I don't really like posting about what individuals are doing, and their drama, but this is both a short (and somewhat bizarre) read and seems like it is both somewhat newsworthy and going to...
I don't really like posting about what individuals are doing, and their drama, but this is both a short (and somewhat bizarre) read and seems like it is both somewhat newsworthy and going to precipitate more changes in the social media landscape.
Bizarre indeed. I wouldn't have found it interesting if it was obvious he was just being buddy-buddy with Elon, but clearly there's something different here. I'm sure he has an angle to make some...
Bizarre indeed. I wouldn't have found it interesting if it was obvious he was just being buddy-buddy with Elon, but clearly there's something different here. I'm sure he has an angle to make some money...
As a casual Bluesky user I don't think this impacts Bluesky negatively at all. He hasn't been involved with Bluesky since before it got any popularity. He was pushing Nostr around the time Bluesky...
As a casual Bluesky user I don't think this impacts Bluesky negatively at all. He hasn't been involved with Bluesky since before it got any popularity. He was pushing Nostr around the time Bluesky was getting popular iirc. I like his general argument that open protocols are important, though his spurning of Bluesky is disappointing and his defense of Elon and X is baffling. Does he think Elon is going to make X into an open protocol that's better than Bluesky? Is he just trying to get on the good side of a fellow rich person? Or does he think Elon has good politics and that's worth more for a social network than an open protocol? None of the possibilities are compelling.
I'm glad I just completely gave up on "micro-blogging" like a decade ago and then deleted my Twitter account after Elon Musk bought the site. I don't see much value in it anymore.
I'm glad I just completely gave up on "micro-blogging" like a decade ago and then deleted my Twitter account after Elon Musk bought the site. I don't see much value in it anymore.
Twitter and twitter-like platforms are still the best places to share breaking news or reach a large following of people. It's not something the average person should need, but there's plenty of...
Twitter and twitter-like platforms are still the best places to share breaking news or reach a large following of people. It's not something the average person should need, but there's plenty of value in it.
Is it though? Without an account you can still view singular tweets if you have a link, yes, but you cannot engage with anything else, not even replies. It actually somewhat blows my mind that it...
Is it though?
Without an account you can still view singular tweets if you have a link, yes, but you cannot engage with anything else, not even replies. It actually somewhat blows my mind that it still gets used as this kind of news aggregator and megaphone/soapbox for political figures. If you look at top social media usage, it's not even in the top 10, but at least the news I follow constantly has tweets embedded in their articles and it constantly gets mentioned that such and such name said thing and whatnot on X, which whomever responded to with whatever, also on X.
I really did think Musk was gonna drive it into the ground completely, and yet here we are. Genuinely blows my mind.. you would have thought Threads would take over, right? But maybe it's too big to fail?
To be fair, that ranking needs some nuance. It's a global ranking (so Chinese platforms dominate), and the platforms each have vastly different value propositions. Many journalists are, for worse...
To be fair, that ranking needs some nuance. It's a global ranking (so Chinese platforms dominate), and the platforms each have vastly different value propositions.
Many journalists are, for worse imo, addicted to Twitter's scroll. I don't think something like YouTube is a drop in replacement for Twitter.
Yep -- just like with the Reddit protests, there weren't really better, established places to go that an entire audience could just pick up and migrate to. Threads tried to capitalize on the...
Yep -- just like with the Reddit protests, there weren't really better, established places to go that an entire audience could just pick up and migrate to. Threads tried to capitalize on the Twitter upheavals, but as far as I can tell it was half-baked and not successful.
Being able to instantly publish pretty much anything to a global audience is very valuable yes. I think people take for granted the power that a platform like twitter has when dealing with...
Being able to instantly publish pretty much anything to a global audience is very valuable yes. I think people take for granted the power that a platform like twitter has when dealing with breaking news and pop culture. There really isn't another style of platform with the same reach or impact on the internet (yet).
I stopped using Twitter/X when they killed Tweetdeck and I am absolutely 100% less informed about current events in the world, in my interest circles, with my (online) friends. I miss it a lot.
I stopped using Twitter/X when they killed Tweetdeck and I am absolutely 100% less informed about current events in the world, in my interest circles, with my (online) friends. I miss it a lot.
Even if you were still on Twitter it wouldn’t be much better. The site is a cesspool of spammers and pornbots now. Everything has a bunch of outrage bait under it, above it, all around it. That...
Even if you were still on Twitter it wouldn’t be much better. The site is a cesspool of spammers and pornbots now. Everything has a bunch of outrage bait under it, above it, all around it.
That callout culture BS seems to have infiltrated parts of BlueSky as well, but since it doesn’t have the same kind of algorithm it doesn’t push itself on you. I only see it because I follow Jamelle Bouie and he’s often dunking on the various types of shitheads who follow him around.
Yeah, Twitter isn't news of substance. It's the most current events interpreted through the filter of rage baiting and outburst culture. It's hardly representative of a world that's slower and...
Yeah, Twitter isn't news of substance. It's the most current events interpreted through the filter of rage baiting and outburst culture. It's hardly representative of a world that's slower and more contextual.
Follow news that matches that description - Reuters, BBC, CBC/Globe and Mail/NYT etc
rss is arguably as good/better in the large majority of ways. Just not as good at letting people ramble in a comments section so you can get dumb takes to rave against.
rss is arguably as good/better in the large majority of ways.
Just not as good at letting people ramble in a comments section so you can get dumb takes to rave against.
Most people don't have the technical know-how or the personal will to utilize RSS feeds though, you have to remember the vast vast vast majority of people can barely use an Iphone app.
Most people don't have the technical know-how or the personal will to utilize RSS feeds though, you have to remember the vast vast vast majority of people can barely use an Iphone app.
Yes but most people don’t know how to do lots of things. Putting a skin over an rss feed and making it more user friendly really wouldn’t be that hard. The problem is a large driver of Twitter...
Yes but most people don’t know how to do lots of things.
Putting a skin over an rss feed and making it more user friendly really wouldn’t be that hard. The problem is a large driver of Twitter success is not staying up to date. It’s rambling with other people about stuff
A new FOSS rss reader app was released earlier this year by a dev popular on XDA. It uses basic design principles and is user friendly. It's still not my go to yet, but it has great potential with...
A new FOSS rss reader app was released earlier this year by a dev popular on XDA. It uses basic design principles and is user friendly. It's still not my go to yet, but it has great potential with its simplicity. Aggregator News
The Apple News app is basically an RSS reader. It’s pretty intuitive and if Apple would have just allowed it to arbitrarily pull in any formatted feed it would have been amazing.
The Apple News app is basically an RSS reader. It’s pretty intuitive and if Apple would have just allowed it to arbitrarily pull in any formatted feed it would have been amazing.
What I find frustrating about Feedly is not something that is specific to it. RSS these days only share the first few words of an article so I usually have to click to view the content on the...
What I find frustrating about Feedly is not something that is specific to it. RSS these days only share the first few words of an article so I usually have to click to view the content on the website. Only a few websites allow me to read the whole thing on Feedly.
Yeah the app is okay it’s the internet that’s bad. I wouldn’t even mind clicking through to a site if modern website design wasn’t a user-hostile mess even with adblockers on. If you don’t like...
Yeah the app is okay it’s the internet that’s bad. I wouldn’t even mind clicking through to a site if modern website design wasn’t a user-hostile mess even with adblockers on.
If you don’t like Feedly and are in the Apple ecosystem though @DefinitelyNotAFae I would recommend NetNewsWire.
That may be part of it, it may also be the mobile reader aspect as my Google Reader days were decidedly desktop, and I just don't spend as much time on a full screen outside of work (breaking my...
That may be part of it, it may also be the mobile reader aspect as my Google Reader days were decidedly desktop, and I just don't spend as much time on a full screen outside of work (breaking my laptop recently didn't help) so that might be part of it.
True, I'm thinking it may be the change in my use of the internet as much as the change in the internet. But i appreciate it, I've been eyeing a few of the RSS suggestions in posts here for summer...
True, I'm thinking it may be the change in my use of the internet as much as the change in the internet. But i appreciate it, I've been eyeing a few of the RSS suggestions in posts here for summer when I have a bit less work stress and more time to fix the laptop and play around
The internet most certainly changed in the sense that major websites and platforms no longer make their full articles available on the RSS reader. However, there is value in following a whole...
The internet most certainly changed in the sense that major websites and platforms no longer make their full articles available on the RSS reader. However, there is value in following a whole bunch of old-school blogs that make their entire text content available in the app. I don't really use RSS for news anymore, but rather for a curated list of interesting old-school blogs and websites.
Oh I agree, I really did love Google Reader, and I just can't tell if it's that I've mostly tried Feedly on mobile, if it's Feedly itself for some reason, if it's that many webcomics now don't...
Oh I agree, I really did love Google Reader, and I just can't tell if it's that I've mostly tried Feedly on mobile, if it's Feedly itself for some reason, if it's that many webcomics now don't even display great in the app on mobile when going to the full site, or if it's just that my personal usage has changed so much. I'm going to try a couple of the apps others have suggested too to see if it's something about Feedly in particular that I'm not vibing with or if it's more about my usage.
Too many things want to send me an email to the point that my email is useless even ignoring the advertising spam, so as I start fresh with a new email I'm trying to be thoughtful about reorganizing my digital life. And I want RSS feeds to work, somehow.
I get by pretty well with Apple News. If something truly important is breaking, it's at the top of my feed. My partner is subscribed to NYT breaking news alerts and will get an email if something...
I get by pretty well with Apple News. If something truly important is breaking, it's at the top of my feed. My partner is subscribed to NYT breaking news alerts and will get an email if something major is happening. I don't see how either of us would be any more informed by using Twitter. I tend to think Twitter users are just addicts at this point.
There very clearly is on the Explore page. There's even a setting under Privacy that's labeled "Feature profile and posts in discovery algorithms." What's ridiculous about Mastodon is that the...
There very clearly is on the Explore page. There's even a setting under Privacy that's labeled "Feature profile and posts in discovery algorithms."
What's ridiculous about Mastodon is that the only way to sign in is via email address, although it's impossible to see what email address you created an account with unless you message the instance admin. Why is everything done by username except sign-in???
That last part seems wrong (nowadays?) On my instance, which is running (afaik) plain Mastodon, I can clearly see (and modify) my associated e-mail in the "Account settings" section.
That last part seems wrong (nowadays?) On my instance, which is running (afaik) plain Mastodon, I can clearly see (and modify) my associated e-mail in the "Account settings" section.
The app doesn't have that and the problem is that I can't sign in to the web version without knowing the email address (and my saved credentials don't work, nor does the saved email address for...
The app doesn't have that and the problem is that I can't sign in to the web version without knowing the email address (and my saved credentials don't work, nor does the saved email address for the "forgot password" button.
Not like it matters because the extent of my activity is retweeting one time, but it's the principle that matters.
https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mike-solana I think this has come out recently. I managed to read it before I experienced a paywall but have to reference from memory now....
IIRC, he basically says Bluesky was meant to be a decentralized protocol that Twitter could use so that they could get out of the business of entertaining censorship requests. If they didn't own the data, they couldn't meaningfully honor such a request. But after Twitter was sold / went through an utter shit show, the person he got to found it worked increasingly independently, to the point of talking to VCs and (iirc) trying to secure funding.
They also rolled out recent changes that basically allowed for moderation, which was exactly what he didn't want. Although it's true that your data doesn't need to disappear, Dorsey is correct to point out that an app built on Bluesky's protocol will still be able to honor exactly the same requests that he was hoping Twitter would avoid. I have no clue how to really circumvent that, though, even with a blockchain. There's the frontend, the hosting, and the domain ownership that can always be theoretically used to penalize a website, right?
I think what this is missing is that BlueSky has no single moderation system. Users can subscribe to whichever one they want. I haven’t tried switching. It was only rolled out recently and it’s...
I think what this is missing is that BlueSky has no single moderation system. Users can subscribe to whichever one they want.
I haven’t tried switching. It was only rolled out recently and it’s too soon to say how it will work in practice. Maybe users will mostly stick with the default, so BlueSky’s default moderation ends up with a lot of power in practice?
But it’s like the right to fork in open source projects. The option is there.
It seems awfully soon to give up on BlueSky, given that basic features are still being added (they just added direct messages), and it’s not large enough to see how well it will handle problems that only happen at scale.
Bluesky was always a joke to begin with! As far I remember, he only started it to sort of divert or manage the accusations coming across his way that he made it too easy for Elon to acquire Twitter.
Bluesky was always a joke to begin with! As far I remember, he only started it to sort of divert or manage the accusations coming across his way that he made it too easy for Elon to acquire Twitter.
For a joke, it's a pretty comfortable place so far. I have no expectations of it staying that way for more than a few years, sure, but that's how enshittification works. Right now, it's leagues...
For a joke, it's a pretty comfortable place so far.
I have no expectations of it staying that way for more than a few years, sure, but that's how enshittification works. Right now, it's leagues better than Twitter.
That doesn't quite follow unless he can see the future - the idea for Bluesky was first talked about in 2019 and the company was founded in 2021. The whole debacle with Musk buying Twitter was in...
That doesn't quite follow unless he can see the future - the idea for Bluesky was first talked about in 2019 and the company was founded in 2021. The whole debacle with Musk buying Twitter was in 2022. No doubt though that the trajectory Bluesky took to where it's at was influenced by Musk's handling of Twitter though.
His story now (idk what it was before) was that he didn't like doing censorship and felt a decentralized protocol was the only way to get Twitter's hands clean. Basically "How could I ban <random...
His story now (idk what it was before) was that he didn't like doing censorship and felt a decentralized protocol was the only way to get Twitter's hands clean. Basically "How could I ban <random user>, I don't control the protocol?"
Bluesky is also more than the actual app (the actual app bores me). The underlying protocol has a lot of thought put into it. His criticisms on their protocol were kind of correct though.
I don't really like posting about what individuals are doing, and their drama, but this is both a short (and somewhat bizarre) read and seems like it is both somewhat newsworthy and going to precipitate more changes in the social media landscape.
Bizarre indeed. I wouldn't have found it interesting if it was obvious he was just being buddy-buddy with Elon, but clearly there's something different here. I'm sure he has an angle to make some money...
As a casual Bluesky user I don't think this impacts Bluesky negatively at all. He hasn't been involved with Bluesky since before it got any popularity. He was pushing Nostr around the time Bluesky was getting popular iirc. I like his general argument that open protocols are important, though his spurning of Bluesky is disappointing and his defense of Elon and X is baffling. Does he think Elon is going to make X into an open protocol that's better than Bluesky? Is he just trying to get on the good side of a fellow rich person? Or does he think Elon has good politics and that's worth more for a social network than an open protocol? None of the possibilities are compelling.
Ding ding ding
I'm glad I just completely gave up on "micro-blogging" like a decade ago and then deleted my Twitter account after Elon Musk bought the site. I don't see much value in it anymore.
Twitter and twitter-like platforms are still the best places to share breaking news or reach a large following of people. It's not something the average person should need, but there's plenty of value in it.
Is it though?
Without an account you can still view singular tweets if you have a link, yes, but you cannot engage with anything else, not even replies. It actually somewhat blows my mind that it still gets used as this kind of news aggregator and megaphone/soapbox for political figures. If you look at top social media usage, it's not even in the top 10, but at least the news I follow constantly has tweets embedded in their articles and it constantly gets mentioned that such and such name said thing and whatnot on X, which whomever responded to with whatever, also on X.
I really did think Musk was gonna drive it into the ground completely, and yet here we are. Genuinely blows my mind.. you would have thought Threads would take over, right? But maybe it's too big to fail?
To be fair, that ranking needs some nuance. It's a global ranking (so Chinese platforms dominate), and the platforms each have vastly different value propositions.
Many journalists are, for worse imo, addicted to Twitter's scroll. I don't think something like YouTube is a drop in replacement for Twitter.
I think people consistently underestimate the power of being an entrenched player who is too big to fail.
Yep -- just like with the Reddit protests, there weren't really better, established places to go that an entire audience could just pick up and migrate to. Threads tried to capitalize on the Twitter upheavals, but as far as I can tell it was half-baked and not successful.
Being able to instantly publish pretty much anything to a global audience is very valuable yes. I think people take for granted the power that a platform like twitter has when dealing with breaking news and pop culture. There really isn't another style of platform with the same reach or impact on the internet (yet).
Twitter is cemented in history due to its outsized role in the Arab Spring, among other events.
I stopped using Twitter/X when they killed Tweetdeck and I am absolutely 100% less informed about current events in the world, in my interest circles, with my (online) friends. I miss it a lot.
Even if you were still on Twitter it wouldn’t be much better. The site is a cesspool of spammers and pornbots now. Everything has a bunch of outrage bait under it, above it, all around it.
That callout culture BS seems to have infiltrated parts of BlueSky as well, but since it doesn’t have the same kind of algorithm it doesn’t push itself on you. I only see it because I follow Jamelle Bouie and he’s often dunking on the various types of shitheads who follow him around.
Switch to Mastodon. Subscribe to NPR's feed. Don't go back to FormerlyTwitter/DumpsterFire.
Yeah, Twitter isn't news of substance. It's the most current events interpreted through the filter of rage baiting and outburst culture. It's hardly representative of a world that's slower and more contextual.
Follow news that matches that description - Reuters, BBC, CBC/Globe and Mail/NYT etc
This one that seems to have not posted since 2020? (Surely not)
https://mstdn.social/@NPR
No, this: https://press.coop/@NPR
If you need an alternative, Squawker is a pretty decent reader for Twitter and are not turned off by principle.
https://github.com/j-fbriere/squawker
While I don't deny the value these platforms have to many, in my personal life the value of breaking news is usually quite low.
rss is arguably as good/better in the large majority of ways.
Just not as good at letting people ramble in a comments section so you can get dumb takes to rave against.
Most people don't have the technical know-how or the personal will to utilize RSS feeds though, you have to remember the vast vast vast majority of people can barely use an Iphone app.
Yes but most people don’t know how to do lots of things.
Putting a skin over an rss feed and making it more user friendly really wouldn’t be that hard. The problem is a large driver of Twitter success is not staying up to date. It’s rambling with other people about stuff
A new FOSS rss reader app was released earlier this year by a dev popular on XDA. It uses basic design principles and is user friendly. It's still not my go to yet, but it has great potential with its simplicity. Aggregator News
The Apple News app is basically an RSS reader. It’s pretty intuitive and if Apple would have just allowed it to arbitrarily pull in any formatted feed it would have been amazing.
Yes, but then they can't make money off selling you a subscription to an RSS feed.
They could though! They own the pipe they could put a whole authentication system on top of it to enable feeds to charge subscriptions for access.
I use Feedly. It requires no technical knowledge. You don't even need to know what RSS is.
I find Feedly so frustrating and I can't explain why.
What I find frustrating about Feedly is not something that is specific to it. RSS these days only share the first few words of an article so I usually have to click to view the content on the website. Only a few websites allow me to read the whole thing on Feedly.
The app is fine in my view.
Yeah the app is okay it’s the internet that’s bad. I wouldn’t even mind clicking through to a site if modern website design wasn’t a user-hostile mess even with adblockers on.
If you don’t like Feedly and are in the Apple ecosystem though @DefinitelyNotAFae I would recommend NetNewsWire.
I'm on Android and not in Apple at all. I don't mind clicking through so much, though I do think that's part of it.
That may be part of it, it may also be the mobile reader aspect as my Google Reader days were decidedly desktop, and I just don't spend as much time on a full screen outside of work (breaking my laptop recently didn't help) so that might be part of it.
I see. In any case, Feedly is available for mobile and desktop
True, I'm thinking it may be the change in my use of the internet as much as the change in the internet. But i appreciate it, I've been eyeing a few of the RSS suggestions in posts here for summer when I have a bit less work stress and more time to fix the laptop and play around
The internet most certainly changed in the sense that major websites and platforms no longer make their full articles available on the RSS reader. However, there is value in following a whole bunch of old-school blogs that make their entire text content available in the app. I don't really use RSS for news anymore, but rather for a curated list of interesting old-school blogs and websites.
Oh I agree, I really did love Google Reader, and I just can't tell if it's that I've mostly tried Feedly on mobile, if it's Feedly itself for some reason, if it's that many webcomics now don't even display great in the app on mobile when going to the full site, or if it's just that my personal usage has changed so much. I'm going to try a couple of the apps others have suggested too to see if it's something about Feedly in particular that I'm not vibing with or if it's more about my usage.
Too many things want to send me an email to the point that my email is useless even ignoring the advertising spam, so as I start fresh with a new email I'm trying to be thoughtful about reorganizing my digital life. And I want RSS feeds to work, somehow.
I get by pretty well with Apple News. If something truly important is breaking, it's at the top of my feed. My partner is subscribed to NYT breaking news alerts and will get an email if something major is happening. I don't see how either of us would be any more informed by using Twitter. I tend to think Twitter users are just addicts at this point.
Mastodon is a decent platform, but you need to go out and find people to follow yourself. There is no algorithm suggesting anyone to you.
There very clearly is on the Explore page. There's even a setting under Privacy that's labeled "Feature profile and posts in discovery algorithms."
What's ridiculous about Mastodon is that the only way to sign in is via email address, although it's impossible to see what email address you created an account with unless you message the instance admin. Why is everything done by username except sign-in???
That last part seems wrong (nowadays?) On my instance, which is running (afaik) plain Mastodon, I can clearly see (and modify) my associated e-mail in the "Account settings" section.
The app doesn't have that and the problem is that I can't sign in to the web version without knowing the email address (and my saved credentials don't work, nor does the saved email address for the "forgot password" button.
Not like it matters because the extent of my activity is retweeting one time, but it's the principle that matters.
https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mike-solana I think this has come out recently. I managed to read it before I experienced a paywall but have to reference from memory now.
IIRC, he basically says Bluesky was meant to be a decentralized protocol that Twitter could use so that they could get out of the business of entertaining censorship requests. If they didn't own the data, they couldn't meaningfully honor such a request. But after Twitter was sold / went through an utter shit show, the person he got to found it worked increasingly independently, to the point of talking to VCs and (iirc) trying to secure funding.
They also rolled out recent changes that basically allowed for moderation, which was exactly what he didn't want. Although it's true that your data doesn't need to disappear, Dorsey is correct to point out that an app built on Bluesky's protocol will still be able to honor exactly the same requests that he was hoping Twitter would avoid. I have no clue how to really circumvent that, though, even with a blockchain. There's the frontend, the hosting, and the domain ownership that can always be theoretically used to penalize a website, right?
I think what this is missing is that BlueSky has no single moderation system. Users can subscribe to whichever one they want.
I haven’t tried switching. It was only rolled out recently and it’s too soon to say how it will work in practice. Maybe users will mostly stick with the default, so BlueSky’s default moderation ends up with a lot of power in practice?
But it’s like the right to fork in open source projects. The option is there.
It seems awfully soon to give up on BlueSky, given that basic features are still being added (they just added direct messages), and it’s not large enough to see how well it will handle problems that only happen at scale.
Bluesky was always a joke to begin with! As far I remember, he only started it to sort of divert or manage the accusations coming across his way that he made it too easy for Elon to acquire Twitter.
For a joke, it's a pretty comfortable place so far.
I have no expectations of it staying that way for more than a few years, sure, but that's how enshittification works. Right now, it's leagues better than Twitter.
That doesn't quite follow unless he can see the future - the idea for Bluesky was first talked about in 2019 and the company was founded in 2021. The whole debacle with Musk buying Twitter was in 2022. No doubt though that the trajectory Bluesky took to where it's at was influenced by Musk's handling of Twitter though.
His story now (idk what it was before) was that he didn't like doing censorship and felt a decentralized protocol was the only way to get Twitter's hands clean. Basically "How could I ban <random user>, I don't control the protocol?"
This article came out pretty recently I think (somehow managed to read it free then got paywalled, even after using a private tab).
https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mike-solana
Bluesky is also more than the actual app (the actual app bores me). The underlying protocol has a lot of thought put into it. His criticisms on their protocol were kind of correct though.
Somebody pissed him off or Elon offered him some cash.