Category: [Social media]

Threads has been quite interesting so far as a social media experiment, cos I do find myself having a somewhat different relationship with it to what I have with the others, especially when it comes to blocking other users. On Twitter, I tended to mostly block ads and right-wing shitheads when one occasionally got thrown up at me, but more often what I’d do was go into trending hashtags, and in many such instances you just knew they’d be overrun with the aforementioned shitheads and I’d block as many of them as I could there, so I wound up blocking quite a lot. (Of course, given Oolong’s determination to kill the block function, I wouldn’t have been able to do that much longer, another thing which drove me to kill my account.)

Conversely, I almost never do this on Mastodon or Bluesky. Part of that is that I just don’t use Mastodon that much now, and also I think the nature of it keeps the idiots away. Obviously there are idiots, but the defederating thing stops them spreading. Similarly on Bluesky, there’s stupidity but it’s easy to keep out of one’s feed; handily, it’s also easy to make lists of accounts and share them with everyone else, so when someone makes a list of MAGAts or other right-wingers, I can subscribe to that and automatically block the mongrels en masse. That sort of list for pre-emptive blocking is one of my favourite features of Bluesky. I don’t use it often, but it’s handy to have.

On Threads, however, there seems to almost be a culture of “block early, block often”, and blocking at the slightest provocation is kind of encouraged, cos the “For You” page is the default setting rather than the accounts you actually follow. So you open the site and you basically get whatever the algorithm thinks you’ll like rather than what you necessarily want… and though the Threads algorithm is actually pretty good in that regard, I will sometimes encounter someone having a conversation with a dickhead or cluster thereof and that gives me something to block. Indeed, sometimes I’ll just block people for being mildly annoying, even people whose accounts I’ll look over and they might be OK but they post one or two stupid things that irritate me and BOOM. Away they go. And, like I say, the general culture of the place seems to encourage this sort of thing and I’m fine with it.

Continue reading “Talking of Threads…”

Spotted on Twatter:

And yeah, a remarkable number of the BT’s FB commenters do seem to have been more bothered about the erstwhile Fraser Island being given a new “woke” (i.e. indigenous traditional) name than the whale’s corpse being, you know, poorly treated. This was the case also in the comments of the tweet where I found this. Incidentally, there was another humpback spotted in distress in the same location after this (though at least this one had a happy ending cos the whale freed itself) and the Brisbane Times locked comments on the Facebook post before anyone could make any. I guess they learned a lesson from the previous one…

Jack Dorsey gave $10 million to an anonymous founder with a deep devotion to a fascist ‘guru’

Dorsey gave $10 million to a foundation supporting Nostr and 14 bitcoins, worth roughly $245,000, directly to Nostr’s founder, who until now was known pseudonymously as Fiatjaf.
Nostr “has no board, no company behind it, no funding,” Dorsey said in an interview with the Silicon Valley outlet Pirate Wires last month. “It’s a truly open protocol. The development environment is moving fast. And I gave a bunch of money to them.” Nostr has a relatively small user base of cryptocurrency and privacy enthusiasts, including Edward Snowden.
“We don’t know who the leader is, it’s like this anonymous Brazilian,” Dorsey said.
That anonymous Brazilian is Giovanni Torres Parra, a developer who has also built at least two webpages devoted to disseminating the work of the far-right conspiracy theorist Olavo de Carvalho. Before he died in 2022 after contracting COVID-19, de Carvalho — known as Olavo — praised Brazil’s military dictatorship, claimed that Pepsi-Cola was flavored with stem cells of aborted fetuses, preached that tolerance for homosexuality was “incompatible” with democracy, and had an office in Virginia decorated with portraits of Confederate generals.

So not that long ago I posted something about Beardo quitting Bluesky because he was more interested in Nostr, and I noted my puzzlement at him funding this thing without even knowing who “Fiatjaf” was. I mean, that’s quite a lot of money to give to someone you don’t even know the identity of… evidently that identity is now known somehow (bet he’s thrilled about that), and for some reason I find myself suspecting that Dorsey was perfectly aware of who he was all along. The end of the article further says:

On a podcast last year, Parra, as Fiatjaf, mused about the likelihood that “Nazis or racists or whatever” could see Nostr as a home for hate speech because the nature of the protocol means it has no centralized content moderation.
“I want to tell these people to go somewhere else, but I think we need these people, too,” he said.

Giovanni, meu irmão em Cristo, NO ONE needs Nazis. No good comes from Nazis. And no good is going to come of Nostr if you think Nazis might be useful to it in any way.