Elon doesn't want you browsing Twitter

HunterBidensLapDog@infosec.pub to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 525 points –

You know how people looked at the dumb decisions of #StocktonRush and said don't get in the #Titan ?

Don't get into an #ElonMusk #Tesla or #SpaceX

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I'm pretty happy just using Lemmy and discord, I deleted Twitter and reddit because of recent events, it's definitely helped keeping my screen time down and discord typically leads to more fulfilling conversations imo

You might want to also replace Discord if you care about your data.

I'd love to, but there's no equivalent. My friend group and I need voice channels with ACL, streaming support, video chat support, and webhook/bot support.

Check out Revolt, it's basically a Discord clone without the bullshit. Matrix is getting close to being full replacement, but still lacks some features.

Being open source definitely is a plus for Revolt. Gonna give it a good try.

Guilded or Revolt seem like good alternatives if you can convince your entire community to move over, might still have privacy issues but I'm not really sure.

Moving to a different closed source platform feels pointless at this point, but maybe Lemmy is spoiling me

This right here. Honestly, if we're taking the time to hop platforms and start bolstering the next wave of popular sites and services, why make the same mistake again as the last time around?

No matter how much a company talks about how ethical they want to be or how much they value doing the right thing for their clients, once money enters the picture on a wider scale and people start looking in the direction of an eventual IPO, everything goes to shit.

Meanwhile, IRC is still working just fine. No degradation of services after decades. You can still throw your own ircd up on a $3/mo VPS and be golden.

Moving everything to open source, decentralized platforms can only be a boon for all of us in the long run. Anything less is just kicking the problem down the road a little.

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Unfortunately, Discord can't be replaced right now. All my gaming friends are using it and I don't see any FOSS software that can replace it right now.

Irc + mumble used to be my goto 15 years ago. It would still work, but understandably a bit less refined

If you care about keeping your data private then why are you on the fediverse? Everything here is public. Anyone can datamine if they want. And you can't even delete your data if you want (since there are backups on different instances). Even your DM's can be read by the admins of your or the recipients instance.

That's the purpose of public forum. There is a difference between Fediverse selling your data and someone scraping comments you made publicially. They also offer Send Secure Message if the user has added their Matrix handle. Which offers E2E by default for private messages.

I also believe the delete issue was resolved, but not sure if it was merged already.

Unfortunately it just seems too hard to care about my data anymore

Damn this site is great! Shame I never heard of it before. One thing I love about the fediverse is the amount of actual useful info being shared in more general communities instead of just focused communities.

Honestly, I’d leave Discord if I could back up my chat history. I have a chat with my boyfriend going on for two years.

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Matrix protocol as a replacement for discord

There need to be serious improvements in the VoiP but someday I think it will be a true replacement.

Any replacement for Discord is going to run into the AIM problem. Even years after nobody was on AOL, AIM remained the biggest instant messenger client simply because it had the most users. A big factor in it losing its dominance, though, was Trillian. Once you could have all your accounts in one place, it kind of made it starkly obvious which ones were redundant. At the same time, it made the barrier for entry feel lower.

Instead of needing different clients for ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, and MSN, you could have it all in one place, packaged with a totally garbage IRC client. So if you had friends on, say, ICQ, there was little reason not to register an account.

This is what we need with Discord. A client that people can migrate to because it's objectively better, which allows them to connect both to Discord and to an open source Discord killer (a Disczilla, if you like). That way nobody has to convince whole ass communities at a time. You can slowly osmosize over as the client gets popular without having to have that critical mass from day 1 to draw people.

I just need a good worldnews and news sub on lemmy and I’ll be set. I enjoy following the Ukraine war through the worldnews sub.

Try out !world@lemmy.world for your world news, seems pretty decent.

Thanks! Memmy is an amazing app so far! Loving it. Feels exactly like Apollo it’s a shame Christian didn’t wanna head over to Lemmy.

I just love solid megathreads on Reddit worldnews to follow along with everything about the war. That I’ll miss the most.

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It seems they're just trying to make it seem intentional when really, they're just struggling now that their Google Cloud contract has expired.

In 2018, Twitter signed a $1 billion contract with Google to host some of its services on the company’s Google Cloud servers. Platformer reports Twitter recently refused to pay the search giant ahead of the contract’s June 30th renewal date. Twitter is reportedly rushing to move as many services off of Google’s infrastructure before the contract expires, but the effort is “running behind schedule,” putting some tools, including Smyte, a platform the company acquired in 2018 to bolster its moderation capabilities, in danger of going offline. Engadget, June 11, 2023

  • fire most your staff
  • boost shit content, hide real content
  • force users whove blocked you to see your content anyways
  • refuse to pay your contractors / services

Elon 'the genius' Musk

I could never understand what drew people to Twitter. I just want to stab myself in the eyes everytime I end up there.

I feel like part of what caused it to explode is that some celebrities joined up early and it provided a tangible way for fans to interact directly with them. This was totally novel and completely unprecedented. Prior to Twitter you could watch Entertainment Tonight and read People magazine. Twitter let you directly contact celebrities.

I really couldn't care less about celebrities, which I have always thought is part of why Twitter has always felt kind of pointless to me.

But I fully recognize that for some people that's a huge draw and I do think it's a big part of what makes Twitter popular.

For a moment in time, Twitter livestreaming the Arab spring and other mass demonstrations was more effective than the CIA at toppling regimes

Each time a platform reaches enough popularity to attract an average voter, people starts to blame the platform for being stupid. I'm waiting for the day we collectively realize it's not the platform we hate, it's the average person.

The average person it's fine, it's when they're in a group and you get the average of the average people that things get dumb.

When you have one guy in town that's an idiot, that guy is the village idiot. The village idiot know he's the dumbest guy in town and so will tend to listen to the people smarter than him.

But with the internet you're getting a lot of people together and letting them find groups they fit into. That's mostly a good thing.

But all the village idiots get into a group together where they only people they're talking to are other village idiots. Then they start thinking their idiocy is right. And they stop listening to the people smarter than them.

Then you have a lot of confident idiots who bring everyone down to their level.

It's the same thing that makes any social media attractive: everybody else is there and it's where things are happening. This critical mass of users is the hardest thing for a website to gain and the hardest to lose.

It's a toolkit that allows people to imagine themselves as an online celebrity. Or maybe a cult leader.

Lots of followers liking the things you say at the ready anytime you want to pretend that you have adoring fans.

Taking bets : when will spez do the same thing ?

Already seen some screenshots from people trying to reddit in their mobile browser, despite being logged in. Their popup had the classic 'View in App', but the 'Continue in browser' was replaced with 'Take me outta here' or something to that effect, and would take them to the previous page in their browser.

I can appreciate this distinction on NSFW content without a logged in user, because of concerns with age verification. But it seems some users were part of a selected testing group to migrate users into the app almost completely.

Considering that Firefox browser can block ads on reddit (and that browser reddit still runs better than app reddit) there's definitely pressure for Reddit to drive users to their app with a stick. They certainly don't offer carrots.

I do not understand his logic. It could be due to coding issues but his vague statement plus all the antics since he took over is just very suspect. Feels like he is working on another money grab idea.

t could be due to coding issues

It's self inflicted. This is what happens when you turn API's off or make them unaffordable.

instead of using a low resource API entry, sites now switch to full on scraping which uses huge amounts of resources.

He's probably not really focused on Twitter but focused on using Twitter staff for getting X.com ready so they do a huge rebrand.

That does make sense, which haven’t they been running on a skeleton crew for months now? Also, what is up with the weird obsession with “X”?

Twitter went from like 7000 employees down to 1000. So skeleton crew for sure. There's also speculation that they didn't migrate all the data off Google cloud services so they lost a bunch of data as the contract ended June 30th.

As for the X thing no idea his obsession I'd probably guess he thinks he's like the modern day iron man or professor Xavier for the gifted with x men.

I'll give credit where credit is due he's really good at being able to raise capital but in terms of actual business execution he falls flat to me.

I suspect his "logic" is that most users only read & do not interact or post (IIRC the general rule for socials is 90/9/1), so in addition to whatever technical reason, he thinks this is a genius way to get more subscribers.

Fucking genius move, so glad he's fired everyone who would disagree.

It's about making it more difficult to get access to download all of Twitter for use in training AI. chatGPT was trained using Twitter and Reddit. And large language models like chatGPT are HUGE money makers and have insane potential. The AI industry is exploding right now, so Twitter, Reddit, and others are adjusting how you can access their content so they can charge big companies money for the right to use their data.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure reddit allowed openAI to train on their network and Musk was a big donor of OpenAI. So wouldnt these API changes be to monopolize the market since OpenAI has access to both these sites and is the leader in the field.

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"Pay for your news feed and comments we demand it! Stop blocking our ads it's not fair" ~ venture capital schmucks everywhere

this is genuinely mind boggling. So he plans on eventualy making twitter pay to play!?

How long until it's exactly like truth social and the right wingers aren't having fun because all the liberals they depend on left?

When has the internet ever been willing to switch to paying for a service that used to be free?

Yes, sort of. Elmo saddled the company with $12.5 billion in debt while alienating the advertisers which was where the majority of Twitter's revenue came from. Revenue has to come from somewhere. BuuuUUUUUuut, Elmo is in over his head, doesn't really understand Twitter's business model, and is making decisions by the seat of his pants. The answer to every question may as well be yes, no, maybe.

Maybe the super-rich want Twitter gone because they saw how it was used to organise protests during the Arab Spring. Musk is just the guy making it happen.

I said this when the sale first happened. Those billionaire Saudis didn't loan him the 8 bil needed to finance the sale, they gave it to him as payment for a job. And it's 100% the long tail of the Arab spring reaction

I don't think it's anything so specific, but the rich and powerful most definitely want to keep social media under their control so as to keep populations under control.

Though that's not about always preventing protests. They likely want destabilization to happen, just only in the countries they want it to happen in.

I mean if the goal was to prevent ALL protest, twitter would be boosting only happy thoughts and photos of kittens and puppies right now. But instead it's pushing some fascist shit. Not exactly stuff that promotes stability.

Or maybe some branch of Operation Mindfuck is converting rich silicon valley cryptobro jackasses into useful idiots to trigger an open source social media revolution.

This might actually get more people to move to Mastodon as the influencer accounts will want as many eyeballs as possible instead of only people with a twitter account, and these companies are rich enough to setup their Mastodon instance where they get to control their content instead of Musk.

Unfortunately, I'm just seeing a wave of "here's my Bluesky account" tweets from the few holdouts I still followed on Twitter.

That's cool and all, Mr/Ms Internet Celebrity, but none of us peasants have access to that site.

People are going to want to try different things, as it's complete chaos right now since the foundations of Internet advertising is being shaken to its core because of all the centralized services are making one bad decision after another.

New forms of marketing will definitely emerge from this, we just don't know what yet, but setting up a Mastodon or Lemmy server should be trivial for these large media companies, and they won't have to deal with verification anymore.

I loooooove seeing Twitter unalive itself

I had a Twitter account for about a week that I posted with, after that I made a new one and never posted. The most toxic disgusting social media site I have ever been on. The one and only good thing about it was how the local governments where I lived used to make all announcements with it. I plan to bring my kids to the reading event at the library, better check Twitter. Oh it got moved an hour later. Also the local mass transit system used it.

Elongated Muskrat throttling legitemate twitter users to keep AI out the door seems to be a good thing for the Fediverse & Mastodon in particular.

Plus that makes two services on their way to the grave on the guise of "keeping AI out." *slow clap*

First time I've ever agreed with Elon on anything. I don't want to be browsing Twitter either.

The big name platforms literally forgot its the community that makes them. They think its their platform. It never has been.

Social media sites used to be a revolving door but for a while the big ones have been pretty locked in. They're getting overconfident and forgetting how easy it is to leave a website

It can happen here over time too. If the people running their instances somehow all get replaced with corpo instances. So we still need to watch out. It would just take a vast amount of effort and is highly unlikely.

If anything I'd say it's far more likely on a platform still establishing itself. Of course, the fediverse has a solid failsafe against stupid corporations actively trying to ruin it. But at this stage anything that scares users away will kill the platform real quick

I would have to agree. Though in the fediverse we can just move instances and pick back up on unaffected communities like nothing happened. Hopefully this means we can avoid enshitification and future mass exodus because a CEO wanted his product to be savory to investors.

Great to know Elon cares this much about my mental health.

Once Musk took over Twitter, and he opened his day with firing half his staff, we kinda knew he was going to enshittify Twitter into irrelevance. Now we're watching as the world catches up and seeks alternative platforms for general announcements.

While I think it would be more than a few minutes, this would still limit people's time on Twitter. I can't imagine advertisers are super happy about that idea.

It is like a manager at an oil company just torching the wells or a store owner closing the doors.

#Sorry, I couldn't #read all of that. Too many #hashtags in the #way of the #tweet.

#Lemmy #FuckTwitter #PostedOnMyIphone #ihavenoideawhatimdoing

I wonder if reddit, twitter and youtube all got around a table one day and decided that no, actually, screw the users entirely.

Because they are all doing really bizzare things.

Normally not a comment I'd apply wordy science too, but let's see if I can do better than an upvote. Because this is exactly what I can't let go lately.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/18/1/013029/pdf

Authorship of paper is 2016, and we're always talking about larger populations than CEOs, so there is going to be 0 scientific rigor that can be applied to any study.

Still given the perspective of social behavior being about the product of advocates/bigots on any platform; where are the good, non rent seeking social media CEOs? The standard bad behavior of social networks is always around the issue of monetization, the first wave of 'well meaning' people have been replaced with a mandate for profit and a limited playbook. The social contagion was taking buyouts, now it's turning screws to users.

Weirdly Zuckerberg looks like a model citizen, he's still playing the growth game.

It's probably VC money running dry. With interest rates higher than zero, we risking putting your money in some online firm that never made a profit when you can get 3-4ish% with hardly any risk.

this is the dumbest thing i have ever seen in my fucking life, holy fucking god

we're reaching levels of capitalism that shouldn't even be possible!

Based on how much Mastodon is struggling right now, I'm guessing they're getting another boost today, too..

I don't know much about Mastodon — how is it struggling?

Much the same way Lemmy is struggling right now. The server are taking a beating. (At least they are on mas.to where I hang out)

I can't think of any reason one would want to stay on the birdsite any longer. What's the use if you can't have full access to people's posts?

When I gave twitter a go to try and fill the Apollo shape hole in me I noticed the toxic algorithim and brain dead users so I am glad that I found Lemmy. I am just really confused as to what Elon is doing? He seems to be throwing money away for the fun of it.

He’s obviously playing 6-D chess, and us plebs just can’t see the bigger picture /s

I have a friend who literally believe this. He's so positive about everything Elon does. I don't want to waste time arguing, so I just ignore it.

Guess Mastodon is gonna get hit by a wave of newcomers...

Crawlers and scrapper bots consume a fuckload of traffic, that much is true. But I think it's a bit too late, there's already enough "twitter warehouse of posts in X language" to feed most AI needs, at least for coming up with short answers.

Also, I can't believe Elon did something that could be generally seen as a good thing overall (forcing people to spend less time on twitter)

I've been saying it for months. Teslas are inherantly unsafe and I won't ride in one.

Maybe Elon is playing 4D Chess and trying to stop people from turning into Terminally Online Twitter Radicals.

Why the downvotes tho? I thought it was a funny joke.

Poster can't read?

To limit data scraping and system manipulation.

Wait for it, coming to Lemmy soon... ('cos right now it isn't interesting enough to scrape).