Get out, now.
It’s amazing how people convinced themselves they need all these platforms in their lives. Meta, X, TikTok, YouTube - they can do whatever they want to their users, and the users just take it.
I’ve learned to drop social media platforms as soon as they pull shit I’m uncomfortable with and live a happy life, somehow.
“They make communicating with your friends and family easier!”
Um, E-mail has been doing that since the dawn of the Internet. There is absolutely nothing at all that has made communicating any easier since even instant messaging. All that social media has turned into, is nothing but megaphones for the idiot masses.
They literally don’t. X pushing things to the top of ur feed, Facebook polluting your timeline with random video shares, it all makes it harder to see the content you actually care about
Facebook before the algorithm was awesome. It was just the most recent stuff your friends did in that literal order. There was nothing wrong with it lol. Or at least I didn’t think so.
OG Facebook was honestly great.
It didn’t make as much money from sponsored videos until they forced it to be in your face via the algorithm 😀
Now if you go on Facebook, you barely even see posts from your friends. Just videos and posts from random groups you aren’t even in.
I blocked all the “suggested for you” posts on facebook through uBlock origin.
Now when I load my feed, I see it block one post after the other, so many of them, literally more posts than the ones I get from friends.
Afterwards my feed is as clean as a whistle, lol
When I visit Facebook, it’s about 8:1 “recommended for you” vs people I actually know.
I see exactly one post on Instagram from anyone I follow before it’s all ads and random algorithm shit I’m not interested in
I’ve just started going through and telling it not show me any of the recommended stuff.
It’s kind of fun watching the algorithm cycle through waves of guessing. “Ok it’s going to be all wrestling for the next two days. Hmm, that didn’t work, let’s try MMA for a couple days. No, alright, how about a bunch of memes about being a mechanic…”
On the other hand the clicking “don’t show me this” doesn’t seem to actually do anything. I’ve told it not to show me Pixie and Brutus at least three times.
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I do actually care about the content they “push”. Most fediverse apps are pointless to me exactly because they don’t have an algorithm. Unless you already know EXACTLY everything you’re interested in from the start, finding new stuff is the primary and best feature of the “algorithms”.
No they’re not… Those algorithms push stuff meant to manipulate you into making you click more. It doesn’t even expose you to anything new, just stuff you either already agree with or that makes you angry.
You want to find new stuff? Find or build a directory website. But wanting it found for you is the root of the problem. You don’t get to just be served in life.
I’m not trying to defend what it has become but social media can be good to keep updated or in contact with people. You’re not gonna email everyone pictures of your vacation or whatever. Or to keep up with people you don’t see nearly as often as you’d like because of, well, life. People do take it way to far and either post way too much info or take everything too serious.
In my opinion, it’s a very passive way to keep in contact. It doesn’t require remembering people or interacting with them in any way. If you post photos, it shouldn’t be expected that people see them. If you post about a party, it’s not a replacement for an invite to people.
It’s shouting into the wind and then pushing the responsibility of that relationship to be on the person viewing the post to reply to it or like or whatever.
I got off social media for that exact reason, it was very seriously impacting my mental health. Now I may have fewer “friends” but the ones that do are the ones where we are important enough where we actively interact with each other.
Um, E-mail has been doing that since the dawn of the Internet.
I always see people saying “but I have some friends across the world and Facebook is the only way we can keep in contact because they don’t have a phone 😭😭😭”
Like… my guy. You both have email addresses and used them to create FB accounts. Cut out the middle man.
Facebook as taught them that they can be lazy and reduce their effort to remain in contact with a like or emoji reaction.
Ironically, I upvoted your comment.
One big difference I see, between email and various messengers on the on side and social networks on the other side is, that emails are me pushing my information at people while a social network is supposed to be them pulling information from my feed. This allows me—when it works—to share stuff with people instead of potentially sending spam. Not all communication is a digital postcard. Social networks allowed a new form of communication. I enjoyed OG facebook until the first big privacy scandal. It was a (mostly) good thing and it was very accessible even then. I‘ve never got such a large part of my tribe on a pull service since then. Sure we all have messengers and groups and what not… but it is not the same. I dream of self-hosting something from the fediverse but we‘re not exactly young anymore and I doubt my tribe will assemble.
AIM was a game-changer tho
It was.
What was better than e-mail? Instant messaging and AIM gave us that.
What was better than just instant messaging on your PC? Doing it on the go, on your phone. Great!
What was better than just instant messaging on the go and on PC? Being able to share content like video and pictures. Being able to make group chats and all.
Did it all without the need of social media.
But where else can I post a picture of my dinner and have millions of random strangers see it, thereby validating my personal fragile ego, before I even take the first bite?
There are subs on Lemmy where you can do that. :3
My preferred method of communication is a good ol’ phone call, or an SMS to say things like “be there in 5.” I don’t really get the hype with a slew of different text based messaging platforms.
I’m pretty close but I prefer signal just because SMS doesn’t do group messaging very well.
I was all about Signal until they dropped SMS support (totally understand why). None of the people in my life use signal except for the select few that enjoy their ahem extracurricular activities, so it’s kinda moot. And I just don’t have the energy to crusade for people to give a rats ass about their privacy. If I need to have a combo that requires a degree of discretion, I just do it in person.
i use the phone (ya know… for its original and intended purpose) for nearly all ‘not face to face’ communication. i don’t even have data on my mobile and sms is disabled at the carrier.
I hate that it is now Meta’s, but WhatsApp is a damn practical app. I wouldn’t share as much with my social circles if it wasn’t that practical compared to emails.
After being on fediverse it’s been great how refreshing and natural real decentralized social media is rather than the astroturfed, money and soul sucking dreck that is the big corporate socials are.
I almost wish there was a way that we could encourage growth and somehow let it scale to critical mass through grants and donations. But eventually if the fediverse got to that size then there would be grifters and corporations to ruin our fun.
Yeah, I mean, Lemmy and other fediverse instances need to play their cards carefully. If they are to be the future, then they need to not cave into what has plagued the other social media platforms we’ve long used before them.
Thats not how any of this works though. Corpos and governments are free to spin up their own instances of any federated service right now. It is the future, but the future is small bubbles that communicate with each other. So we don’t have to be on Meta’s instance, or Wal-Mart’s, or even the US’s national instance. We can stay where we are and keep it like this.
Some people really can’t grok this. I remember trying to explain Diaspora to a friend several years ago, and he said “Yeah, but if Diaspora got as big as Facebook, then they would turn evil, too!”
I had to patiently re-explain how instances work, but I still don’t think he got it. We’ve been living with big corporations running the Web for so long that some people can’t even imagine it being any different, and that’s scary.
lt was so easy for me, personally. I have to reassert my own biases everytime I talk to someone about federation because it just makes sense to me. Its equivalent to a bunch of email servers talking to each other. I can send an email to whoever I want, as long as my provider has not blocked them or I myself have not. Picking an instance is like picking gmail/outlook/yahoo.
How well does that explanation work? When a bunch of people were migrating to Mastodon last year, I remember some were still very confused, even after the comparison to email.
With enough time and enough pressure, I think that the vast majority of people would figure it out, though. They figured out email, and if you tried to explain that to anybody in 1990, they would’ve looked at you like you had an extra head.
Tbh its hit or miss, and I’m all out after that. I’m too deep in the tech sauce to return my brain to 0 and explain it from the outside. So when people don’t get it after that I often just leave them to their walled gardens.
Right! The fediverse is 100% a happier place. I love Lemmy and Firefish and Pixelfed. I’m deleting Facebook as soon as I collect enough email addresses.
This is the first I’ve heard of Firefish. What’s the advantage of using that instead of Mastodon?
Much more customizable and in my opinion far easier to navigate, and for some reason way cuter. You can also download the app right from Firefish when you sign up, there’s no dealing with the app store. I don’t quite know but it’s super friendly, all sorts of strangers greeted me and followed me when I joined, which definitely didn’t happen with Mastodon. I just find it strangely adorable and full of cool people and very positive, and for some reason I don’t find Mastodon that way.
Hmm to be fair with YouTube you don’t think this is now a repository of incredibly valuable resources? If YouTube went down and we lost all videos, we would be losing many important resources, from historical documentaries no longer easily found in media, to guides on woodworking.
It’s a bit scary. Once you remove the crap, it’s an incredibly valuable library resource and time capsule.
Absolutely. There’s nothing special about YouTube’s frontend - it can be replicated by someone with no coding experience, in an afternoon, for free, via a Softaculous module. On the inside, it’s the Library of Alexandria. And unfortunately, it’s owned by a company that understands that reality only as a means to a nefarious end, which is to develop a detailed psychological profile on its users that can be sold to advertisers.
My hope is that the cost of server storage and delivery will become inexpensive enough that YouTube can be forked and maintained by a nonprofit like the Wikimedia Foundation, who sees user generated content as a means to the enrichment of human experience. I’m not optimistic though, the history of the Library of Alexandria is instructive.
There is already something like this via the Wayback Machine (who indeed do copies of video media but more typically VHS and other things) and things like the Russian Library genesis, which is kept in torrent format.
The problem really is that storage for video media is insane compared to storage of document or even photo data.
If people here haven’t read into it, it’s incredibly interesting to look into the way the Internet Archive works. In particular you have to begin to concern yourselves with how long it takes for HDs, SSDs, and other media to degrade in time.
The problem really is that storage for video media is insane compared to storage of document or even photo data.
Yep, and add to that, 500 hours of video is uploaded to youtube every minute & they serve over 2.5 billion monthly users. The scale really is unfathomable.
If people here haven’t read into it, it’s incredibly interesting to look into the way the Internet Archive works. In particular you have to begin to concern yourselves with how long it takes for HDs, SSDs, and other media to degrade in time.
Where can I read more about this? It sounds interesting.
This wasn’t what I read but this looks excellent.
https://archive.org/details/jonah-edwards-presentation
Another super interesting story is about Marion Stokes, who recorded around 71000 cassettes worth of television media from 1975 to 2000s. She houses them in 9 apartments. I need to watch the documentary about her. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
I remember I started reading about about this when I wondered what kind of media is “safe” for storage. It sounds like a simple question but it’s not. Digital media, unlike print media, is so easy to lose.
Thanks for the links, I’ll check them out. Persistence of data seems like an interesting issue.
🤔 We all should build a nonprofit to foot the bill for new hardware to run a public Youtube fork, or PeerTube instance.
Video rippers are a thing. If there’s a video that you’d miss if it were gone, download it.
Sorry, I think you misunderstand that I’m talking about a large scale problem rather than a personal problem. Of course people can individually download videos to preserve.
Imagine losing YouTube’s videos next week. You would have effectively lost nearly two decades worth of media chronicling human and technological development (more if you take into account that YouTube has repositories of older media).
Someone described it like the Library Alexandria. In terms of density of information, I think the comparison is apt.
A good comparison that might be too old for some readers. Back in the 80s and 90s, the early internet was populated via usenet discussions. Google eventually bought this data and merged it into Google Groups. However Google Groups was disbanded. This meant that some archives can no longer be accessed because to do so requires some active component no longer in service. We have effectively lost gigantic chunks of early 90s internet history. A lot of this history was quite important in many facets of life.
I’m totally with you on that. That’s why I support the Internet Archive. But it’s important for people to realize that not everything on the Web is forever, so you should make backups. It is a large scale problem, but individuals can mitigate it. If there’s a copy of the file somewhere, then it can be preserved and archived.
Absolutely, I only had FB and I was late to the game on that as well compared to others. I gave it up completely in 2016 thankfully right before the crazy political crap took over and never looked back. I did reddit which was fine because I didn’t know anyone and it let me actually follow everything I loved no matter how small it was. Now I am here because of what they pulled. Wonder how longer this place will last…
I can only speak for myself but I’m not on Twitter because I deem it essential for my life and I can’t leave. The reason I’m not leaving is that these changes have had almost zero affect on me and quite frankly I just don’t care. Only change I had to make was to move from the Flamingo app to using it via browser which doesn’t really matter since I almost exclusively use it on my laptop anyways.
Welp, sounds like it’s time for you to grow up
Probably because he’s sad that people are blocking him.
This has to be the reason
Nah, he wants to boost ‘engagement’ for his advertisers.
At this point, any advertisers Xitter has left get what they deserve when they spend money on ads there.
My guess is people were blocking Blue users-- now they can’t!
So much so that he let them hide it.
He’s the only user I have blocked, because of the bug he caused where every post was from him. I suspect that one incident made him the most blocked person on Twitter.
Community Notes jumped on that tweet fast:
If the ability to block users was to be removed, X would be in violation of the policies of the App Store as well as the Google Play Store. Potentially, this could lead to X being removed from these platforms.
Pfft, good. I’m sure Musk’s response will be “wah, wah, they censor me, wah, wah”. Because out of any playbook of republicunt, is to proclaim you’re being censored when you’re breaking the rules and think free speech applies to just you and your allies.
Musk is walking proof some people SHOULD be canceled!
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They can still do too much damage to society after being cancelled.
Better to just eat the rich.
Let’s keep them in factory farms. And plump them up, mmmmm mmm.
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I wonder how much “EARN MONEY FREE” spam it’d take for them to realize blocking is a very desirable and needed feature for such a big platform.
about time
X is in violation of the App store’s naming guidelines. They still managed to shove it through.
Elon: DOIT, ANYWAY!
Stop using Twitter. Seriously, people, stop using Twitter. It’s not going to get better.
Think of this as an IQ test. Those that pass come here, those that fail get Zuck’d, Musk’d & Spez’d.
It’s the same logic I use to justify barring all Republicans from my life: You’re either so evil that you like what’s going on, or you’re so stupid you don’t notice what’s going on, and either way, I could do without you.
the moment my Japanese artists switch over to another app, I switch. I can’t live without them 😭
Most Japanese artists have a Pixiv or Nijie account. You should be able to move most of your follows to those services.
A lot are also jumping ship to misskey.io, which you can follow if you use mastodon/pleroma/misskey/etc.
I suspect the small amount of holdouts will soon create an alternative as well.
I get that many people don’t like it and has left but I still haven’t figured out why non-twitter users are urging the rest of us to leave the platform. What do you care? Really
It seems obvious to me. Twitter has historically been used by public figures, and especially public institutions like local governments, transit agencies, etc, to make official announcements & statements. Of course having that on a centrally owned social media site was never good, but now with Space Karen making it actively hostile to users (and trying to prevent logged out users from seeing that info), it’s very bad. The sooner Twitter completes its inevitable collapse, the sooner those public figures & institutions will move to a better way to deliver those - Mastodon, RSS, webpages, whatever.
IMO it’s in the public’s best interest for all the holdouts to get out now so we can move on.
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What if I hang in the art community and none of that has zero relevance to me?
I mean you still get served the ads that provide them revenue. But it’s not like I’m assigning you personal responsibility for keeping them in business, or saying you’re wrong or bad for staying. Just sharing why I want people to get off the platform quicker.
Adblocker deals with that
Your interactions still fuel the platform
Get off Twitter, stupid ass
Because it’s not even Twitter anymore. It is called X, a MLM platform for neo-nazis. By stubbornly using the platform you are keeping their dream alive.
Conversation at Twitter HQ:
- Staff: How can we increase engagement?
- crickets
- Elmu: I’ve got it! We’ll make stalking easier!
- Staff: Uhhh
- Mush (now halfway out the door): Have it done by Sunday.
Alternatively:
Staff: Uh, the blocking feature is having some issues.
Emu: Well fix it.
Staff: No one knows how that part works and you fired the guy who wrote it. And then you insulted him.
Emu: Meh, just remove the whole feature.
My guess as to how it went:
- random twitter troll: “haha Elon you’re probably the most blocked person on this site”
- Elon: “not anymore”
That’s how it went the last time he brought the subject up. During that hole period where we learned he had the engineers tweak the algorithm to 10x his visibility in the feed.
Cool, next they should remove the “log in” feature.
They won’t need it soon anyway
Both Apple and Google terms of service require apps to have a blocking feature built in. Elmo been spouting off again without actually knowing anything. As of this evening he’s figured out that’s not something he can actually do and deleted his tweet.
Or he does know this and is intentionally trying to run Twitter down to get out his purchase of ot that was legally enforced after he tried to back out
Seems a little late to get out of the purchase, having brought the company private and rebranded it already…
He’s not playing 4d chess here, he’s playing a different game:
It’s not gone entirely, you can still block DMs.
It’s not gone at all and unless the app stores change their terms of service, it won’t be.
naw
The stores need apps to be able to block users. Not other users blocking users from their feed
Does it have a nsfw filter?
On the one hand, lol, on the other, we shouldn’t need permission from either of those companies to do a goddamn thing.
You don’t. The only thing you need their permission for is to work with them (by putting something in their stores). I feel it’s reasonable to give them that power.
He doesn’t need their permission. He could just publish an APK for Android and provide side-loading instructions for iOS, but the majority of app users are never going to do that, so they’d just never see another app update ever again.
Elmo must have found out how many people are blocking him.
Wish I had 40 billion to decimate
The entire problem with Elon is he could literally have burnt it to the ground and it would not affect his life or prosperity at all.
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Pretty sure he’s the one blocking others…
Hey, I just like watching Elon Musk and Twitter destroy each other, alright?
Unstoppable turd vs. immovable asshole.
Unpolishable turd vs uncontrollable asshole
At this point, either he went insane, or he is just making bad decision on purpose to destroy the company out of spite
went insane
Come on, read his statements and actions of the past, say, 5 years. The sanity ship sailed ages ago.
It was never in harbor to begin with.
Given the fact that all of the ultra wealthy are by default already batshit insane id argue its more that his facade started cracking and is finally breaking down.
Never attribute a bad action to malice when it can be just stupidity.jpg
I mean the guy clearly isn’t that smart but have “managed” car company, rocket company, so why not media company, same probably right?!!
He’s not actually stupid. He learned orbital mechanics just to run SpaceX, for example.
You can be smart about some things and stupid about others.
This is fair.
I learned the basics of orbital mechanics to play ksp. It took about 2 hours. This is not an achievement.
So go build a rocket to Mars if you know so much about it in so little time. Prove Elon is a flake in that respect.
I’m sorry, what?
There’s gotta be a hedge fund out there hes got money on that’s betting on x to fail.
I just want to see how much he can enshittify the platform before a significant number of people actually leave.
They won’t leave until there is a viable alternative.
There are a few, the most obvious being Mastodon.
Mastodon is way more alive than Lemmy honestly.
Can Musk do that? I would think this goes against Apple and Android app store rules right?
But it’s ok! Because he’s an oligarch, he gets an exception.
According to another post, yes.
What if this turns out to be a good thing? Apple/Google remove Xitter from their store, Musk gets all whiny about it, uses his billionaire corruption powers to get regulators to finally acknowledge that app store monopolies are bad, Apple/Google are forced to allow third party stores (without anti-competitive barriers, as in Google’s case).
And Elon Musk turns out to be a hero for consumers and the free market!
Not trying to argue, but could you expand on “anti-competitive behavior” a bit? I recently installed the Epic Store on my phone and found it pretty straightforward.
Considering you’re on lemmy, I think it’s safe to assume you’re good with technology. Imagine someone in your life who isn’t good with technology trying to install the Epic Games store (without assistance)
First they have to track down the toggle to allow “unknown sources” (it’s never in the same place on all Android phones, they move it so that it’s hard to find), which presents a scary and vague warning about malware that a non-techie will never understand. Then they have to track down and install the APK, which presents even more scary warnings, then they get pestered by a “Play Protect” dialog which gives google permission to remotely disable the app (and the dialog can’t be permanently dismissed, so everyone will agree eventually)
Think about how you could run a successful app store in that environment. The cost of user acquisition is very high compared to Google. The only way to do it is to strike deals with OEMs to ship with your store, but Google has been caught either threatening or bribing these manufacturers to not accept those deals from competitors. Additionally, Google pays full time engineers to analyze competitors stores to search for vulnerabilities, and then leak them to the press before they get a chance to patch them, just to scare people away.
There’s probably more stuff I’m forgetting. This is all stuff that came out years ago when Epic first launched their store and got into public fights with Apple and Google. There are articles from back then that really go into the details if you’re interested in the topic.
Last I checked, when you try to install from another source it just pops up a message saying this is not currently allowed due to this setting, with a button to take you to the setting. Literally two taps and you are able to install from other sources.
Yeah. I had the experience you described. Not sure if it’s because I have a newer version of Android or stock Android experience.
then they get pestered by a “Play Protect” dialog which gives google permission to remotely disable the app (and the dialog can’t be permanently dismissed, so everyone will agree eventually)
It is possible to disable Play Protect itself though? You’d just get a permanent red warning text on Play Store.
Quite possibly, this timeline has already thrown up some odd things
Sadly, these big apps already have tons of exemptions.
such as?
I killed my Twitter account the day after Muskrat was forced to buy it.
Fun Fact: If he does this, Twitter will get removed from both app stores.
Both app stores require a block feature?
I can’t speak for Apple but Google does. It falls under their user-generated content policy which requires you to “Provides an in-app system for blocking UGC and users”. Google is generally the more lenient of the two when it comes to policies, so I’d be highly surprised if Apple didn’t have it…
Apple too requires mechanisms to block stalkers from what I saw on Mastodon.
I killed mine the day he unbanned the orange moron. Like, I knew it was going to be a shitshow once Musk got his hands on it within weeks of having it. Soon as he did that unbanning though, I was out.
Fun Fact: If he does this, Twitter will get removed from both app stores.
Fingers crossed!
I knew the ship was sinking but I stayed around until the name change to X because official and then I bounced. Made it here after Reddit and twitter made more recent bad decisions.
this is me… as soon as I saw the X I jumped ship … fuck where that place is heading
From your keyboard to God’s feed
Just stop using Twitter. There’s a half-dozen alternatives by now, Jesus Christ.
Take your time and attention somewhere else. Leave.
Twitter has all the content. I want the content. Therefore I’m on Twitter until most of the content moves. In addition, I hate how most of the fediverse social media has no algorithm. The algorithm is how I found most of the content I’m interested in in the first place.
What do you care if people are there or not? I don’t get this mentality of as a non-twitter user urging people to leave the platform.
Because helping others out from under the influence of things that are making them stupid is good for the world in general.
As a Twitter user only there to participate in NAFO - I advise anyone else to leave the platform for Mastodon or literally any alternative. For you specifically, there’s an entire community on Pixelfed specifically for art posts. Stop giving space Karen engagement numbers.
I’m on pixelfed too but that place is basically empty compared to twitter. I also have by far the biggest following on twitter and even though I in no way profit from that monetarily it’s still much nicer posting your stuff online when there’s actually an audience.
Artstation, Pixiv, DeviantArt? Or to swap one devil for another, Instagram?
Why? I’m already settled in on twitter and dom’t have any major complaints about my experience there
Like I said, to stop giving space Karen’s site your views and engagement. A site that actively and explicitly caters to self-proclaimed Nazis and distributors of CSAM. Directly or indirectly, you are supporting and condoning their behavior by actively engaging with it.
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I left and deleted my account after Elon changed the algorithm to show nothing but his posts. With this decision and the many other bad decisions he’s made since buying Twitter, I’m glad I left and I frankly don’t miss it.
This will absolutely be abused and people will be harassed, but I feel this is intentional as he continues turning Twitter into a far-right echo chamber.
You could always just mute users you’re not interested in
It’s funny how corporate guys will always lie even about dumb shit like this. Of course blocking is a feature, users want to be able to block other users. It’s the owner of the website that doesn’t want anyone to be able to block him
notice that the only kind of harassment he’s likely to experience (in DMs) is the only one that gets a carveout
It was my instant question when I saw this. Who blocked him that upset him so. But then it occurred to me. It’s probably the number of people that blocked him.
can’t escape the dictator
Get out now before he makes quitting impossible and mandates 10 Xerts a day.
Please drink verification can.
Have you performed the X Salute today?
Is that where you from an X with your arms, bringing them down as you thrust your crotch and saying “suck it?”
I believe it has something to do with a sink
