W3C Leaves Twitter
w3c.social
w3c.social
The alternative is having a random selection of highly liked (and, often, very old) posts show up on their profile for logged-out users. Setting their account to protected is an easy and effective way of making that go away -- and it also prevents users from following an account that's no longer in use.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90933866/elon-musk-x-stealing-mo...
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173422311/elon-musk-npr-twit...
I'm hoping Elon gets kicked out like at PayPal and Twitter is able to become less cringe.
Twitter is not a platform any more it used to be, a lot of fake accounts with blue ticks and ads after ads.
I just wonder what was Elon's original idea with Twitter, buy big social network, rename it to "X", show to the world that "Yes, I can", then destroy it gradually from inside?
Secondly, my theory is, it's all worth it to him. (It's called an obsession, or being crazy.)
If you wanted to keep up with what's happening around you, either in general or in a specific topic, it was the place to be.
It was possible to hear directly from the people who are reporting on the news you care about, but also from the people the news were about. And INTERACT with them directly.
Unfortunately that didn't last for long.
What the openai debacle showed us very clearly is how important the platform still is despite all the damage. Threads was as if it didn't even exist.
The thing is, none of the fediverse networks who try to replace Twitter would be able to accomplish that same mission.
The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture. I'm not judging, I have guilty pleasures too, but for my tastes: good riddance!
Not the grand parent, my instance is shutting down in January. I have no way to migrate my posts. This is the sixth time I've gone through this over the years. I don't feel like dealing with this stuff anymore.
> The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture.
If you pay attention to the few notable people in their fields, they describe some of the problems such as:
https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/111511735894043437
I hope my comment explains some of the whys for you.
I called the Fediverse a "regression" for a reason. You could lose all your blog posts, too --- there were things that mitigated the risk, just like there are with the Fediverse, but there were no real promises.
My point is, it's a regression back towards a world nerds tend to aver was a kind of golden age of reading and writing online. A lot of the things people now say they appreciate about Twitter are part and parcel of the way Twitter destroyed that golden age. Now we've got it back. I'm surprised at some of the people who aren't overjoyed by this, who I expected would be.
There are a lot of people on Mastodon who use the word "fascist" the way some people use the word "fuck". I block that. I block the names of most national Republican politicians because I hear enough about how bad Trump is from the MSM.
There are people on Mastodon who have an absolute fit because somebody replied to their post and unfortunately it is being framed like the "reply guys" are the problem
https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/22/mastodon-tackles-the-probl...
and not people who take a fit on the slightest provocation. My take is that when Twitter went to hell the bottom 1% of disagreeable people left first to go to Mastodon and you find them there.
The "you are replying to someone you have no connection to" warning is a good idea. I thought Twitter at one point did something similar. For me, it has nothing to do with any "Reply Guy" phenomenon, but rather countering the weird parasocial thing that happens to make people feel entitled to join conversations they're not a part of as equal (in the conversational sense) peers. You can talk to strangers! But in real life, there is a protocol and a set of norms for doing so. The norms Twitter replaces them with are unworkable and terrible.
I have noticed that some people still take the server affinity thing seriously, that they might work to create bonds with people that happen to be on the same server. I don't think that model is long for the world. I think we're going to end up somewhere similar to Blogger, where most people "run" their own "instances", which are really just tiny managed slices of huge multitenant servers, and the idea of talking mostly to people on "your same instance" will be as archaic as webrings.
lots of "new world" people used to the new ways, some old people changed, and other old people have simply withdrawn from the conversation.
I think the issue is still size, as well as a more general audience. Mastodon is nowhere near as large as twitter, but I wouldn't be surprised if it still has more users (not necessarily more conversation) than the Usenet days ever had. And of course that demographic will be very different from those in the 90's.
we can go back to old tech. Really hard to go back to old culture.
Are you paying for it? I've been using omg.lol for some time and I'm not concerned about that mastodon instance disappearing anytime soon.
I've been donating to the instance, yes. Although the reason this time is to do with UK's new laws on social media sites.
This will keep happening until people realize that:
- there is a significant cost to properly manage an instance
- there is a significant cost to develop sustainably the software
- there is a significant cost to deal with moderation
and that these costs can not be covered by donations from a small minority.
I thought that was the whole point of ActivityPub? that your comments aren't contained on any one instance and are yours to move around.
And why is your instance shutting down?
-----
from link:
>I can probably count on one hand the number of times I had to block people because, get this, Twitter had a quality filter which caught most insufferable people
I guess "had" is the underrated word there. But even then I'm confused. There were entire curated block lists made because some people were so pervasive in so many circles while skirting the rules.
>My needs and experience here are likely VERY different from yours. At this point, they're often too different to reconcile.
Sure, but I' wondering if that need will be met anywhere on the net. Strictly moderated popular forums just isn't a thing on the modern net. You need to go to a less popular, lower traffic place for such management.
To allow others to see your posts, yes.
But if your instance goes away, instances can't fetch those posts anymore and admins of Mastodon instances shutting down tend to run a process that prunes users/history across the fedi too. Even if they don't, that information fades, especially as status authentication is a thing now (checks original instance for the post existence).
Then further, if you move to another server, that history is not attached to your new account either etc.
> And why is your instance shutting down?
This time it's due to new laws that the UK has introduced around social media websites. Previously it's been stuff like admin didn't want to do it after getting bullied. Not enough money. Lost all data and can't be bothered anymore etc.
> I guess "had" is the underrated word there.
I don't believe he's on Twitter anymore.
> Sure, but I' wondering if that need will be met anywhere on the net.
I believe this is currently handled by "algorithms" on the major social media networks.
I wish every government would establish a national instance to deliver public announcements and create channels for easy and fast communication with their citizens.
Large companies should adopt Mastodon as well. People can easily receive news and comment on them.
But none of them will have the best people in ai, and blockchain, and finance, and rockets engineering, and commidians, etc. in a single website to not only deliver the news but also help make sense of it.
Now, it's a real pain to just find the instance that hosts the real account of your favorite multimillion news organization, let alone some world-class expert in a very niche topic that became the topic-du-jour for some reason.
nothing is stopping them, except the fact that (user facing) tech in govt. tends to be 20 years behind. There is some out of the way dropbox to write once the govt. does want feedback. But in general snail mail is the "recommeded" way to reach a representative if you can't participare in a physical forum.
On the rest of your comment, I wish RSS feeds didn't fall by the wayside. We don't need one big website hosting all those best people, and we see the results when that central point collapses. RSS feeds add a small bit of friction but you get almost all the benefits of centralization without its downsides. The main part missing was curation (AFAIK): have some place to categorize your site and its features (comments, post submissions, type of moderation, etc), have it be easily searchable and sortable by various metrics, and if you like the site you add it to your feed. Lots of custom sites still use stuff like Disqus so you may not even need a new account to make comments.
RSS is still needed because, despite all of this, not everyone was/is on Twitter.
And I'm sure 99.999% of people on Twitter don't want to be bothered by creating and maintaining their own website or blog. Also, these are 2 totally different mediums with 2 different types of content, and 2 different publisher/reader dynamics (and, no, comments aren't the same thing).
Even if RSS was still in its heyday, a twitter of some sort is still being to be a need.
In theory, it doesn't have to be. In practice, one cannibalizes the other. I don't necessarily blame Twitter, but Twitter isn't incentivized to let people know that they can grab their feed from outside the app/website. There inlies the issue.
RSS can definitely work alongside centralized microblogging platforms. You can (or used to) grab an RSS feed for a specific subreddit, and you can unofficially generate RSS feeds from twitter in several ways[0]
>Also, these are 2 totally different mediums with 2 different types of content, and 2 different publisher/reader dynamics
The idea isn't to end microblogging. It's that you don't put all your eggs in one basket and end up confused on where to go when that basket is suddenly full of nazis. Some may simply wander around until the next big basket pops up, but it should always be emphasized that it's easier than ever to whip up your own platform.
But as we've seen the biggest issue of a new platform is discoverability. In theory, an RSS Feed + some curation for feeds to subscribe to solves this.
EU did it some time ago: https://social.network.europa.eu/
Because the common person expects content and content creators to be surfaced for them. Which Mastodon instance provides this for the larger fediverse?
> The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture.
Well, that and the other millions of regular people that are just hanging out and posting on Twitter. I'd love to see them come to Mastodon but they have no incentive.
That makes Threads probably a much closer approximation of what the average person cares about. You have to be like five levels deep into bizarre internet drama to be glued to your phone to get live updates about Sam Altman's and Helen Toner's employment status.
Key people covering OpenAI e.g. Alex Heath, Kara Swisher, Casey Newton were all posting on Threads first.
It was then re-posted on X.
I apparently missed this. What important role did Twitter play there?
I'm not sure that twitter added much other than allowing us to spectate the whole thing in realtime. I don't think it impacted the outcome in any meaningful way or provided us a ton of useful context. I actually worry that the endless speculation (and intentional misinformation at times) can be a bit dangerous. Kind of like when news stations went 24/7 and then grasped for anything at all to put on the screen to fill all that airtime.
Twitter/X is still the de facto global real-time news platform.
If 5% of X's top users exited to a different platform, X users would just screenshot and redistribute their noteworthy content on X and it would be business as usual.
You can't beat the network effects.
I say that's a huge win, when you shift your lens away from "the destructon of twitter" and instead "options outside of twitter"
Although it should be possible to whip up a text-friendly view of a server you're not logged into assuming they allow non-authenticated access to the API.
Unfortunately /embed is not very useful.
But sarcasm aside, JS is a web standard, just like HTML and CSS. While I understand the opinion of people who don't want to execute JS in their browser, I'm also highly sympathetic to devs who want to use things that are enabled by default in all modern browsers.
... and this is neither.
And in any case, graceful degradation is a good thing to shoot for, but far from a requirement. Mastodon is Free Software. If someone wants to fork it and make a version that replaces frontend JS with server side rendering, that's legal and fine.
So, I think there's potential, but it's definitely not ideal.
[1] https://fedidb.org/software [2] https://fedidb.org/software/smithereen [3] https://friends.grishka.me/w3c@w3c.social
I make this assumption because there are plenty of services that can post to multiple social media accounts, and even cross-posting really wouldn't take that much effort- maybe an additional minute per post if you have to log in each time.
They're purposely limiting their reach, and I see no reasoning listed so I assume not everyone there is proud of their "why".
And they should feel no obligation to support a private, closed source company.
And most people smart enough to know what the W3C is are also smart enough to know that antisemitism isn't political.
That leaves everyone using it with no non-political options -- there are political implications whether you stay or go.
Leaving it now (when a bunch of others are going too and the front man has recently been dropping bombs) is probably the less political option -- especially in the long term if you think the site is going to get more radical.
Bonus points for moving to a federated alternative, since you can move away from big tech (which is more of a principled stand and/or tactical move than a political statement, IMO.)
This announcement does tell us w3c is a politically motivated org that disagrees with the new regime.
Yes, with the "Musk regime". He often likes to claim that he fights for freedom of speech, but even his authorized biography (from Isaacson) is pretty open about him not having a coherent concept of it, and after the acquisition he reinstated / banned accounts depending on his mood of the day. Musk doesn't like to bind himself by rules, but that turns out to be a pretty important thing for journalism.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38548128
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38548531
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38548342
This looks more like people making views they don't like or agree with invisible rather than the posts breaking specific guidelines.
In addition, flags are generally user imposed. a Mod can flag whatever they desire, but enough users with enough karma can flag a comment, and enough flags will auto-flag until/unless a mod overrules it.
Neither of these are "censorship", even in the colloquial sense. One means someone disagrees with a comment, another means that it doesn't adhere to the spirit of the site.
Anyone who is posting just on Twitter is limiting reach. Twitter is closed internet.
W3C posting to open platform is not limiting reach.
Being on the platform is considered political to some and leaving the platform is considered political to others.
All things considered, I think they did fine by not making a big fuss about it. They don't seem to be looking for pats on the back.
Please quote the part of W3C's announcement that discusses their political views with regards to Twitter.
From loading it just now: my top feed items are over 60% "interaction bait," i.e. ranked posts from accounts that I don't follow. When I turn off my adblocking rules, these are interspersed with bottom-barrel advertisements.
In other words: it's dead, but the corpse is still warm.
What surprised me was how QUICKLY tiktok died for me! It's so vanilla and boring these days, every second video is some ad of a chinese dude selling me some trinket. It's very strange. Instagram caught up with their reel tech, and instagram is just a wild west of content and comments, love it!
This is consumption-side growth, not production-side. A similar thing happened with Facebook when it went all-in on algorithmic feeds: engagement went up, but actual organic content production went down.
Ultimately, whether or not you find that distinction interesting depends on how you use the Internet. But much of the demographic that found Twitter fun and useful before 2022 isn't interested in a reskinned Facebook or Instagram, which is what the current site is.
Even if you personally don't use Twitter, virtually all the contemporary media you consume is being molded by it. Even today. It'll take a lot more influential people to drop it or move elsewhere before it won't be significantly impacting your life.
In the US, at least. I don't know how seriously it's taken in other countries.
Take two weeks off, you'll realize that it really isn't that important. Most people don't use it.
My being off Twitter won't make the news, media, culture, or politics less influenced by it.
How do you think "the news, media, culture, or politics" are influenced by Twitter except via the people doing the influencing and the people being influenced both being on Twitter?
People leaving Twitter does reduce its social impact.
So you either need influencers to shift out (which is happening, slowly. But I'm not sure if it'll be enough to "kill" Twitter) or somehow generate a new batch of influencers for a competitor. Both are hard.
As long as the journalists, politicians, screenwriters, staffers, celebrities, and other cultural elites continue to use it to signal which issues matter, which ones don't, and how their various tribes respond, it'll continue to underpin the culture.
It already got as far as it has in the US with under 20% of the population. That's with >80% not participating. Getting that back to 90 or 95% won't matter as long as the most influential (including most influential OUTSIDE of Twitter) people stay.
Even mid tier popular people get over whelmed by interactions and ignore and block them, so they your not communicating two ways.
It's just a fire hose of bits of facts. a few thousand likes makes things feel important. A thousand on a local level when towns are made up of 30k people isn't representative of a significant opinion.
Tweets are just entertaining noise
I can't full agree. It may not be as immediately effective as politicians, but politicians are beholden to the people, and people are influenced by influencers. So loud influencers can indeed sway public opinion and even political policy simply by posting on twitter. The largest one being the now owner of the entire site.
I agree the comment replies are just the peanut gallery, but I think we're well past the point in society where social media is "just entertaining noise".
It doesn't do this based on individual politicians taking seriously arbitrary tweets sent to them. It happens because the world's most influential people care about what happens there. And it feeds itself.
And it does that with less than 20% of the US population as users. It'd still do it with less than 10%, or less than 5%. As long as the most influential people stay.
Twitter doesn't really "make news". People talk about news on twitter and lazy news orgs (desperate for free, zero-effort content) post commentary from rando twitter users about the non-twitter news that sometimes actually matters.
Occasionally companies do announce things on Twitter, although most of the time they have a press release or blog post on their own websites that say the exact same thing. That said, there are a few extremely cheap/lazy government officials/offices that use twitter to announce things while failing to provide that information elsewhere and that should really change.
Twitter is a whole lot of advertising. The PR teams of celebrities, advertisers that call themselves influencers, and bots drive the platform.
Twitter isn't usually where things happen, it's where random people talk about things that are happening elsewhere. The vast majority of twitter is as totally worthless and unnecessary as the hot takes found on facebook or the selfies posted to instagram. If twitter were shut down tomorrow and all that content were wiped off the face of the Earth little, if anything at all, of any consequence would change beyond people wasting more of their time on other social media platforms.
Either you believe these influential people are only so because of Twitter, or that Twitter is just a communication medium which is used by some people you seem influential.
I see more influential people posting on LinkedIn than Twitter, for example.
If Twitter is going to be declared dead, I think it will likely be an avalanche type thing. It won't be any individual account that kills it, but rather a large amount of prominent accounts across multiple parts of our culture.
I disagree with paleo-Republican fiscal policy, but in an academic "I see what you're getting at but don't think it's correct" way. It's interesting and instructive to have that debate, though. Even if I'm not persuaded, afterward I can appreciate the other person's viewpoints and respect that smart people might come to different conclusions than I do.
Some rando spouting that "Jews are taking over the world" or something else ridiculous isn't worth engaging or hearing out. I have no interest in a service exposing me to idiotic opinions like that against my will.
absolutely not. See Michael B. Tager's quote about the nazi bar:
All evidence seems to contradict this. People love viewing content that makes them mad (ref: fox news) and companies love the engagement they get from mad people.
E.g, you can be sure that if Macron starts tweeting from mastodon (the gov has an official instance https://social.numerique.gouv.fr), thousands of journalists and politics will switch.
But maybe there are more nails, any will do
It's like opting out of the genepool. Twitter/X is still where everything happens and where you get closest to the source.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com
Even the most vocal Spaceman haters come back whenever something big is happening. This was reaffirmed again recently with the entire OpenAI CEO saga.
Add to that community notes, the single best social media innovation.
And community notes is a nice addition but it isn't a replacement for moderation.
Which it makes it unsuitable for fast paced topics. This has been repeatedly demonstrated.
It would help if they sent a notification to everyone who liked or interacted with such a tweet, to give them the community notes update. And or resurface it in the timeline.
At the very least, he's an enabler.
And sometimes that's a perfectly fine thing to do.
>Twitter/X is still where everything happens and where you get closest to the source.
Please explain why this concept would be vital for W3C, and how it might be detrimental to their existence to opt out.
It's not where the W3C happens, clearly. That statement becomes less true by the day as more and more accounts leave.
You misspelled cesspool.
they aren't coming back because it's twitter, they come back because they need to reach a lot of people. That isn't unique to twitter in the grand scheme of things, it's just the current crown bearer.