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Reclipse@lemdro.id to Technology@lemmy.world – 68 points –
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It feels like for every small step taken towards a decentralised social network we get a giant leap back to centralised networks run by surveillance capitalist billionaires

But picking an instance is so hard 😭

This is why we can't have nice things. People literally want to be told what to do.

But picking all instance is so hard

I mean actually kinda yes. I'm pretty techy and I spent a few days trying to figure out which one I would use. Ultimately landed on .world because I didn't want to do an interview. Other people might be turned away from that, but maybe it's a good thing.

So much of the systemic problems in the world stem from that sort of mentality

21st century people have only ever known capitalist control, they can't help it

Eh, it also helps that it's from a recognisable brand that people already understand. Decentralised social networks have a long way to go to meet the elevator-pitch test, as it were.

Not to say that it makes it any less bad, but just that it's at the very least understandable - I can easily see the "average person" saying "I want to leave Twitter" and just picking something is relatively similar, with a single logon page that just works out of the gate.

I've been busy all day, but I've just seen through talking with others how threads is basically blowing up today and lots of our local Twitter accounts, companies, bigger celebrities/influencers and more are going to it and sharing their accounts.

And it just makes me so fucking sad to see people embrace Facebook again when a decentralized, grassroots, non corporate alternative was already right there. It's a lot of "liberal" people, too.

It's sad but understandable. One is the company that people already know and their favorite celebrity just announced their new account, the other is 'wtf is fediverse and federation'?

My worry here is the fact they want to federate with things like Lemmy. We want the users, but we don't want the corporate overlords, and most new users won't know the difference.

The good thing is the corporate overlords have no control over other instances, except to defederate from them

Google basically killed Jabber/XMPP doing exactly what Meta/Facebook is doing here.

In all honesty, the lawful evil Zucc is better than the chaotic evil Musk, at least for now.

Zucc is a greedy asshole, but I think he knows when to sit back, and let the smarter people make decisions.

Musk is an arrogant, insufferable fuck. Epitome of a know-it-all.

Zucc is a greedy asshole, but I think he knows when to sit back, and let the smarter people make decisions.

Eh, the whole Metaverse fiasco. But he's at least not an outspoken Fascist, which makes him somewhat good in today's dystopian world.

Are you saying Musk is a fascist? The guy that’s championing free speech and got rid of all the people that were censoring opinions, and working with government officials to lie about and censor stories?

I guess the word fascist really has lost all meaning with people these days.

If this is your view of Musk then you really need to pay attention. He claims to be fighting for free speech, when it's so obvious he just pushing his own very specific agenda harder than even the most biased people before him. Honestly I'm surprised people are still around believing the bs about him being in favour of free speech.

He can push his agenda as much as he want, but he’s not censoring any speech. He’s not silencing anyone. That’s not fascism.

As long as there are algorithms there is censorship. Censorship mean to hide stuffs for people and that what algorithms do

Not even remotely the same as what Twitter was doing before he bought it, and no algorithms don’t just hide stuff.

Elon musk isn’t a fascist because he’s done the opposite of what a fascist would do with his platform. Like I said, the word fascist doesn’t mean what it’s now being used as. Ironically it’s the people calling for censorship that are calling other people fascists.

Which makes him even more dangerous. In my personal world all centralized social networks would be put into Musk’s hand and Zucc behind bars for every genocide, election sway and dictator Facebook has enabled and will enable in the future.

I think it's important to realist that it's not at all about the owner to be evil or benevolent. It is all about what structural and economic incentives exist. A for-profit corporation based on the business model of advertisement is structurally incompatible with some objectives that I - as a netizen - want to achieve (freedom, privacy).

This is also why I don't agree with those of "it's a win for decentralized" or "it will bring users". For me decentralization and other properties (e.g. OpenSource code) are only some necessary conditions to achieve the above abstract and ideological goals.

The issue is that Twitter, even with Musk hammering nails into it, is still a better social media than Threads. Threads has no way to even limit your timeline to only people you follow or view posts in reverse chronological order. It's all algorithm and Zuck shoving brands in your face.

Plus Twitter remains one of the last few major havens for NSFW socials, and I doubt Threads will be any more lenient than Instagram's strict rules.

I'm just really hoping that Mastodon gets more traction, but it feels like the realistic version of David vs Goliath where the little guy gets squashed.

At the same time, with Twitter in its current state, it is basically unusable for social media, since your average account is limited to about 300 - 600 requests, which includes every single interaction and loading of all posts you see.

It's mostly better than twitter, in that it actually functions reasonably well, and it's obviously considerably worse than Mastodon (especially compared to the Ivory app)

  • The biggest downside is the timeline seems to show a mixture of accounts you follow and other accounts, seemingly suggested accounts that it thinks you might want to follow. I can't see any way to only see posts from accounts you follow.
  • The timeline isn't chronological and I can't see a way to make it chronological
  • You can't edit posts

Their competition is with Twitter. They are not competing with Mastodon (atleast for now).

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It's a bit sad to see the state of things, where the only options the average Joe knows about when wanting to jump ship from Twitter are either a new app by one of the usual megacorporations, a dodgy app built to cater the ultranationalist circles that keep getting banned from everywhere else, or both at the same time.

As long as I don't have to interact with that instance I'm OK. I'd rather not ever federate with Meta though

I downloaded it and it instantly wanted my age, so that was a fast delete, didn't even get logged in

Ofcourse it wanted to know your age. You could have just lied if you wanted to just test the app.

Sooo ... we're just gonna take Zuck on his word here ... does anyone know for sure how many people are on there?

Musk is going to be pissed. Let's see if the cage match happens.