That was always the point of the blue check under Elon. It’s very clear already that blue checks have vastly higher reach and engagement. This all started back in December.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/23/23523845/twitter-blue-paying-priority-replies-conversations
Not surprising. We’re in a gold rush for AI and Nvidia is selling shovels.
I’m using a thinclient (Fujitsu S920), slapped an Intel Pro/1000 NIC in there and installed opnsense. Hardware cost for both used was around €80. Wifi is handled by a TP-Link access point.
It’s a big boy router/firewall, and it’s been quite a learning experience but very fun.
Or many of the other games in the genre as long as they have auto-aim. Brotato and halls of torment are worth checking out, imo.
I think the issue is that people nowadays have come to expect a certain degree of individualized feeds and discovery features.
There is probably plenty of content on mastodon that would be of interest to any given user, but the discoverability is kind of lacking - especially if you are used to Twitter’s algorithmic feed.
I wonder what it is that is keeping more diverse users away?
One aspect is that federation is definitely a bit harder to wrap your head around technically.
But I think another large contributor is the fact that culturally, the zoomers never really grew up with things like independent forums. I’m 33 and back in t the day it was very common for me to be signed up to many different forums for my different interests. Over time, I’ve seen the centralization of those communities, forums shut down and centralized services like Reddit, and lately Discord took their place.
I remember a time when the internet wasn’t solely controlled by a handful of organisations, I can see the value in federated systems.
But someone who only knows centralized services and walled gardens is likely to fear the wild, or at least won’t value it as much.
//edit: Another thing to keep in mind, is that it’s just very common for this demographic to be early adopters for tech products and platforms.
I remember when Twitter started, and a large part of its early user base was people in their 30s or older who were very into tech, or journalists. The reason I started using Twitter towards the end of the 2000s was because most of the podcast hosts and regular contributors on the TWiT network were using it.
Seems to me that if you want to launch a social media platform, your early adopters are either guys who are into tech and in their 30s and 40s or teenage girls.
People are already pissed, so why not push through a crazy privacy invading law.
What are the citizens going to do? Riot?
Embrace, extend, extinguish is exactly what first came to my mind when I heard about threads planning to federate. I think it is a huge risk.
I’m taking bets on how long it takes for Google to remove those 1 & 2-star reviews because some automated review bombing algorithm kicks in.
Eternal September is early this year.
Pretty much, yes. - Shodan user