Twitter has started blocking unregistered users
Twitter has started blocking unregistered users
Elon Musk blamed “data pillage” and claims the move is temporary.
Does Musk gain anything for making Mastodon such a good alternative?
Discovery on Mastodon is not great. At the time I signed up most of the accounts I followed from Twitter were just repeating content but never engaging with the replies. Felt very cold and empty.
Yeah, I don't like it there either (never been a twitter user). But it sure is weird that Musk is basically making all the important tweets from organisations who rely on that platform unavailable to the majority of the public. If such behaviour continues even the least tech savvy orgs are going to have to start migrating there, and the organic interactions may follow. Musk is basically providing incentive to migrate at this point.
Yeah no doubt.
I think what I run up against is more fundamental to ActivityPub.
My wife was going to try and sign up for Lemmy tonight, but I didn't even know where to direct her. Lemmy.ml has signups off. Lemmy.world is a version behind. I know nothing about the people hosting any other instance currently. Lemmygrad is great but it's kind off in a corner. Defederated heavily and comes with normy hate baggage. She was calling her self a Communist well before I got on the train, but a more casual experience is likely what she wants. Just the stuff Reddit provided, pre sleep reading entertainment/news. Twoxchromosome, parents subs, subdrama, content creator related subs etc.
I took a look at /all on Lemmy.ml and I feel like it was over run by meme posts from a dozen meme communities across the network...
I guess hexbear is technically a Lemmy instance now but I have no idea what the community is like over there.
It's just kinda a mess lol. I felt that way about mastodon too. I have no idea what I'm missing because of how both federation and defederation works. Creative communities seem almost non-existent.
I'm not sure there is a point im getting at here lol but onboarding is not easy.
I think Twitter and Reddit going down the drains is an op at this point. The state department heavily used Twitter in their work. The NSA gathered a ton of data from both of them. They manipulated public discourse in real time when they needed to.
Musk is someone they have control over due to his ties to the MIC. He doesn't just do things that would disrupt state propaganda operations without approvals.
Two major social networks effectively destroying their ability to get information produced by the community into the wider public through search indexing? This isn't a coincidence.
Reddit would very much like their subreddits to all return to normal operation. They're going to remove all mod teams that don't unprivate later this week. Reddit's valuation by Fidelity has been going down the drain since all this drama began. I don't see evidence that they are purposely sandbagging against their own capitalist self-interest.
Musk being an incompetent (Hanlon's Razor) can explain every single move he has made.
Reddit is also killing all sources of data egress and will likely sunset the old interface when their numbers look good enough and the new interface is less usable for finding counter-narratives and likely less searchable by search engines.
Remember that the profit motive of reddit is not separate from war profiteering as the companies that are involved in any IPO are the same companies that control pretty much every other industry.
If you grant Musk's incompetence and you grant Twitter's function in state propaganda then the MIC isn't letting Musk buy it out and they aren't letting him make decisions when they already have state actors in executive positions at Twitter to handle and manage him.
I don't see what the objective would be though. If they remained the way they were, banning and co-opting any anti-capitalist community I think they'd have a much better impact for US interests. By airfrying the frog rather than just boiling it, they're just scaring away even the most "normie" people and organisations to harder-to-control alternatives. Just look at beehaw and how many libs went there from reddit. Even the short-term benefits of such strategy (like making smaller international organisations hidden from the public), in the long term it's making those same people consider at least keeping a mastodon/lemmy branch. That is unless the Fediverse is somehow owned by the feds. Would be funny ngl.
I don't think their trying to control normies who use these platforms. I think their trying to disrupt information flow from power users/influencers to normies by destroying the search indexing. If I search for stuff about the war and I get results from Twitter and Reddit countering the narrative, that has broad social implications.
That is to say, it's a mass media disruption, not a community disruption.
This has been going on for a while now. I don't have a Twitter account but I regularly checked the hashtags the football (s*ccer) team I support during match days. Can't do that anymore.