It’s a win for humanity if it causes more people to leave and stop thinking it’s a public forum.
It IS a public forum though. The whole point of it, even dating back to it’s inception, was very very public conversation. It was in stark contrast to facebook, which claimed to be privacy driven. As opposed to the mostly public myspace, and the completely public twitter.
Since Musk took it, it’s more like an arena where the loudest and dumbest have the microphones. It is neither a haven for free speech nor a forum where legitimate discourse takes place. It has become the trash pit of the internet.
That’s not what was said though. I was saying that it was a PUBLIC forum. I’m not stating WHAT is being said. Merely that it’s being said in a public way.
I don’t think I would agree that just because something is public that it’s a public forum. I feel like the public has to own it as well. I looked it up and maybe it’s because I predate social media by rather a lot, but I think of it in the classical sense:
Public forums are typically categorized into three types:
- Traditional Public Forums: Long-established spaces like parks or sidewalks, where people have historically exercised their rights to free speech and assembly.
- Designated Public Forums: Areas that the government intentionally opens up for public expression, such as town halls or school meeting rooms.
- Limited Public Forums: Spaces opened for specific types of discussions or activities but with certain restrictions on the subject matter or participants.
The important factor being public ownership of the forum. I will concede that it has colloquially come to include public social media, but I think it’s important to distinguish that it’s not really the same thing at all as has been discussed through most of our history.
Food for thought. I just think calling them public forums attaches too much importance to a profit seeking endeavor.
Exactly. You were much more articulate than I, with my comparison, but it was effectively the point I was trying to make — it’s not a public forum at all and it’s now overrun by a cesspool of nonsensical garbage.
City council meetings are public meetings. But if you go in there and start swearing your head off and using the N-word you will be removed because you are distupting the ability of rational people to have a discussion.
Twitter has decided to let these freaks scream their heads off. This disrupting its ability to be used as a public forum. It is no longer a public forum. It’s just 4Chan now. Sane people wanting to have discussions don’t use 4Chan.
Where’s the “CALL ME THE MEME LORD” meme
I swear I’ve read this exact headline a year or so ago already.
Everythings made up, and the headlines don’t matter.
He keeps floating it, but hasent done it yet.
They clearly have internal data that top alt right posters are getting blocked too much for Musk’s tastes, so here it is again.
other than userbase, what does twitter have that mastodon does not have? genuinely curious
An egotistical twat at the helm.
Better media and infrastructure support, name recognition, corporate privacy issues instead of no privacy whatsoever, ads, pay-to-win social ‘cred’ (blue check-mark), an insane leader, and an algorithm controlling your content.
Better media and infrastructure support
the only positive you’ve stated lol. man, do I wish the fediverse would take off
I’ve come to the conclusion that it never will. Be happy with what it is. It’ll slowly grow for a few years, and slowly die at the same time.
What eventually will happen is the fediverse will be so niche that less than 1000 people will use it.
Which is sad because IF it had the userbase, it would last basically forever. Because it can scale, and adapt to a changing world. It can scale itself indefinately as long as there is interest. It has the basic foundation for being able to uproot corporate ownership elsewhere.
But the reason it never will is the same reason Linux never will be even in the same conversation as the dominant operating systems. It’s because it’s formed niche concepts which confuse the average user. I’ve been here 5 months, with more posts than most I come into contact with. Yet I still feel like I must not be getting something. It feels off.
It’s more than just decentralized. It’s fragmented. The people who write the code seem to think that the average person gives two shits about decentralized. They don’t. At all. If anything it’s a hinderence to them, because it makes things harder to understand.
And THATS the problem. If you call the average person “normies”, then you’re sending a clear line between them and you. As if they don’t belong.
The best way to attract “normies” is to make things easy. Painfully easy. Preschool levels of easy.
My niece has been using an iPad since she was like 2 years old. My sister, who bought the iPad has ZERO clue how to use it.
These are the people who live on this planet.
With both Linux and the fediverse, the same mentality from the creators seems to be in use. “If I had to deal with it being hard, so do you”. And that’s a deal breaker for the vast majority.
There needs to be a set of standards that ALL fediverse services and instances need to adhere to. It can still be defederated, but it should FEEL unified. That means one set of usernames. It means if you don’t like the instance you’re on, you can transfer your account. All your settings, all your post history, all your upvotes would come with you. When you’re signing up, you get the choice between the default behavior of random home instance. Which would place you on any random instance which accepts public resignation. OR you can choose any instance that will have you.
This would please the idea of no single instance growing too big. While also keeping individual public instances from clumping same minded people, which then introduces different instances all having different personalities. Ideally you want fediverse nuetrality. Just people, all people, on all machines.
But that’s why the fediverse won’t grow. SOMEONE will come along and say “Well it won’t work because…”
To which I say MAKE it work. Otherwise the fediverse won’t be attractive to average people. Google looked at linux and said “We’ll MAKE it work.” And today Android is the most widely used cell phone OS in the world. While traditional linux has less than 5% adoption rate.
Android is something you don’t need to explain. It doesn’t work like windows. So you can’t blame that. It had no preexisting muscle memory, so you can’t blame that. They just put it in peoples hands in 2009, and said “This is android. Use it.”
And people didn’t need to watch tutorial videos. They didn’t need to learn new things. They just picked it up, knowing nothing about what a smart phone even was. In those days touch screens were even a novel new concept. And people just got it. They understood right from the start how it worked.
That’s what the fediverse needs. Simplicity that doesn’t need explaining, and cross adoption. So if you get a Lemmy account, it makes sense to get a pixelfed account instead of an Instgram.
But thats not what the developers of these systems are doing. That’s not whats being worked on. It never will. Don’t look for it. What we have is what we got. We might get a slight increase in users, but not anything significant. Because there is no unity in the decentralization.
Name recognition and privacy are also positives though.
Although they are bad long term. Any platform reaching critical mass is invaded by the corporations, fanatics and propaganda campaigns.
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name recognition
Though that is debatable, given how hard that they’ve been trying to shed it for the “X” name for ages.
Ability to actually find interesting content. I want an algo, but at this point I want more of what Bluesky does but for Mastodon.
good point, I agree.
Shit tons of racists.
If the block feature goes away, I guarantee it will come back for - at the very least - the highest tier of paid accounts almost immediately afterwards.
I can’t imagine any of the large corps that still use Xitter for customer communication will be happy not being able to block serial trolls. Or people with legitimate grievances who won’t go away.
the block function will block that account from engaging with, but not block seeing, a public post
Could be worse. I never liked the idea of blocking “hiding” your content from other people to begin with. It makes it too easy to give trolls the confirmation they succeeded in getting under your skin, encouraging them to make another account to continue harassing their victim.
Hopefully when Musk does this it will convince my addicted friends to drop the platform when their stalkers can all suddenly contact them again.
Or maybe it’ll get the EU to ban the platform like Brazil did.
I have started to actively avoid brands, journalists etc. who still use Twitter as their primary social media presence.
lol, what?
At this point if you’re still on Shitter you kinda deserve whatever you get
I agree that X is enemy territory now, but in a world where billionaires can buy up all the major means of communication, it doesn’t feel like enough to just close up our accounts and move on. They can follow us wherever our accounts go and buy platforms out from under us. Lemmy and Mastodon are slightly better as open decentralized platforms, but they still could be attacked by Musk if he had the initiative to.
I’m saying it now: Get an amateur radio license and pay ARRL dues. We’re going to need to protect that bandwidth.
But I need that to block the 15 bots that follow me each day
A browser plugin bringing the functionality back would probably do well.
That makes no sense. You can filter them out of your feed pretty easily, but they’ll still be able to interact with you and of course bring a lot of new toxic users to you. Your browser can’t do anything about that, it’s entirely Twitter’s side.
I meant in terms of hiding a particular user.
To me, blocking means “I don’t see $”. Not “$ doesn’t see me”. Ad blocking, script blocking, site blocking via DNS, etc is my mental model.
Looks like that’s basically what’s happening now that I looked into it more. Like I believe the “hide” user button is the same (idk I haven’t been on the site forever lol), and the block basically blocks interaction but doesn’t hide it. Honestly makes sense because you could see the user who blocked you if you simply clicked a thread link in private browsing.
Like if you replied and blocked me on Lemmy, I could still open the thread in incognito or whatever and see the whole public thread but not reply to you. Seems actually reasonable tbh, since the blocker and block-ee doesn’t lose or gain anything they couldn’t already do already.
That’s how Reddit used to work until they made the idiotic change (IMO) to go the other way. A blockee loses the ability to even participate in any thread/post started by the blocker.
For example, after the change if I blocked you now, you wouldn’t be able to respond to me or anyone else further down a thread I started.
This is a boon to bullshitters, disinformation campaigns, etc since those people could just post their bullshit and then block anyone who attempted to call them out.
The delete account button is still there.
I’d say “for now”, but at least we’ve got the EU protecting us from that possibility.
When I comment that Twitter is trash and I’d never use it, the response I often get is ‘it’s actually pretty good after you block all the trolls and bots and corporate accounts and politicians and blue checks’… 🙄
Before the musk acquisition I had something like 8,000 people blocked… mostly the inane shit like “Patriot Christian Dog Mom” or incredible douchebags like “dc_draino”.
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Journalist James Ball noted that this is not the first time that Musk has made similar threats to reimagine the block function, suggesting it may be a false alarm.
But hey, at least we got to sell more ad space by printing another article about it…
I mean, Twitter’s blocking policy goes way too far… but axing them completely? I dunno about that one chief.
People need to get the fuck off twitter.
