary reason Mastodon didn't eat Twitter's lunch was that Mastodon didn't want Twitter's lunch. The cultures are very, very different, in ways I'm not familiar enough with either to clearly elucidate, but which are IMO pretty obvious. (I tend to come around to this example as highly illustrative.)
Threads, on the other hand, exists for the sole purpose of eating Twitter's lunch, as soon as it became obvious that Twitter's lunch was emphatically up for grabs. And given that Twitter is currently run by virtually the personification of getting beat up for your lunch money, they're unsurprisingly experiencing a great deal of success in their venture.
"Mastodon for the things you like, Twitter for the things you hate". Obviously more subtle than that, but I think that summarizes well.
I hate zuckerberg. I always have. But Zuck has a big advantage over Musk, he doesn't seem to care if you hate him (I mean people have been hating him for a long time, it's not like he has fostered a lovable image). Musk is a total narcissist and I think it eats up at him any insult/hate he hears. I don't think Musk can even help himself honestly. When things are going well he can make himself look great but soon as one slip up happens and people start criticizing him, he cannot help himself and digs himself further.
Sadly we have a large group of people in the US who if you tell them what they want to believe, will totally ignore or excuse what you do and Musk (and Trump) have found them once they pissed off the original group they were trying to fit in. So the group encourages their shittyness and they get shittier cause the group wants to hear shitty things. And some how their inability to contain themselves if everything isn't going well doesn't sink them cause this group will keep them afloat.
Mastodon has some pretty severe performance and UX problems, that's the main reason IMO.
There's plenty of instances and frontends that don't. The culture is really the issue here. No one wants to join a social network where no matter where you land, you'll likely have issues following some of your friends due to various instance blocks. That is unfortunately the situation with Mastodon. It's workable but a very high barrier of entry for most people.
Do they plan to add a web interface to Threads? Before Musk took over I used the twitter web interface exclusively.
Meta knows that mobile apps are far more addictive than websites. They want the ability to be accessible at all times and to gain access to phone data.
Its development was also extremely rushed. As-is, it exists as a minimum viable product. I would expect we'll get a more feature-rich app and some kind of web interface in the future.
If they (Threads) holds to their commitment to Federate then their WebUI won't matter - we'll all get the content from our preferred Fed-instance.
The fediverse (Kbin, Lemmy and Mastodon users) are up-in-arms about Threads and have vowed to collectively defederate from Meta's offering if they ever decided to join ActivityPub, mainly out of a fear that they'd do what Google did with XMPP and cannibalize an open standard.
Meanwhile my sole gripe with Threads is that there are no hashtags or trending topics to browse.
What Facebook and Google did. There is a history for them as well.
The thing is, XMPP isn't dead and one of the main reasons Google and Facebook cut support for it is because you can't really moderate spam on a platform that isn't yours. A lot of spammers were abusing it.
The fediverse is experiencing a similar problem right now. I can almost guarantee that a lot of the daily signups that have been breaking records have been from bots and spammers waiting for the opportunity to astroturf the shit out of Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon.
Spamming Fedi is relatively expensive, as you need to pay for a new domain name for each operation. Instances can (and often do) close their registrations when flooded with spam, and due to the distributed nature of the platform this doesn't cause major issues.
Very different from a chat protocol like XMPP.
Speaking of which I always thought XMPP would be insanely cool to build a federated social network on, so I was happy to discover movim.eu which works exactly like that and is surprisingly decent.
It’ll probably come. I’m really hoping for a feed filter for people you follow (without that it’s almost unusable…)
I have just assumed (without any attempt to verify) that Facebook, Google, TikTok and others are blocking a variety of domains that might be competitive under various guises.
So I guess the question is: is Twitter really unique in blocking direct links to competitors? I honestly don't know.
Are any of its competitors owned by “free speech absolutists”?
"Free speech absolutist" just means "I want to spout my xeno-/homo-/trans-phobic b/s unimpeded while blocking everyone who looks at me funny even once".
i would think they would be. Stopping links from working will just make people think your app is the issue.
Not unique, even Tildes is not free speech site either.
The only platforms with free speech are ActivityPub and Nostr.
Because (edit: absolute/unrestrained) free speech is not something which is desirable – you have to draw the line somewhere (my belief is that for any reasonable individual there always exists some content which is so obscene they would ban it).
It is unfortunate that absolute views on free speech give rise to the equally harmful view that free speech should be abandoned.
Free speech is most certainly desirable in a democracy, as long as it is strictly understood as the right to be free from undue government persecution.
Freedom of speech is not supposed to protect people from consequence and opposition.
The right for private entities to determine what is acceptable on their platforms is actually protected as a form of free speech.
Oh I definitely agree that we should have free speech to a degree, but I do think there are classes of speech which should be prohibited (obscene content, defamatory stuff, threats/incitement etc).
What I mean to say (which I should really have written in the previous comment) is that online communities need moderation, otherwise the tail of antisocial users will cause problems.
Although I understand these are valid concerns, what makes you think obscenity should be prohibited?
Maybe I’m not a reasonable individual, but I support the existence of things like Freenet which is explicitly designed to resist any form of censorship.
On the one hand I think that things like Freenode and also Tor are good, because they make it possible for journalists to expose abuses of power. On the hand, there is definitely a problem around things like child pornography and other such content being distributed over such networks.
Of course, I don't think we should ban Tor or Freenode, not least because pedophiles aren't exactly going to continue with pedophilia but be sufficiently scared of a ban on encryption (as some governments seem to favour currently) because it's illegal.
I would argue 4chan has free speech lol
Even there, there's rules and things that will get you banned
I have honestly never used 4chan, but I was led to believe it's just a lawless zone of free speech where literally anything goes.
What "rules and things" will get you banned from there? And how do they even ban you considering it's all anon anyways?
Without accounts, 4chan goes by IP bans, and they don't allow pedophilia, loli, doxxing, generally anything illegal within the USA, and there's a number of board-specific rules that I believe are mostly organizational.
There's rules, but depending on the moderator on the clock... it's more like guidelines, really. And there's The Infamous Board where it pretty much is a lawless wasteland.
eh they're on the front page or whatever. And it's not that anonymous; they can ban via IP.
Musk gets flak here because he used his "free speech" nonsense as a justification for why he needed to buy Twitter in the first place. And as much as I hate to defend corporations, Twitter corp was doing a pretty good job of providing a stable social media platform.
I disagree, for instance community notes has been a good recent addition to Twitter.
Community notes came before Elon.
Good to know.
Twitter hasn't really added any new features since Musk took over. Just Blue and a host of controversies. There hasn't been anything that's improved Twitter as a platform.
Blue and the removal of actual verification has led to a very noticeable and sharp decline in quality. The top replies to anything that manages to get any reach are dominated by far right, crypto, and tech bro takes that get elevated thanks to their blue checkmark. Crypto scams used to get buried under everything else, hidden away behind a "hey there's nothing but low quality garbage past this point" button. Now it's elevated straight to the top. And besides banning links to other platforms and the half-rolled-out subscription features, that's all the technical changes to Twitter we've seen.
You disagree on what?
Twitter doing a pretty good job.
So you're saying that Twitter are doing a good job of providing a stable social media platform right now?
Whether or not 'community notes' are a good feature, I wouldn't call Twitter stable right now. It used to be stable, now it's not stable.
How come is not stable?
You mean apart from some of their servers going down every so often? Well, recently they limited the tweets you can view without logging in, which broke a bunch of my bookmarks of tweet-chains.
Musk has even explicitly acknowledged their stability problems, but blamed it on Twitter's codebase claiming it's "like a rube goldberg machine". So there undeniably is a problem, and whether that problem will stick around depends on what the cause is and how much you trust Musk's technical expertise.
So, how trustworthy is Musk's technical expertise?
I seem to remember Musk making a claim about Twitter's software architecture and criticizing one of the twitter devs, and then when said dev replied with 1) a statement that Musk was wrong, and 2) instructions for how any Twitter user can personally verify whether Musk's description of Twitter's architecture was accurate (it verifiably wasn't), Musk responded by firing him.
In the more long-term, Musk seems to have fired large numbers of software devs and system maintainers, which you could claim is Musk just knowing a whole lot about what's "actually necessary", except that Musk wants to implement stack ranking based on lines of code written.
Measuring performance based on lines of code is utterly idiotic, and stack-ranking is utterly ruinous because it involves firing employees regardless of how productive the team is, while rewarding any individual for having unproductive co-workers (which can be most easily achieved by subtlely sabotaging coworkers on your team, or by deliberately hiring useless people as meatshields). Microsoft abandoned stack ranking in 2013 due to these exact reasons wrecking their company culture (cough), so Musk unironically supporting stack ranking shows he can't be trusted to manage competently.
Speaking of competent management, I have one bookmarked about the most empirically-verified source of dev productivity: getting a full night's sleep. Tweet chain here. So when Musk declares that he actively wants devs to work 80-hour work weeks, I again question his competence in managing software development.
So since Musk has decided that lots of Twitter's debts are optional and has stopped paying e.g. his office rent (while simultaneously decrying WFH), I can't just assume that Musk is some genius with a brilliant secret plan here - it's probably just what it looks like, which is Musk doing reckless things.
So in summary: even Musk agrees there are stability problems today, and he doesn't seem able to solve those problems in the future. He could right the ship, but stability is whether we can rely on him righting the ship.
I have seen more stability problems using Reddit than what you find on Twitter, comparing them does not justify how Musk manage the stability of Twitter but most of the time Twitter has been working fine.
Not surprising given Mastodon. Still very petty, even if I personally have no interest in using Threads myself.
Surely this should count as an anticompetitive practice? They're literally censoring mention of their competitor.
This will either herald the death of social media or the "engoodening" of it. I'm for either side at this point.
I really, really dislike Zuckerberg, but I won't deny that I do have schadenfreude observing Musk right now.
Ideally I would prefer that mastodon would replace both.
Correct me if I'm wrong since I don't use threads or twitter, but Is it not threads.com?
I tried threads.net and get a black screen so if threads.net isn't the website then of course it isn't going to show up.
Edit: Ok after further checking I'm guessing it requires the app to view these sites? Either that or something on my side is preventing them from loading. So if twitter has some kind of broken link filter, it's possible these sites are just being flagged by crappy programming and need to exclude the domain.
EditEdit: Nvm, firefox's facebook containers was blocking it - thanks Nastharl for pointing that out. :)
Primary domain (threads.net) only has a qr code and a galaxy loading in the background, and individual posts do load when linked, and profiles were only brought online yesterday or the day before.
If you're using firefox, firefox blocks all the content until you tell it facebook containers are allowed access to threads.net.
really? i'm using nightly firefox and the site has always worked for me
Odd, that solution worked for me. I just have the regular firefox though.
Do you have the facebook containers addon and is it active?
That was it! After allowing it in Facebook containers it loaded the QR code and spinning galaxy picture (I did select all to see if there was anything hidden and you can see the square picture spinning lol).
Welp, nothing wrong with the site so that soundly defeats my attempt to play devils advocate. :)
I'm pretty sure Musk bought Twitter intentionally to destroy it. Threads means it doesn't matter.
Competition is always good for us. Without it they have very little incentive to do better.
To be fair, Elon started blocking links to competing platforms, like a 12 year old's cartoon fandom forum in 2009, shortly after he took over Twitter. So it's no big surprise, especially since he recently, like a 12 year old, insulted Zuck and demanded a dick measurement contest. Just after he, like a 12 year old, announced that "cis" is now considered an insult on his website and excessive use will result in consequences. Just after he, like a 12 year old-
I enjoy observing the big-tech social media slap fight.
"free speech" my ass.
I have to say that it’s very entertaining to observe these clowns hash it out on the internets like a bunch of 12 year olds. It also makes me realize how social networks have degraded really quickly.