3679

I opened a Post Social account after all this ongoing Musk stupidity. I can’t see any way that Twitter is going to survive in anything remotely resembling its current form: it continues to give a “dude with crappy interpersonal skills running a forum” vibes.

3680

During Trump people were banned for making threats and abusing others. Now those people are being reinstated.

3681

Calling Vindman a puppeteer pretty much reveals Musk’s true colours.

3682

Similar for me. I would love to see it crash for a couple of weeks early on though to highlight Musk’s poor management practice. Also I think if cutting 2/3rds+ of the staff doesn’t result in some sort of disaster, other tech bros are going to be encouraged to follow in his footsteps leading toward poorer work-life balance for a lot more people.

3683

The most pernicious idea of the conspiracy theorist (or the deluded authoritarian) is that individuals lack agency to effect the world - in their minds everything and everyone is beholden to the nebulous “Them” or “Other”.

3684

It’s going to take the valuable folks just opting out, which is going to take others saying nope to this.

This is why I said screw it. My own twitter experience was pretty good, somehow. I kept things pretty curated, but at this point if Twitter doesn’t fail, it’s going to be really bad for society.

3685

twitter is totally replaceable by Mastodon. At least 15% of the 280 people I follow have switched over to Mastodon and I found it really easy to find another 50 people to follow in just a few days and there are some really interesting accounts already.

Fedi.federated has a lot of great recommendations in so many categories it’s overwhelming on its own, but it was a great place to start.

Having local is also interesting. There are tons of servers out there … way more than what is shown on the joinmastodon.org site. Unfortunately I didn’t bookmark it, but there is a site where you can do better searches for servers. I found one that is focused on astronomy, so I joined that one and so my local feed has a lot of astronomy related content.

It made me want to be able to peruse other local feeds of other servers, but that’s not available currently.

It is so refreshing to using Mastadon without ads every 2 scrolls and the same 50 people retrweeting the same exact article. Twitter really is a “OMG look how much of an asshole XYZ is in this article / clip / post” whereas Mastodon is more community focused. I’m sure it will change and how much the admins will hold up with the necessary monitoring will be the real question for me, but I think with so many servers doing a review before accepting an account will negate a lot of problems.

Post looks interesting, but seems very focused on news article access from others that have written about it (it seems they may be providing access to a lot of news sites where you “pay points” to access articles / or reward authors for what they write), and I think both Post and Mastodon may be able to co-exist very nicely.

3686

Screw twitter. I’m going back to usenet.

3687
3688

First of all, get some damn coasters, Elon. You can afford them.

Second, yeah, we’re watching someone Howard Hughes in front of our eyes. In a year a full piss bottle will be on that table, too.

3689

Unless the piss bottle is the empty one in the back.

3690

I’d heard people say he has a coke addiction, now I understand.

3692
3693

And I’m sure Coca-Cola appreciates his placing their product right next to firearms. /s

3694

Twitter is getting impressively messed up.

3695

That’s Diet Caffeine Free Coke. What a wuss.

3696

Technically neither are firearms, one’s a toy and one’s an antique that dodges most firearm laws. Why a grown man has a toy gun beside his bed I leave to the reader’s imagination.

3697

While Musk is trying to reposition Twitter as his personal middle-aged edgelord Insta, the bots are running wild:

Twitter’s radically reduced anti-propaganda team grappled on Sunday with a flood of nuisance content in China that researchers said was aimed at reducing the flow of news about stunning widespread protests against coronavirus restrictions.

Numerous Chinese-language accounts, some dormant for months or years, came to life early Sunday and started spamming the service with links to escort services and other adult offerings alongside city names.

The result: For hours, anyone searching for posts from those cities and using the Chinese names for the locations would see pages and pages of useless tweets instead of information about the daring protests as they escalated to include calls for Communist Party leaders to resign.

… Sunday’s campaign was “another exhibit where there are now even larger holes to fill,” the ex-employee said. “All the China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned.”

3698

You can see realtime how it’s been a day, and its still happening. Search for Beijing using it’s name in simplified Chinese characters - 北京 - and you’re in for a wild ride of (PG) escort ads in Chinese and other garbage that’s streaming out like a firehose…

3699

He fixed the bots though right?