Some day, we’ll have a technology sub that isn’t polluted with Twitter “news”.
It’s a tech company that is burning itself to a ground. Hard to take your eyes off of a slow moving car crash.
Never understood why we call them tech companies to be honest. There is nothing technologically interesting at twitter. And if there is… it is never the subject.
If I remember, tech companies are generally those whose primary products are digitally based. And technology these days has essentially become synonymous woth the internet.
So I think the main thing is scale—they’re tech companies (in the category they’re in) because of the engineering required to build & maintain something that operates at the scale they do
And IMO at least in the early years it was pretty impressive what Twitter was capable of in terms of technology.
This is a bit of a learning experience though.
The big tech companies advocated during 2020 that they were not biased and should not be held responsible for policing the Internet.
Since then, FB swapped to Meta to cover up the documents showing FB is intentionally causing psychological damage our children because it gives them more clicks/view time.
OpenAI scraped the Internet, legally and illegally to power ChatGPT.
Twitter, a social media company known for free speech, was bought by Musk, a former Trump associate. Trump was reinstated during this period and dissent was banned.
Google decided to push web DRM to force us to use their software or else we can’t access the Internet.
Sounds like they very much want to police the Internet. We just aren’t putting the pieces together in a collective way.
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Well, I suspect since free money is gone, everyone’s looking at private “donations” which also have private incentives.
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Higher interest rates. Free money means you can spend a lot on trash projects that generate hype but no money. Expensive money means every dollar needs revenue.
On Reddit I’ve found most of the news about the big social networks is posted by only handful accounts, they also don’t post other interesting things, so you can just block them.
I’m hoping that’ll work on Lemmy as well.
I haven’t seen an option to block people here on Lemmy. I’m a new migrant (12+ years on reddit, nuked to oblivion), so maybe I just haven’t seen the option yet. But i did look for a quick second before posting this reply, to no avail.
That’s just true of social media in general. 1% of the accounts generate 99% of the content.
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Mastodon would be my personal preference, but Bluesky seems pretty noisy to me, which seems like what people want from microblogging sites (I’m more of a reddit/lemmy/kbin style person, myself.) The question is whether Bluesky pulls a Google+ and stays invite-only for so long that they miss their own hype train.
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Keep in mind that I barely use it and only follow a few people I followed from TwiX.
People seemed friendly enough but there is a lot of self-serving navel gazing, and it seems like the “Discover” feed is full of inside jokes/references that I don’t use the app enough to get.
My first day the big thing was complaining about how terrible and bigoted the devs of bluesky were, for something they said that I never did figure out, and the subsequent complaining about people complaining about the devs. Very dramatic.
To be fair, I’m sure if you just followed the people you cared about, and avoided the discover feed, it would be pretty Twitter-like.
Also, there’s a character limit and you can’t edit. These aren’t technical limitations anymore, like they were for Twitter at the beginning, so they must be design decisions.
If I had an invite left I’d give you one.
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I have tried all the things! And I recently saw that article you’re referencing.
In my own experience, I haven’t seen one single person being rude or mean or blowing off newcomers. I suspect the bar to entry is slightly higher because you have to get your head around how the fediverse works, so the types of people coming here trend more patient. It’s also a slower pace here, which can be good or bad depending on what you like.
The nicest feature for my use is that you can follow just about anyone anywhere. On kbin especially. There you can follow users from any Lemmy instance, or an entire instance, as well as users at Mastodon. The downside is that it can be a little tricky at first to figure out how to follow someone who’s on another instance. It’s not hard, but it’s something new if you’re coming from a single entity site like Twitter.
It’s also no big deal to make an account on multiple instances if you’re not sure where to go. My approach with all of them was to browse the local server (e.g., lemmy.world, mastodon.social) rather than the federated feed. The local feed gives you an idea of who’s on that instance, what topics come up a lot, how the users act, etc. I’d also check out the “about” section. That will show you who the moderators are and what their focus and approach is. Some are laissez-faire and others are much more curated, so there’s something for everyone.
The neat thing about this system is that you can find more niche instances if you have a particular interest – gaming, software development, climate, science, memes, etc. You can make that your main instance and still see everything going on across all instances. That helps eliminate a lot of FOMO.
I was never on Twitter and not on most social media except Reddit, which I thought I’d miss. But I’ve enjoyed using Mastodon, Firefish, and Lemmy/kbin a lot. It’s a smaller group but still plenty to see and lots of interesting people and topics. Everyone has been very nice, but it’s easy to mute or block people or subs that you’re not interested in. After that you won’t see them in your feed at all.
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Ha, sorry! I guess being on them hasn’t improved my reading skills. :-D
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Looking at who’s involved with blue sky, though, I can’t help wondering how many times the users need to be taught the same lesson.
I have come over a few Reddit communities who moved to Discord of all things. I don’t get why. That isn’t even remotely the same type of discussion platform.
I’m really not a fan of Discord. Why would anyone use a platform that’s not accessible without making an account and requires an invite to each group? If it wasn’t branded towards gamers I don’t think it would have much appeal.
Imo it’s because sites like reddit make communities too open. It’s common knowledge that once a sub regularly makes it to r/all, it loses all identity and joins the vague soup of r/all content which everyone upvotes with no regard for the source.
A lot of people don’t want one big page with all the biggest communities thrown together. They just want to follow what they like and nothing else.
That said, the chat room format of discord is a pretty awkward stand-in for a forum type of community.
Discord has its uses but it’s very much not the same. I often can’t even find my question I asked an hour later.
At least for me, Mastodon replaced Twitter and Lemmy replaced Reddit. But then, I’m not “normal” and find the Fediverse to be endlessly fascinating.
I mean i moved to misskey/firefish which was awesome, but in my friend groups many of them just quit twitter & spent more time on discord, instagram, tiktok, etc. other places which they engaged w/ ppl 🤷🏿♂️ (fg age range: late millenial/gen z)
Most folks I follow went to Mastodon. I even met some new folks, including some that are local!
Some are still on twitter even though a small number of us begged/pleaded with them.
One went to blue sky.
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Don’t forget Threads.
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It’s fun to snark on threads but yes, it had 100 million signups in a week and 50 million people still using it.
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I don’t support Meta and they’re not a good company. I was merely answering the question about where people went.
Meta is a public company though so they could get in legal trouble for false reports, and there’s also a bunch of ways advertisers can check metrics.
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A big chunk of those would be bots/fake/spam accounts, ie not real users. Marketing companies have already started selling fake followers for Thread influencers.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/yes-already-buy-fake-followers-145053836.html
How many people do you think are on lemmy compared to threads lol
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This is speculation but I suspect people are already oversubscribed to social media and just spending a bit longer in other places they already go. So if they’re on Discord, they’re probably just spending more time there.
Offline?
If your main social network is on fire, you’re probably just going to put the phone down and do something else, especially if you’re not on another social network.
The learning curve with getting used to a new one might be a more than what most people really want to do with their time and energy, so they might just be curbing their Twitter use.
I thought it was the same thing that happens with these “content creator” in every niche. Over saturation requiring these greater extremes to get more attention.
