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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

There's something magical when one location becomes the default for something. A site like this would be impossible if YouTube wasn't the place for videos.

It's why I'm sad that we no longer have one obvious default for microblogging. It was such a rich source of thoughts. That's all gone now.

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We don't need centralization for this. Federated protocols like mastodon have friendlier APIs than some of the most popular walled gardens of today...

Discovery sucks, though.

Just like in the Internet?

it's getting better

Mastodon is a walled garden

iiuc your argument, it would be more accurate to phrase it as: mastodon, lemmy, and other federated social protocols are like archipelagos of small islands.

Or, you were referring to bluesky.

Mastodon contains several sub federations that near automatically ban each other’s users… So a very tribal and extremely violent archipelago of small islands…

Can you elaborate?

Mastodon the software isn't. Mastodon the community is because they want to control who is and isn't allowed to federate.

I don't see why a site like this couldn't search one or more of the top video sites if there was healthy competition.

And the former default is no longer developer friendly. (Or friendly to anyone else, really.)

Youtube certainly isn't developer friendly.. their APIs have very strict limits that often force people to go down the scraping route

I can't tell if this trail of talk is about Tumblr, Blogger, or something else - idnk, does anyone else remembers Astroatlas?

I’m pretty sure they’re referring to Twitter.

Twitter still exists. Renamed. Same exact thing. You can create an account and post whatever random things you want. Some people might follow you. Some might not. If you see something that makes you sad, you can block the person who posted the sad thing.

> Same exact thing.

It very much is not. No third-party clients; can’t see threads without an account; owner inserting himself and his ideology at the centre; fewer and less diverse participating people; diminished trust in the platform; more spam; different verification rules… Even the character limit is different.

"no longer developer friendly" referring to them re-pricing their API to make aggregating data for fun monetarily infeasible.

Not just aggregating data for fun. It made third-party clients like Tweetbot impossible. Similar to non-old.reddit.com, the web interface has been crappy for a pretty long time, but was easily worked around by using better clients.

No more.

It's a walled garden. Unless you are logged into an account it's basically a private network.

All social media have to be walled gardens or be free-prey for ravenous AI bots. Evolution at work.

or be free-prey for ravenous AI bots

Have you recently been on X?

I think your parent comment is talking about AI bots consuming the content, while you seem to be making a point about AI bots posting content.

There are thousands of bluecheck AI bots that just copy-paste/regurgitate or just make up stupid content and post it continuously to get engagement views and money.

It is really worse than before.

Why are you following them?

You don’t need to follow someone to see their content. When you open the app the default timeline is the “For You” one. Sometimes you don’t even notice that the app has switched back to “For You”, X definitely doesn’t really want you staying on the “Following” tab.

"Popular" tweets (of which these bot accounts often fall into, because they're propped up by bot responses and engagement farming) are pushed into your feed even if you're not following (or engaging) with them.

The regurgitated content is often in the form of comments in popular threads.

I'm not following them, I just see them in any damn mildly interesting thread out there.

Even blocking has changed!

Probably Twitter? Tumblr and Blogger were for regular blogging, not micro-blogging.

Oh you'll be back.

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