I've always used Twitter in read-only mode; but shortly before the Muskover, Twitter, probably in a desperate attempt to increase the number of its active users, became quite hostile to non-logged-in readers like me; and this has only become worse since Musk. A pity.
Nitter helps; a bit. In fact, Nitter is like an ideal Twitter; without all the javascript bloat; but because of that, it does not support Twitter's rich media such as spaces; and it also sometimes cannot connect to the api. And it isn't clear how long its api key will last.
The fact so many government organizations use Twitter as a primary means of communication on alerts/events is frustrating to no end in the post Musk days.
Sometimes I think about evangelizing the Fedi to local government officials since I am sure a lot of them are disgusted with Musk. (I live in one of the most liberal counties)
If it is for official communications (weather alerts, subway running late) there is not much of a problem. I mean, “free speech” doesn’t include publishing a bogus weather report on weather.gov. People can go post fake weather reports at treehouse.social or some other mastodon server.
Blocking might be a problem to second order. Say there is some climate denier who is just always saying that reports of 115F at the airport in Phoenix are false. Can the weather service block that person, even if means they can’t get weather alerts anymore?
It only make sense that large enough entities run their own instance, they don't even have to self host it.
I always found it strange that no serious professional would use an @gmail.com email but somehow publishing behind twitter.com was normal. At least now there is a viable alternative...
Mostly other things competing for attention, not being all that personally excited about receiving messages from almost anybody, and not having a clear proposal. (Do I try to get them to run their own server, do I tell them to use somebody else’s, etc.)
Nitter does not use the official API, so there is no API key to expire.
The "sometimes cannot connect to the API", is because the APIs they use (which IIRC are the APIs the official twitter website uses), changes from time to time and is not a stable API and probably because Twitter wants to make it harder to "abuse" the API like nitter does.
ive noticed that too, personally not wanting to log into twitter to boost their stats, ill use nitter if i really really really want to read a persons post
It sucks that these platforms have made creating a single tool or site for interacting with each other increasingly impossible.
I miss quite a few things about the Old Internet, and one of them is how easy Pidgin, Trillian, and the like made talking to people on Facebook Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ, or whatever. I think I even used a social media aggregator at one point so I could stay current on Facebook and Twitter at the same time.
I don't think that's possible anymore. Talking to people cross-platform is definitely not possible without something like Beeper (which is buggy, but not because of Beeper)
Daily user of Beeper -- iMessage, Signal, Whatsapp, Matrix, Slack, and Facebook Messenger. The last thing I'd consider "buggy" was not being able to create text groups, but that was solved within the last few months, and itself was just a missing feature. It's incredibly stable, in fact I've disabled the built in iMessage app on my iPhone and Mac for the last year with not one issue. Would highly recommend!
I had Beeper. It was a cool concept but also underscored my issue with today's chat platforms.
For WhatsApp, Beeper needs to have an active session token on their servers that you approve via QR code. This is needed because WhatsApp doesn't have a public API and the only way they can grab messages is by scraping web.whatsapp.com.
It's very similar to the approach that Spark (iOS Mail App) takes for connecting to Gmail (they hold refresh tokens server side). Will someone from Spark or Beeper read your messages on the sly? Probably not.
But if their servers get compromised, someone else might, and that's a problem!
In the Old Days, everything was username/password Basic Auth, and all of the chat platforms exposed some kind of an API. No need for an intermediate server to hold tokens on your behalf.
> It sucks that these platforms have made creating a single tool or site for interacting with each other increasingly impossible
Is it really impossible or just very difficult? To me it seems like it's the latter since alternative frontends as in libredirect [0] exist for many sites. You can't rely on APIs and would need to build custom browser simulation for each site. That's certainly difficult, but doesn't seem impossible?
I don't see how these sites could ever make automation completely impossible without locking out humans as well.
Well, technically speaking it's impossible for them to "find you" as there is no way to distinguish between a sophisticated enough bot and a human user.
It's not impossible but writing the Puppeteer or Selenium incantations needed to scrape these sites (whose elements change fairly regularly) is a lot more work than "implement this API and get tokens via OAuth standard grant flow"
And that's before you get to the Cloudflare final boss
Sure, ultimately it’s just one computer interacting with another one, exchanging messages over the network, so anything is possible. But is anyone willing to do it; is it worth the effort?
Google Reader with sharing content to a "feed" and having friends comment on it was peak social media for me. I'd argue that today's social media is no different from mobile games. Designed to extract as much time, money, and knowledge about you as possible.
Yeup. I wish we all went back to blogs and posting stuff to our own sites. There was a barrier to entry for doing this, naturally, but it kept the riff-raff off. There was also a few years of early Twitter days before the general public came on, and it was pretty amazing and useful
I'd rather just have a feed-reader that I manage, and manually subscribe to people's content. Something like how Spokeo or FriendFeed back in the day.... FriendFeed was also awesome. I wish we'd go back to those days.
Sounds like it. But I personally don't even bother with the feed thing anymore, and I definitely don't use an aggregator or Twitter or any of that. I go to a couple information sources that I expect the good stuff to bubble up to, and spend my 10 or 15 minutes/day with that content.
It doesn't feel like there's critical mass keeping rss feeds up to date. And I had a pretty extensive Feely configured for awhile after the google blog reader went away, too.
But as he himself admits, he doesn't comment on anyone's posts. Social media posting for him just seems to be manually cross posting links to his blog.
Google Reader + Google Talk (the chat app) were incredible. I had an ancient Blackberry Bold 9000 with 128MB RAM on which Gtalk absolutely flew. It's shocking how laggy modern chat apps are by comparison.
It was also incredible how standards-compliant they were. Google Reader was feeding on RSS data, and Google Talk was a XMPP/Jabber client that respected federation and all that. Google was even pivotal for the development of Jingle, XMPP's VoIP extension. Peak Web 2.0.
Back when the Internet was for internetworking sites together, not just a dumb pipe to connect you to walled gardens protected by impressive moats & highest of walls.
Not sure what the author's intention is but I reckon that he will never give up his Twitter account with 350.000+ followers regardless of who owns Twitter. Having this many followers is a vehicle for exercising power and generating money.
He makes it pretty clear that he doesn't rely on Twitter for that sort of thing, and given who he is and how well known his books are, I can't see this being an issue for him.
Used to be the case... not now taking a closer look at one’s followers list shows that a large chunk had ghosted the place or haven’t posted in months.
> not now taking a closer look at one’s followers list shows that a large chunk had ghosted the place or haven’t posted in months.
That's pretty much the norm on twitter, idk about other social networks. On some social networks (including twitter) it's quite normal to just lurk and not contribute anything.
Well, it has finally been admitted that 1 year later after the layoffs that forecasts of the complete collapse of Twitter/X were somewhat delusional and remains stickier than thought. Unsurprisingly.
Twitter/X should have been shut down 6 months ago maximum according to such prophecies like this one [0] by many HNers here. For example, even with predictions of Threads to 'to hollow out twitter in extremely rapid fashion' [1] giving them just months after launch. Not even that happened, let alone the other dramatic changes to the platform.
We have given the doom-mongers plenty of time for Twitter/X to shut down or completely collapse and go permanently offline but all we got was the alternatives like T2 shutting down [2] due to Threads crushing and killing off the rest of the smaller competitors (Spill, Post.news, Substack Notes, etc) and some Mastodon instances shutting down to recentralize to Mastodon.social, the most centralized and one of the only viable instances that has enough funding to be sustainable.
We are slowly realizing that the completed takeover that happened 1 year ago, lots of emotions and hysteria took over by a small minority begging for the collapse that never happened.
To me, Twitter/X is still running purely because Musk and the banks he used to finance the purchase REALLY don't want to admit to a failure. Musk is very high-profile, with many government contracts, Neuralink coming in hot, and Tesla under a lot of fire over the Cybertruck. He really doesn't need the bad press right now that he pissed away $44bn. Reporting a valuation of $19bn even now is him slowly ripping off the bandaid to prevent too many eyes focusing on his other projects.
- US web traffic down 19%
- Ad portal traffic down 16%
- Mobile traffic on iOS/Android down 17.8%
- Granted, all social traffic was down around 3-4% globally, but we can see the anomaly that is Twitter's traffic.
To me, it's all rubbernecking at a car burning on the side of the road. We'd rather see it burn down while we're there, rather than watch it on the news.
The simple fact is that Elon's a smart and ballsy businessman, and most of us aren't.
People will shout "agile" from the rooftops, but when it comes to actual change, people are (as they've always been) uncomfortable with it.
In the case of running a business it comes down to Profit = Revenue - Expenses. The purchase of Twitter brought in and will continue to bring in change that aligns with this formula.
People can be upset that a bunch of people got fired, or that new changes have happened, but as they say, it's not personal, it's just business.
Musk isn't god; not everything works out nor is it wise to defer to someone in that way.
> In the case of running a business it comes down to Profit = Revenue - Expenses. The purchase of Twitter brought in and will continue to bring in change that aligns with this formula.
Do you think Musk bought Twitter in order to make money? By that standard, it's been a horrible failure. The prediction that it will change is groundless speculation.
The forecasts were overblown and X/Twitter is definitely stickier than people thought, but pointing at cherry-picked hyperboles to state that the criticisms were just emotions and hysteria is just ridiculous. Twitter did quite indeed suffer a lot from the Musk takeover, just by looking at ad figures, engagement, and the actual content on the site.
Anecdote: I used to be a daily twitter user, and I barely use it now because you can pay to traffic terrible content (not ads)
You're right, it's been a roaring success, with massively tanking revenue, more fraud/spam, brand destruction, and declining user base! You really showed 'em.
> avoid any feed that involves the platform trying to figure out what I might like. Instead I pick selected feeds to follow and organize them into a handful of lists to read according to my current context.
This is such a great litmus test for responsible internet use. Who picks the content? Is it you? Is it curated by one individual? Is it determined by a voting system? Is it determined by an engagement algorithm? Is it determined by a content corporation?
Realistically, the healthiest way to consume content would probably be to feed it to yourself. And the unhealthiest diet would involve being fed by engagement algorithms.
I might start thinking about more things this way.
Yes, but unfortunately, the past 10 years the alternative became way worse. Propaganda, rage baits, AI generated content, pointless click baits, ads. There is no value anymore on the general internet.
If you want value, if you want it to worth your time, you need that bubble. 90s and early 2000s ideals are dead.
"Social media" as a concept is pretty much dead. Nobody is posting life updates on Facebook. People still post, but it's mostly memes and mini-blog-posts ("how about them Eagles?"). Instagram likewise is 50% memes and reposts.
The internet today is like one big web forum, we all use our real names, but nobody knows us.
Telegram has by far the best UX for me out of these "social media", largely because it is not based on an ad-driven algorithmic feed.
I wish X had a proper UI like Telegram. The "Following" feed is pathetic. The problem is, of course, that I would spend 90% less time on X if there was such a feature. Really drives home that You Are The Product.
Telegram is one of the best software out there. Not just the ux but also the speed and the technical brilliance is superior to anything from Google Twitter Facebook etc.
Serious question: how do you do discovery of good channels? Downloaded TG over a year ago because I read that a lot of interesting on the ground Ukraine reporting was happening there.
But after I downloaded, I quickly realized the discovery experience was non existent. I was googling for good TG channels, which is crazy in my opinion!
Some of the channels I follow are moderately active and they do lots of re-posting, which links to the related channel. It's not the best discovery feature, but it does work for me.
I got HN and Slashdot feeds on there it's so nice. There's even a golang bot you can run that you give an RSS feed so you can read the headlines in telegram.
The problem is in my country if you go for a gun licence the cops give you the side eye if you're on telegram. It may affect your ability to get (re)licenced.
It seems like fan out social media will just be in a cycle of consolidation and then a shock event eventually breaks it up a bit. Given that Twitter/X seems to have survived this shock, most likely to me in 5 years or so the next reconsolidation will be people migrating back there to access the network in the usual kinds of feedback loop. There was a window where this wasn’t assured (bluesky had a pretty clear opportunity to disrupt here imo) but that phase seems over and the next cycle seems pretty locked in.
side note but Fowler's organization runs an employee Mastodon instance. This is the "correct" model that should have been applied to social networking from the beginning (interoperability, not silos)
Mastodon can't scale and centralizes too much power into the largest home nodes, Bluesky is a much better, more 'correct' approach as you put it.
But ultimately it doesn't matter, I don't think your first point is correct - the window of opportunity for this cycle is behind us for a decentralization of social media imo. The network effects of X are too strong, eventually people will come back.
You're viewing the Mastodon vs. Bluesky problem from very different temporal points of observation, so your conclusions are not really meaningful. Mastodon is installed on hundreds of servers, how many instances of Bluesky are there? Until it's adopted more widely it can't be "more correct".
Orkut didn't really die a natural death, though. It was cannibalized to juice Google+, which subsequently collapsed.
"X" is definitely running right into a similar problem that Google+ faced: a good name can't save you but an awful name can sink you. I've never heard even the most ardent Musk fans defending the name change. It's ridiculous.
Google+ had a lot of active users, which is especially observable if you join the right communities. The demise of Google+ marked the loss of those communities, which I still sorely miss to this day.
Those communities, plus stable infrastructure, great integration with photos, publicly viewable profiles without requiring sign-in, transparent moderation that I never knew I missed until I joined Diaspora, and no ads. It was a real shame.
I think the amount of money that was bankrolled into Twitter is sustaining the impression of survival.
For me the most useful part of Twitter was real time news trends. I don't even open that tab anymore.
Next most useful thing was the network of scientists from my field. It is also non existent now. I saved a lot of tweets about new papers over the years. When I went back to read them during literature review for my dissertation, I found most of them gone and accounts deleted.
What has increased drastically is verified accounts spewing either sensationalism without any care for engagement, or outright misinformation, sometimes taken down hilariously by community notes.
Right so what I'm suggesting is the current situation is not a stable state. If I'm right, what you should expect is that those people will, slowly, return to posting their content on X. If I'm wrong, you should expect more and more people migrating off of X and less and less active users on there. The reason I think I am right is because the size and connectivity of the X social graph.
You're living in a fantasy bubble if you think anything in this comment is insightful or representative of the current state of Twitter.
The only thing that was in doubt during the various recent Twitter changes was how rapidly it would decline - people have underestimated network inertia, which is why Mastodon and now Bsky have failed to capture sufficient impressions to convince everyone they're the "next Twitter". Which ultimately brings people back to Twitter - noone is going to Twitter because Mastodon/Bsky don't work, they're coming back because with each migration they overestimate the finality & are disappointed.
Ultimately though, slow as Twitter's decline is, it is continuing to decline steadily & will inevitably cross the critical threshold where one can consider it first irrelevant (Facebook's currenly approaching this state, a process which has been slow), then eventually "defunct".
TL;DR: declines always take longer than everyone predicts, but ultimately still happen. Comebacks generally speaking don't.
"Comeback" vs "decline" is just a rhetorical frame. Ultimately what I see is that Twitter has a unsurpassed level of social graph in terms of metcalfe connectivity, and that the value of the network itself seems to provide a significant force for people to come back. It's not hard to understand why: Fowler's post shows it. The fact he can't sever his connection to X because there are people on there shows that this is an unstable state. The question is which way things will tip given that networks inevitably consolidate. The next stable state of consolidation is either some new network with dense connectivity or an existing one. So, you have to be able to point at what that network is to say if you're making an actual alternative prediction.
> you have to be able to point at what that network is
You don't really. In fact, historically, migrations away from a large declining platform don't tend to have a unified destination. Consolidation doesn't happen directly, it's usually a later stage of any given social network (immediately preceding decline).
e.g. people didn't move from MySpace to Facebook en masse. They went to LastFm, Bebo, Orkut, many other places. It wasn't until long after Myspace's decline that Facebook started to be a singular dominant force (at which stage Snapchat/Vine/Instagram/others started seeping in).
> The next stable state of consolidation
This "stable consolidation" tends to follow mass abandonment of a network to disparate places, it doesn't precede it.
Mastodon has no algorithm, if one guy posts 30 things you get them sequentially so it is dominated by who types the most until they eventually annoy you enough to unfollow them. No algorithm also means you don't filter out their meal photos etc. based on clicking not interested.
Twitter is maybe even worse now though, no matter how many times you click not interested on hard right content, street fights, etc. it just forces it on you. They have stop letting you adjust aspects of your feed.
> Twitter is maybe even worse now though, no matter how many times you click not interested on hard right content, street fights, etc. it just forces it on you.
I have literally never seen this stuff in my feed. Are you commenting on or reposting far right content or street fights? Even if you're commenting or reposting to say how awful the content is, that still counts as "engagement" and will cause the algorithm to give you more of it.
It’s not just that person! I logged back into my long-unused Twitter within the past year (to delete my account) and was presented the same type of content they mentioned above. This despite the fact that my ancient account was dedicated to Animal Crossing memes and whatever books I was reading at the time, never used for anything political. The feed pushed a whole slew of far-right “thinkers,” which was pretty shocking to see.
Anecdotally I've never seen these before. However it keeps pushing AI related posts to me (I never comment or reposting them). I feel it just push a specific topic to a specific account for a while and see if it 'clicks'.
This isn't about whether Mastodon is better or any other existing alternative though: people as a group are less interested in individual rational concerns like these and will ultimately go where the network is, and wherever it's going to (yet to be decided) it's clearly moving away from Twitter. Slowly, but surely.
Martin is forgetting that by next year twitter will not just be a social media website. Twitter will be the everything app, it will do banking, dating and everything else you can think of! Buy a blue checkmark now to get on the ground floor!
banking and having followers is a deadly combination though. Imagine Buterin impersonators, with real payment buttons. "Everything app" goes well with a chat app
Is it worth just considering that in 15 years of social media, the whole culture has changed and there isn't enough openness or trust for it to be an effect those values again? (the way it was the first time around)
Yes I think this is the answer. Twitter at one point captured a type of user and part of the zeitgeist, when users earnestly wanted to meet others on the then small internet and were open to just having conversations. That internet was mostly nerds. Today's web (yes I changed the word from internet to web, as most people rarely use the internet outside of the web these days) is a very different experience. Today's web has everyone: it has your parents, it has your kids, and it has people from very different cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds.
The brief period when Twitter started was the start of a transition from a nerd-only internet to a general-use web. It was a single moment in time when everyone still felt open to internet socialization. Nowadays, niche interest and groups form insular groups the way they used to in the pre-internet days. The stuff I read on the more social HN threads could be interchangeably posted on IRC channels, Matrix rooms, or Mastodon posts. There's a more definite sense of "FOSS-y tech tribe" than I feel there used to be 15 years ago.
In that, it's just a return to form. Nerd groups were often niche groups in the past and now that everyone is on the web, they have returned to being niche groups. It is sad that we lost a brief moment of openness, when groups were interested in cross-pollinating. But it was just a moment in time, a mere blip in the development of social culture, rather than a lasting change.
Hostility, it turns out is "engagement" which is profitable. We went from people organically paring themselves to algorithms steering people towards "engaging" encounters. Where we used to say "don't feed the trolls" we should now be saying "don't feed the algorithm."
I suppose we shouldn't feed either one but right now "the algorithm" is the bigger threat. I mean, I can usually get a troll to work for me with a bit of patience and perseverance... algorithms? They'll only work for me if it's profitable for someone else. It's so soulless.
I don't think that's true though I know a lot of people on HN do. People just respond to ragebait. Look on here and on Mastodon. Angry posts still generate the most engagement. I mean, forums used to have everlasting hellthreads that were so bitter that owners would cordon them off onto mega 300 page long threads. Usenet had and still has hellthreads and individuals can choose how they sort their "feeds"!
But your post is pretty typical of the viewpoint you see in these technical circles. I know some non-technical small business owners and while dealing with "the algorithm" can be stressful, many of them respect the power of the algorithm to generate awareness of their products. That's what I mean. Niche spaces online have become tribal and niche just like they used to be when they were offline. The brief open period of the web was just the time period when the old ingroup was joined by everyone else.
>I'm seeing a platform diversification. People haven't gone to one service, but have split up among many: Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram....
I saw many journalists/political activists who made lots of doom predictions on twitter creating an urge for people to perhaps try other options but these aren't competitors to twitter.
This is not a either/or type situation. You can be on twitter and Linkedin at the same time.
The way I see it, Twitter has no competitor. Mastodon could have been a competitor but before elon bought twitter they made public decisions which has basically made mastodon impossible to compete against twitter. What a huge shame.
> I first started using social media (in some form) in the late 1980's with Usenet.
I wonder what the definition of social media is which includes Usenet, but not email or BBSs, which presumably Fowler used to some extent as well. To me, social media by definition has some level of participation by users who are not posters or responders—i.e. an upvoting mechanism, a sharing mechanism, or an algorithm based on usage—which changes the prominence of the content in some way. Maybe that's just the definition I've cobbled together in my head.
As he said for me the diversivication of social networks is also really too much. Where should I read? Where should I post? Also WhatsApp started Channels now ... and so on. There will be a critical mass for the splitting then it will roll backwards (to what ever social network that evolved). Because without many people in one network it is not working and ads do not reach enough people.
That s good to hear. The internet was built as a decentralized thing, not the centralized firehoses of social media. We are not meant to discover all of it, and it is meant to be vast, just like the real world.
Silicon Valley is the largest cause and perpetrator of censorship on the internet.
Be it Hackernews, Facebook, Valve's Steam Forums, Instagram, EU Chatcontrol, Google Reviews, YouTube comments. Silicon Valley companies are making sure you can't speak freely.
Feed-based social media were never meant to work with too many users just like usenet before them, but the companies went to great lengths to ban enough users and generate enough mindless clickbait that they kept people around for years. As a reader who has no problem with Musk, i still have lost interest on twitter, or even mastodon anymore. Everyone has an opinion, but opinions are like buttholes. If it's something important it will surface on my lemmy feed. I don't need to learn everything the moment it happens, but i like to be able to search for it. I think we ll end up returning to non-aggregated forums. (Sorry reddit, you ve screwed up beyond repair)
"The reason I'm posting on Mastodon is because the future I want is one that's based on interoperability. I want to see an open protocol that isn't dependent on a tech-lord's whim. ActivityPub is currently the one that looks most developed."
This. so much. And also it is not repeating the same corporate for-profit business model that FB/X/Twitter and other also have and has led to nothing but enshittification. Let's not repeat the same mistake and go to something really different this time and Mastodon/ActivityPub is it.
Yes, I thought the headline would be about more than just talking about the good things of different social media sites.
What I noticed is that even with all that happened, it's surprising that the number of people interacting with his posts hasn't really changed. The network effect seems to be holding things together.
> The reason I'm posting on Mastodon is because the future I want is one that's based on interoperability. I want to see an open protocol that isn't dependent on a tech-lord's whim. ActivityPub is currently the one that looks most developed. Bluesky's AT Protocol may become important in the future, so I'm also keeping an eye on that.
The Facebook aside was interesting. I've been back on FB periodically this year to try to sell some stuff after years off it and it cannot be overstated how terrible the basic experience of browsing the feed is, at least on mobile. It's a minimum of 3-4 ads per actual post from a human I chose to friend, and the ads are just the stupidest, trashiest stuff imaginable.
Just wait until your account gets hacked and you realize there's a bug with the "click here if you didn't make this change" links in the security email making it impossible to get your account back.
Then navigate to Facebook.com/hacked as directed by the help docs and have it reject any attempt to recover your account because it only works with currently used email addresses and phone numbers which the hacker has removed and updated to a value which you cannot know.
Does anyone work at FB or knows if they have a public facing bug tracker or ability to contact their developers? This is a pretty bad bug.
This, on top of how frustrating it is to report the hacked account to Facebook. Several family members have had their profiles compromised, including the email and phone number updates you mentioned.
Myself and many many other people attempt to help the situation by reporting the old profile as a hacked impersonator, only to be promptly closed by Facebook, as they cite they see no rule breaking. They reach this opinion despite the profile being massively changed, from an English speaking father of two, to a woman persona now posting obvious scam links and new family photos in a different language (and country) entirely.
Even as we admit defeat on recovering the old account, often tied to a small business page, and eat the cost of starting over, the old profile still masquerades under the old name, but with reputation damaging and clearly fake content.
I wonder if the BBB can be leveraged. I can't find Meta on there but I did find an Instagram entry and they have a rating of F [1] Maybe we should post the BBB page for Meta to the front page of HN and let people voice their frustrations?
While I definitely am in favor of having businesses listed there if nothing else to let other people with the same issue feel some solidarity, doesn't the fact that Instagram already has such a low rating not motivating any changes make it unlikely that anything would change if the parent company were listed as well?
Hasn't Yelp mostly replaced the BBB as the standard company that aggregates reviews of businesses? You could try leaving Facebook a 1-star Yelp review.
I use the web interface and it's also surprisingly bad, e.g. basic HTML bugs that interfere with engagement, e.g. text editor selection and editing bugs.
I'd say Craigslist has even less authentication for sellers and it's pretty solid most of the time. I've sold a ton of things on there and honestly never run into scammers at all.
Also, I quit Facebook before they added marketplace so I can't make a comparison. I'm just going off of this thread mostly. I also know people who sell things on marketplace fairly regularly / successfully.
Weird, I've had lots of success with Marketplace as both a buyer and seller. I only do local transactions, which is the same I would have done in the past with Craigslist, but I think Marketplace is miles-better than Craigslist.
Exact same thing here. Had to sell some stuff, hadn't done it in years, and was told Marketplace is the thing these days. Within 5 mins I have half a dozen messages all following the same format and all saying they would send x relative to collect. Took all my ads down and went back to Gumtree which has been flawless so far.
That aside it's funny because I have the exact opposite experience. It's the best place to buy and sell locally. Not every place has Craigslist (for better or worse) so it's good to have at least an OK digital alternative. I use it pretty much every day.
Yeah here in Baltimore Marketplace is definitely the place to buy and sell used stuff. It's like a mildly less annoying Craigslist. Except for the peppering of ads to buy shit online. No, Facebook. I came to you because you're Craigslist now, if I wanted Amazon I would have gone to fucking Amazon, you lost this fight, surrender, please for the love of God. Just show me shit I can drive and exchange cash for today!
Fwiw, I think this is somewhat of a self-reinforcing phenomenon. I go through periods of actual interaction with others on Facebook (for various reasons) and the feed seems to improve when I’m interacting with posts I actually want to see. But, when I’m not using it all that much, the feed devolves back into noise.
Also the ease with which you can get banned from the marketplace is ridiculous, with no way to appeal. We ordered some new kitchen cabinets a year ago and due to some very annoying shipping hijinks the shipment got lost. They made a second batch and sent them to us, and the initial shipment got miraculously found, so we had a second set of kitchen cabinets.
I made a Facebook account solely for the purpose of selling this extra set of cabinets on the marketplace, made no other posts about anything anywhere on Facebook, and my account got banned within a week. They asked me to send them a scan of my id to get it unbanned, which I did and they unbanned me. It was then permanently banned a week later with no explanation and no option to appeal.
I think there are 3 things on Facebook: friend posts, short videos from content farms, and actual ads. The first are what I want to see, the third… well, obviously I don’t like them, but they pay the bills, right? The second are, I guess, like things Facebook puts there to hide the fact that nobody posts anything to Facebook anymore.
Yeah, on web with extensive adblocking it's not as miserable (or routing my phone back through my pihole install). But most people aren't adblocking, and the "normal" user experience was jarring.
When I go on Mastodon, half the posts there are bitching about 'how bad' X is. The engagement on posts is extremely poor as well. No one replies to anything.
As far as the problems people complain about on X, I don't see them. Twitter was always buggy at times, and that hasn't really changed. After the exodus of those who just can't stand Musk, I see far less political posts than I did in recent years, which is an improvement tbh. When I see something I don't want to see, I mute it or block the account, just like I always have.
The "explore" feed on mastodon.social is absolutely toxic because it shows the most boosted and favorited posts and unfortunately this is people angry at politics, people who get a thrill out of dehumanizing people, etc. There's a story that "two sides" drive each other crazy on Twitter but my take is that "one side" can conjure the presence of the other side and drive themselves every bit as crazy and there is that subculture on Mastodon.
I block the names of most Republican politicians and certain words used by people who aren't comfortable in their own skin and don't want me to be comfortable in mine. If I ever see angry words in an image (screenshot, image meme, whatever) I block the poster immediately.
Thus I get to meet the "silent majority" of nice and mature people on Mastodon. I've found my flower photos get a lot of engagement, though I wish there was more enthusiasm for my sports photos that I put more effort into. Here is my profile
> When I go on Mastodon, half the posts there are bitching about 'how bad' X is. The engagement on posts is extremely poor as well. No one replies to anything.
That's not my experience at all. Who are you following?
In my niche, Apple platform software development, the community has almost entirely migrated from Twitter to Mastodon, and it's now as active and thriving as ever.
IMO the Mastodon experience is even better than the Twitter experience was, because there are a lot fewer random trolls on Mastodon.
My little niche was the reason I originally joined Twitter back in 2008, so frankly, I don't really miss the millions of other people. I was never interested in following celebrities.
Yea mastodon has been totally incredible in my experience following mostly Swift developers. I’d also argue that the slightly higher barrier to entry is more of a feature than a bug since it inherently keeps low effort users out. Lastly I am old enough to remember early Reddit where it was very “technical and confusing” for a lot of people.
>When I go on Mastodon, half the posts there are bitching about 'how bad' X is.
Have you tried to follow different people? Wouldn't that solve this issue since 100% of mastodon posts in your feed are people you follow (unlike on twitter that has ads and such).
I call BS. Twitter was rock-solid for the approximately 8-year window bookmarked by retiring the failwhale and the disastrous Twitter Blue launch.
Twitter was the place people would go to complain about other platforms being down.I could rely on their availability dashboard, the UI was stable and there were no subsystem brownouts of the kind I'm seeing now (e.g. "Tweet not available" until you refresh several times)
My argument isn't that Twitter had 100% uptime: I consider outages to be on a different axes to general "bugginess" - which is why I stated that Twitter's status page mostly about service availability.
Twitter Spaces was buggy at times, but the core product had much better stability than it has now.
Freedom of speech isn't baked into the fabric of the universe. It's an ideal that we as a society have to continually negotiate for ourselves, and weigh against our other collective values in cases where they are in opposition.
Society is ever-evolving so it's understandable that our definition of "free speech" will necessarily need to evolve along with that. Is it freedom of speech to defame people in the press? Is it freedom of speech to mislead people about the results of an election? Is it freedom of speech to use AI to mimic the voice or appearance of others?
How do we balance the freedom of speech of individuals versus the freedom of speech of corporations? Especially in cases where the corporation is providing a public utility in all but name? (eg, Cloudflare, Twitter)
We are still trying to figure out the right balance between these tensions. I'm definitely not arguing that we've gotten it right so far (far from it, in many cases). And I'm not discounting the risk of, as you put it, "massive societal control" -- we've seen that, too.
I just get irritated when I see people acting as if these are easy questions with clear answers. They're absolutely not. That sort of conviction is deeply unattractive because it shows that you're not seeing the world and its complexities in a clear light. I don't understand how anyone can look at the situation and not come away being impressed by the fundamental difficulty of trying to navigate the middle path.
As a demonstration of this point, the exact issue you're describing -- whether a company like Twitter has the right to block certain types of posts on their platform, especially when they may be pressured to do so by the government -- is on the Supreme Court docket as we speak. It's far from settled law. The case that I believe you're referencing ("illegal relationship") was appealed, and its ruling put on hold:
If the government is violating my fourth amendment rights if it arranges for a third party to search my property when they cannot themselves, it follows that it would be equally unacceptable for them to arrange for a third party to censor my speech.
I don't think the analogy holds. Twitter is not your house. It would be akin to arguing that federal agents shouldn't be allowed to search your checked bags when you board a domestic flight. Again, I'm not saying that there shouldn't be any restrictions on searching those belongings, but it's less black-and-white than you suggest.
Looks like a federal judge felt that the US Government was overstepping and "seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth" and decided to block them from engaging in the censorship behavior.
I don't know. I think it depends on a lot of factors. I think there are some circumstances where that sort of heavy-handed approach would be warranted, but I also think there are a lot of cases where it would be unwarranted and potentially an abuse of rights. The challenge is coming up with a litmus test to differentiate the two. As I've pointed out multiple times in this thread, the Supreme Court will soon hear arguments on that exact issue. I am curious to read the opinions of the various justices on the matter.
I honestly don't understand why he would want to stay on Twitter/X. It feels like from his writeup his only reason is "well I'm addicted to it" and "I see some people on it".
Twitter has shown anti-user behavior over and over again. (From the encouragement of putting conflicting users together, to boosting toxic users, to unbanning the worst of the worst, also throwing people who disagree with their government in the wood chipper [there are ME countries that will follow through with legal and fatal consequences for opposing them in the platform].
Social media is now less town square ("Speakers Corner") and is a information weapon. I think Musk hoped to use blue checkmark attribution as a means of putting posts to the attribution test, and I believe he underestimated the appeal of bias enforcing anonymous posting. The tension between freedom of speech and dog whistling is unresolvable and I would argue different times call for different approaches. Its clear state and state-sponsored actors are abusing social media liberalism to the great detriment of Western values and stability. Its clear these same actors do not permit the freedom of communication they abuse elsewhere.
By way of example, its fascinating the LGBT+ community is so tightly allied with radical Islamic voices against the LGBT+ friendly country of Israel. Its fascinating because of network effects that drive this apparent alliance, whereby a group likely to be outlawed (or worse) identifies with its avowed oppressors.
"By way of example, its fascinating the LGBT+ community is so tightly allied with radical Islamic voices against the LGBT+ friendly country of Israel. Its fascinating because of network effects that drive this apparent alliance, whereby a group likely to be outlawed (or worse) identifies with its avowed oppressors."
- Interesting. I never considered network effects role in this "strange bedfellows" phenomenon, thinking this was primarily due to intersectionality i.e. all the "oppressed" unite against all the "oppressors."
"tightly allied" sounds like either a fallacy or a bad faith argument.
Even ignoring the current situation, criticizing something doesn't necessarily ally you with someone else criticizing the same thing. The "enemy of my enemy is not my friend" etc.
> By way of example, its fascinating the LGBT+ community is so tightly allied with radical Islamic voices against the LGBT+ friendly country of Israel. Its fascinating because of network effects that drive this apparent alliance, whereby a group likely to be outlawed (or worse) identifies with its avowed oppressors.
I don't know what you think network effects do here. There is a very clear reason why LGBT+ community is allied with radical Islamic, and everyone knows it.
Actually, it makes no sense. It would be one thing to identify with the Palestinian people, but its altogether a different thing to identify with Hamas, or any radical Islamist group. Candidly, its quite possibly a sign of childhood mental illness now manifesting in young and full adulthood. Specifically, the loneliness of being unfairly outcast in youth manifesting as projective identification of an oppressed group, and with their oppressors -> Hamas. Yes, Hamas are the oppressors.
I think you're making some weird assumptions here, just because two groups of people have similar opinions about the same thing, does not make them "tightly allied". I dare you to produce messages of support for the extremists from anyone in the LGBT community.
[edit] Actually I'll recant somewhat, you can probably find racists in any community, but I dare say that those messages come from individuals being assholes rather than individuals expressing community opinions.
Its really difficult to browse through these. Some of the most wonderful people I know are Lesbian and Gay people my age, and while not a single one of them identifies with Hamas, its clear the younger generation does. Its madness.
I don't feel like you fulfilled your promise, that link is useless. I want to see where you get this "clarity" about the younger generation, with specific examples, not hand waving and "do your own research"...
I'm really surprised that people read my comment and think the "clear reason" I said is both being antisemitic. I guess it's not so clear for everyone.
The reason is radial Islamic hates the US for supporting Israel, but also for the other reasons like the US army's presence in Middle East, and for other non-reasons like they're just crazy and hating everyone.
The LGBT+ community also "hates" the US, not in the sense they want US to be nuked like Hamas does, but they feel they're oppressed victims in the US[0]. So they have the same imaginary enemy.
Of course, LGBT+ people will be oppressed to death under Hamas's regime. But it doesn't matter for many: the chance Hamas conqures the US is about zero, so they don't fear Hamas. They fear the discrimination from their American fellows.
[0]: Still true in many places today, and everywhere 20 years ago.
I've pretty much landed on Threads. It's not as good as Twitter, but after some of the really awful things the owner of X said, I just can't anymore. I'd rather be on an inferior platform that's growing than see some of the garbage on X at this point.
Nitter helps; a bit. In fact, Nitter is like an ideal Twitter; without all the javascript bloat; but because of that, it does not support Twitter's rich media such as spaces; and it also sometimes cannot connect to the api. And it isn't clear how long its api key will last.