3396

If you don’t follow people who post that stuff, the Ubereats ad would have been next to tweet of something you agree with. Don’t use Twitter to read that stuff. Same goes for Facebook, Reddit, etc.

3397

I’m depressed too, but it Twitter keeps on its current path, it will be temporary as everyone else starts to abandon in, and a new standard platform forms somewhere.

I didn’t see many changes from the jokerification of Twitter, as I didn’t follow that stuff. I just don’t think Twitter is going to survive more than Livejournal has , and we’re better off without it at this point.

3398

Totally agree.

3399

Can you not right click and open image in new tab?

3400

I mean, it’s not like those things weren’t pervasive on twitter before.

3401

No can do. Seems to be disabled. Going in with a debugger, I see five sets of divs all surrounding an img (all same size and location as the image according to the debugger). I suspect some of the divs are creating overlays for the left-and-right previous/next image navigation and are capturing mouse interaction, but I didn’t look that closely. But they are obscuring the actual image. Any image options normally in the context-menu for other webpages are not present when right-clicking on the image as displayed on the Instagram website.

Going in in the browser debugger, I can get the src of the actual image, and if I copy and paste the URL, I can get it to display in high quality in another window or tab. But going through the debugger expanding through the divs to the img and then copying the src and pasting it in another tab is clearly not a good way to view art.

Also I’m usually on an iPad and they don’t even have an iPad app, you just get the iPhone app and you can either view it tiny or you can double it in size. As with the website, no way to get rid of the text and random user comments surrounding the image. Really clunky. I think the whole website is pretty clearly setup for Phone users, which again is not a great venue for presenting art.

Maybe there’s something I’m missing. I’d expect a “full size” button or something. On Twitter on the iPad, you just tap an image and it blows up to take over the screen, which is perfect. On the PC, it blows up, but leaves the discussion on the side, with a little arrow icon to open or close the discussion, so fairly easy to just the image. Here’s what I’m getting by tapping on Instagram on the PC. No idea if those are auto-generated by Instagram, or if Aaron stuck those on as “CTN” is the expo he was giving a demonstration at, but that’s clearly not improving the image. No indication of anything to just display or expand the image. Double clicking on it “likes” the image. Either Instagram is just bad for this and there is no way to just show the image, or their UI guys need to do a better job showing how to view just the image.

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3402

Instagram is infuriatingly bad in many many aspects. I have an account because it’s the main venue for the wider miniature painting community, but hate the experience of using it.
In particular getting pics off it for anything is extremely annoying. I have tried 3 approaches:

  • Just plain screenshots.
  • Getting it from the “sources” tab of the Chrome inspector (which is a pain because you have to look through a bunch of weirdly named folders)
  • Dragging them from the browser into some application like Pureref. It’s a bit janky but ends up working.
3403

Thanks @Lurb, I’m glad to hear it’s not just me!

3404

Having spent some more time with it, I don’t think Mastodon will be much more than a temporary lifeboat for people leaving, before (if…?) a fuller alternative to Twitter emerges.

Technologically, it’s fine - it’s just Twitter-but-many-sites, and even under pressure from so many new sign-ups it’s holding out reasonably well. Once you sign up it’s really no more difficult to use than Twitter.

But I just don’t see how the operational model scales. Anyone can set up an instance, and that’s great, but if you do you’re opening yourself up to so much potential risk I don’t see how it can remain volunteer-run. All the problems that Twitter might be exposing themselves to (by losing so many non-engineering staff at once) apply equally here - what do you do, as a Mastodon server admin, in response to a DMCA request? How much time do you have to respond? Are you compliant with GDPR? Someone posts CSAM to your instance, who do you inform? You get a legal request for user data - is it a valid request, could you challenge it if you needed to? Will you get counter-sued if you do release it? Then multiply all that by every country you serve content to. It’s just overwhelming once a platform is big enough to attract bad actors in sufficient numbers.

Maybe there’s room for some private companies with enough legal resources to set up their own Mastodon servers, but assuming they would need to monetize their users (ads? subscription?) what would be the incentive for users to choose them over others?

3405

Apparently Elon has limits to his belief in free speech (other than for people making fun of him).

3406

This is literally all media though. Do I read the NYT even though they let Maggie Haberman and a bunch of ex military guys talk about how Trump isn’t that bad? Do I read the WaPo even though it is owned by Jeffery Bezos? Do I use Reddit even though they harbor communities full of hateful people, do I use facebook even though it is owned by a Nightmare alien? Do you use Spotify, where your money goes into Joe Rogan’s pocket? Use youtube, where right wing grifters and PUA’s trade their wares?

Trying to assign an ethicism to any corporation you consume from is a slippery slope. They are all differing levels of bad. Unfortunately Twitter took an extremely recent slide into the badder category, and unfortunately I have a lot of friends who still use it and we depend on it for a social connection. Maybe that will change, and we will find a different place to go, but until then, we are stuck on the hell site.

3407

People should do as their conscience dictates. But I will point out that the more people use Twitter, the more money Elon Musk loses (embeds being especially good for this.)

3408

I watched a lot of Hackers (1995) before it was taken down. I am sure that burned some $ in server load.

Some of the criticism feels like a much lesser version of when people talk about people who live in red states. Not everyone living in a red state is happy about their leadership, but they are there, what can they do?

Like yeah, Elon sucks, but I didn’t vote for him and I didn’t want him to take over my site, but here we are. I have a lot of connections here since I started my account in 2008, and I am a part of a nice community who is also not a fan of this, but what can we do? Move? Just move if you don’t like it there!

Moving to a new site is much easier than physically moving somewhere, obviously, but it is the same idea. You have put down roots in a community. Hopefully we get a strong Twitter alternative sooner rather than later. There has been some splitting up into discords, but that feels… different and more fractured. The only real 1:1 analog for twitter is Mastodon, it works and feels like Twitter, but it is different in a few key ways, and is dependent on volunteers to run.

3409

It sounds like Hive Social is also catching on with some folks leaving Twitter. It seems more like Dollar Store Instagram to me, but SHRUG.

3410

Yeah, I expect the exodus from Twitter to take a while, hopefully in the next 6 months there will be a consensus of where to go to.

3411

Lol.

3412

Mastodon is anti-corporate by nature. The cost to run a server is fairly minimal though, especially if you’re a single-user instance, as most corporate places would be ( I know Auschwitz Holocaust Museum and Elvira set up accounts there).

Anyone who tried ads would be defederated from fast.

To me, this is the beauty of it, if someone tries to jokerfy the place , they’ll get shut off into their own little hole the way Gab and Truth Social have been. (Trump’s little project is based on mastodon)

Social media is about the individuals, not the corporations. We lost that along the way, and it doesn’t have to be the way it is now.

I’ve been on there for 2.5 years now though, it’s been a great place for self-discovery.

3413

That’s how I feel when I play EU4 and I have to pick a nation. My eye gloss over.

3414

I am lucky to have a friend who has worked on Mastodon and hosts his own instance, so I have had some of the more complicated parts explained to me.

If you join one of the larger sites, it is pretty seamless. Once you are in the site for a while liking and boosting posts, you’ll get federated with a bunch of other networks, and it feels more and more like Twitter.

I worry that the decentralized nature will end up being a huge hindrance to the platform in the long term, and not the asset people who boost that platform say it is.

If you are on android, the “Tusky” app is so much like Twitter it is an easy transition.

3415

Agreed, but that’s both a strength and a weakness. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s a much more chilled, welcoming space than Twitter, which is fantastic. My only fear is that as it grows, it will also attract vandals and stalkers, trolls and griefers. And with it come some of the legal risks I mentioned, and it seems like it would be unsustainable to place those burdens on the volunteer admins.