Concerns over the enablement of stalkers and trolls abound
Elon Musk’s latest changes for X are driving more users away – not exactly a surprise, granted – and many of them are flocking to rival social media outlet Bluesky. So many made the switch, in fact, it led to Bluesky briefly going down due to the volume of incoming new users.
The central move initiated by X that made the headlines for driving migration away from Musk’s platform is a change to the way the ‘Block’ button works. This was actually announced back in September, but is officially being implemented now (well, it’ll be in place ‘soon’ we’re told).
It means that going forward, X users who you have blocked will still be able to view your (public) posts – though they won’t be able to engage with them in any way (from replies to liking and so forth).
This is problematic for obvious reasons, in terms of enabling stalkers and trolls who will still be able to view the posts of an account that has blocked them, when previously this wasn’t the case. In the past, blocking meant that the blocked user couldn’t see any posts (or anything at all, save for a message telling them that they’ve been blocked), but soon, this will change.
Bluesky posted to say it had in excess of 100,000 new users inside 12 hours following the announcement by X, after the rival network highlighted the fact that its block function stops those who are blocked from viewing any posts.
In an update, Bluesky noted that it has now gained half a million new users in the past day.
There’s another reason that some folks are rapidly exiting from X stage left (and right, and indeed center, clambering over the audience, it would seem), and that’s a change to X’s privacy policy.
As TechCrunch reports, the new policy includes an update that allows third-party collaborators to use content on X to train their AI models – unless the user opts out. This is a notable extension of the reach of AI training on X, which has so far only been used to train Musk’s own Grok AI (unless users opt out, again).
This is in fact precisely what happens. LLM output becomes increasingly incoherent with each subsequent generation trained off of previously AI generated data.
Man I think it's already done, and been done for a long time, without AI. So much of who we are now is based on and informed by what we've read and watched online. It's our been our dominant frame of reference, language and value system for quite a while. We are the AI.
I've stopped recommending it. The discovery and trending post mechanisms are either garbage or non-existent, and it's really hard to get a feed that's remotely entertaining. Devs also seem ideologically opposed to adding any features like that. It'll just give normal people who aren't willing to deal with all this crap a bad taste in their mouth when it comes to the fediverse. I do recommend lemmy to people tho.
Mastodon's hashtag following is by far the best discovery method out there.
I've stopped using Bluesky because I can't find any content and there's just too much "screaming into the void" making it impossible to find anything of substance.
I've stopped using Threads because it's just engagement bait.
While I agree that it makes Mastodon less entertaining I also think that it makes it a lot more fair, representative and trustworthy as a lens through which to observe & participate in social discourse and share information and opinions. That in itself will probably mean that it remains less popular but I think it's also what makes it more valuable IMO. We need to calm down from the urgency of the digital dopamine cycle, for many reasons. If social media is a truly human media then it should be boring at times because that is a human reality that we are adapted to.
I wonder if they’re afraid of Eternal September’ing the service. A lot of people on Lemmy were upset when a bunch of people on Reddit joined. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have millions join in one day. I doubt it would be good for the culture of the community!
Lemmy and Bluesky are what I use, atproto is just much more promising for microblogging than activitypub and Mastodon proves that. Lemmy is perfect for it though.
Another issue I had was hundreds of saved toots having had awesome pictures, important data or things to do.
I saved them hoping to use some later, but it all remained an unorganized glop: unusable unless I looked at each one again, in order, to find the 75th one back, about a cat
It's not perfect? Interesting. I'm sure that will be a deal-breaker for people exiting a failing platform run by a megalomaniacal MAGA asshole actively harming working people...
I know what you mean. I'm self-hosting and use https://relay.fedi.buzz/ to subscribe to hashtags from all over the fedimicroblogosphere. It's literally too much interesting content, I kept scrolling new stuff for hours and had to cut down on what tags I subscribed to. It's like that Lemmy explorer but for microblogging.
I think a reasonable admin should be open to using the service to populate the federated timeline with niché content users ask for.
The only downside is "catch all"-tags and people abusing tags. "Hey #fediverse, check out my XYZ!". No, I want fediverse news dang it!
It's gonna train the little robot dog, which they're gonna put a gun on. And drones. It's gonna train drones, he'll sell it to anyone who'll buy the data.
I just go where the japanese artists go, and they are going to either blue sky or misskey, mostly blue sky since it has a bigger reach, misskey closed account creation for outsiders, and the way mastodon works I bet it's defederated from a lot of the popular instances like baraag.
Misskey is like mastodon so you can just go to another misskey instance.
But if you're talking about the misskey.io instance, it's not that defederated from my experience (the 3 instances I'm on aren't defederated from it).
The instance simply follows Japanese law so whatever Japan allows they allow and whatever Japan forbids they forbid (which is why censoring genitals is also mandatory in that instance lol). It's not like it's some nazi cesspool or anything like that.
I don't know how to see how much an instance is defederated, I just concluded it must be in the same rate of baraag because both misskey.io and it allows loli art. I know that baraag is on some default block list for administrators for example.
Social media like Twitter preys on people's fear of missing out.
Manufactured Problem - not being up to date on internet bullshit. Marketed solution - be on twitter. Supply and demand died a long time ago. Now it's all about manufactured problems, and conveniently marketed solutions.
This sort of psychological manipulation in marketing works. It's why it's so hard to get people to leave websites like Twitter, reddit, fb ect. They've made their brands synonymous with media trends.
It took long enough, but I'm genuinely happy to see folks wising up and realizing they don't "need" Twitter. It's like watching a bunch of people break up with a toxic ex all at the same time.
We know that it is run by the same assholes. Bluesky is VC backed and Twitter was also. There is no way that Bluesky won't go the same route as every other VC backed social network. Sometime in the future they will start to meddle with your feed to push ads and sell your data to everyone.
we already know bluesky is run by former twitter assholes. but it's the same with everything. people disappointed in new facebook policies move to band...
there are better alternatives, guaranteed not to turn into a heap of shit because of designed safeguards - but people don't like those things; they always opt for the devil they already know.
Wait this whole article just baselessly assumes that 1 new bluesky account = 1 person leaving twitter. That is so obviously unrealistic. Sure some people were probably curious and wanted to check out something new but that doesn't mean they will immediately switch platforms.
You can’t just make fun of Those Guys for endlessly believing fake bullshit while unquestionably parroting this garbage.
Twitter is for narcissists, and when they say Mastodon is not as good as twitter they really mean that there's not as many people watching them as on Twitter. So Bluesky gaining 500,000 new accounts could help in making it "better".
Just like a real girlfriend, but better. Apart from you having absolutely no sex life and apart from the fact that it has absolutely no emotional attachment or attraction to you whatsoever. And it will also never do anything like buy you dinner or a birthday present. Enjoy throwing money at your robot that you can't even fuck like a fleshlight.
Bluesky is vc backed by investors, it is a false promise that I am sure a lot of people working on the project believe, but it is a false promise all the same.
Bluesky is in the part of its lifecycle where investors tolerate no return on their investment in favor of drawing more people in. That is the relevant difference between Bluesky and other social media.
There are cool parts to Bluesky but it is absolutely a false promise of a future the fediverse already provides (however imperfectly). It is also full of "liberal" sheep who tell themselves they think differently but are so locked into the mindset of the way things are that they NEED their social network to be owned and operated for a profit by people orders of magnitude more wealthy than them.
Bluesky will end up essentially the same as all investor backed for-profit social networks, it will grow into a toxic, centralized (or in this case pseudo-centralized because of the moderation system), shithole where only popular accounts get any engagement with their posts. Mark my words.
But is it filled with the people that many want to follow and interact with? Twitter was popular for this reason, and people will tolerate being advertised to and sold on if it recreates that experience.
I had brief conversations on Twitter with Ice-T and John Carmack. Twitter’s nature enabled that remarkable connection. Could it happen on Mastodon? Absolutely, but those celebrities and geniuses need to embrace it. If it’s Bluesky, it’s better than X if only for a time.
That type of social media just isn't really for me. But why would one want to choose Bluesky over Mastadon?
When I did try Twitter I somehow ended up following and be followed by a bunch of folks from Ghana... that was pretty neat. Although I did miss out because my Akan/Pidgin is basically non existent. Although I was introduced to the word "bomboclaat" which was interesting... lol
That’s how Facebook went for me the last time I tried to use it with a new account… I was immediately swamped with friend requests from people in western and central Africa. I accepted some out of curiosity so of course FB decided that’s what I was really into. I’m not sure if these people just send out random requests or why they want to add Americans… I didn’t get hit up for scams or anything, it was just people posting and sharing photos of their lives as normal FB users.
1 reason for me, the algorithm. I can never find a lot of new thing to discover or new people to follow on Mastodon when I first started, which makes me not use it very much even now.
So let's say on Twitter, someone blocks me and I can't read their post. Can't I just log out and read their post that way? I don't have a Twitter account, so I've never seen a blocked link before.
People on Lemmy link to tweets all the time and I can navigate and read them. Not sure what you mean then that it's authwalled. It's an annoying experience and it bugs me every time I visit to make an account or log in, but I can see them.
Yup, that's exactly right. On Lemmy you don't even have to log out, blocking someone simply means you can't see their posts. If you don't want a harasser or stalker to see something, and you post it publicly, you're an idiot.
And this is the way it should be... You shouldn't be able to silence someone from responding to stuff you say publicly by blocking them.
While anything that gets people off Twitter is good, I'm sorely unimpressed by those artists who "had to" to patronize the racist transphobic neo-Nazi hellhole "because my audience is there"... until Musk's policies happened to offend their own personal interests, by requiring training for their AI. Countless models trained on all public images already exist, jumping ship won't prevent their work from being scraped elsewhere, and frankly, any one image or even portfolio will contribute virtually nothing to the result, so quitting in protest is largely symbolic. But so many peoples drew the line at that, and not at Musk making "cis" a slur, or protecting child pornographers, or boosting white supremacist supremacy theories. It's really disappointing to see.
I loathe musk, and despise twitter, and I'm happy about anything they will be unhappy about.
That said, I don't have a lot of respect for anyone who is still there. Journalists, politicians, anyone who has to be there for their job... I still just don't have a lot of respect for them.
This is a lesson in humanity. Artists can be pieces of shit too and to be an artist, so committed to oneself and one's thoughts is to be to some extent - narcissistic, and in the end they look out for self interest first, and it's only that the AI portion of this threatens their self-interest do they become concerned. #NotAll, ofc.
Like I said before, solidarity of the scorpion with the turtle.
And that’s on top of all the Brazil users who fled to BlueSky when he refused to comply with a court order (and pay a fine) so they blocked Twitter for a few days. I’m not sure how many went back after he paid the fine but BlueSky was fairly popular in Brazil even during the closed beta so I’m sure a ton stuck around.
has so far only been used to train Musk’s own Grok AI
The Grok models are a laughing stock in the LLM space. They aren't good over APIs, and they're even less useful after Elon "open sources" them far later. Qwen 72B, and heck, Qwen 32B is already better than Grok 2, which is probably hundreds of billions of parameters. Qwen is runnable locally right now, Apache 2.0, and released day one. Grok 1 is... well, I dunno, no one has even bothered to try hosting it for anything.
I dunno what Twitter is doing with all those H100s Elon hoarded, but it seems like a big waste so far. Its certainly nothing to help the open source/self hosting space or to "decensor" and "democratize" LLMs like Elon fans seem to think.
ive been enjoying bluesky more than twitter. i just wish more bug accounts would migrate. i post on both platforms with a script that i wrote and my engagement/followers ratio is far higher
I tried Bluesky but just couldn't get into it. Same with Mastodon. I like Lemmy because long-form posts/comments are more interesting to me. I'm liking Threads a bit, too.
Never bothered me personally. The reason I block people is that I no longer have to see their posts. I find some level on enjoyment in the fact that on Lemmy there are people constantly wasting their time writing replies to me which I'll never read.
I hate Twitter, but I'm getting to the point where I want it to get better because if bluesky gets many more members we're just gonna have Twitter again.
One thing I liked about the Muskification of Twitter was the scattering.
Idiots users just recreating conditions that created their misery in the first place. Freedom doesn't happen from the grace of some cult leader and their slightly less immediately hostile app
What sets it apart is that on Bluesky you can create your own algorithm. You can also share this algorithm, if you want, so others can subscribe to it. This means you see only what you want to see, and not what some corporate algorithm wants to see to maximise some kind of engagement.
Moreover, Bluesky is also its own federation. There aren't many who choose to do so, but you can connect to Bluesky using your own domain, which you have complet control over.
Either the profile is public, which means you can still open it on another account, or it's private, which means no one can see it anyways if they're not an accepted follower.
I don't see how anything changes from Musk's change...
That's how blocking and banning on the internet has always worked. When you block someone they just can't reply to you. The way it was until now is just weird. Why would blocking an account prevent them from viewing your public posts!? "Stalkers" can always just make another account. I am glad they are actually fixing blocking on Twitter. g
I'm wondering the same thing. I never really used Twitter, couldn't people just stalk without being logged in? Or was this to weed out the least motivated stalkers?
You used to. Not anymore. Musk made it so that if you try to view somebody's profile, and you aren't logged in, you don't see anything except for a big box asking you to log in.
Also, it's not so much about stalking per se, but being able to reshare posts (and thus bully) their targets. The way X is right now, they'd have to have a direct link to the post in question and then screenshot it.
This is problematic for obvious reasons, in terms of enabling stalkers and trolls who will still be able to view the posts of an account that has blocked them,
Huh? How? This is the problem I saw too. Knowing details about a victims life feeds stalkers and also gives them opportunities to connect to the victims physical location and movements.
Would blocking a stalker's view of their victim's social media solve the stalking problem entirely? Probably not. Would blocking kill off one lane of information that makes the stalking easier / more psychology rewarding to the stalker? Yes.