[Social media] – Page 5 – INANIMATE CARBON GOD

Well that didn’t take long

I said the other day I’d probably finally stop using Twitter if anything happened to Tweetdeck, and, well, it’s like Elon heard me:

Twitter users will soon need to be verified in order to use the online dashboard TweetDeck, the company announced on Monday.
The popular and previously free tool allows users to organize the accounts they follow into different columns to easily monitor content. It has been popular with businesses and news organizations.
The new policy will take effect in 30 days, the company said in a tweet, and could bring a revenue boost to Twitter, which has struggled to retain advertisers under Elon Musk’s ownership. […]
The TweetDeck change could be an attempt to push more users to the Twitter Blue program, through which users can pay for verification. The subscription service costs $11 per month in the US (on iOS or Android), £11 in the UK and $19 in Australia, and includes the blue checkmark, a demarcation previously free to politicians, journalists and other notable public figures.
The service attracted just 150,000 subscribers in its first weeks – a small portion of the platform’s global user base of nearly 400 million. As of 30 April, the number of paid subscribers had fallen to about 68,000, according to reports from Mashable.

I was a little perplexed, if not indeed a little concerned, when Tweetdeck suddenly launched a new design at me last night. I no longer remember when I started using it, but it was certainly at least back in the days when it still supported Facebook, and it stopped doing that in May 2013. And in 10 (plus?) years I don’t believe it’s ever changed its design until now. I am not a fan of the new look, which now makes it look and behave more like the web version of Twitter which I am not a fan of either. I was puzzled by what this new design indicated… and I’m guessing this is it.

And if I’m going to have to pay to use a version of Tweetdeck that just looks like the web version of the site within the next few weeks then, well, I’m not. If the site lasts long enough I’ve no doubt the web version will also require payment to use it (on top of how you currently already need an account to see anything). So once Tweetdeck starts demanding cash, I’m gone.

For what it may be worth, while on Mastodon yesterday, someone posted this interesting theory…

…but, as nice as it looks, I don’t buy it. The whole idea outlined here is simply too complicated for me to believe it, and the fact that we now know Jack Dorsey is no longer as keen on that “singular solution” as he was last October doesn’t help. Also, it kind of relies in some degree on Oolong actually knowing what he’s doing… which is debatable at best.

Also, I joined the queue for Bluesky the other day. We’ll see how that goes. If it does.

Masto… do?

So, a few days ago I posted something about why I still have a Twitter account and Mastodon is an imperfect alternative. And the latter still is, but… well…

Yeah. Twitter had an outage a couple of nights ago, and Elon’s response has been 1) make Twitter visible only to people who have Twitter accounts and 2) limit the number of tweets those people can see.

Verified accounts were temporarily limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, Musk said, adding that unverified accounts and new unverified accounts were limited to reading 600 posts a day and 300 posts a day respectively.
The temporary reading limitation was later increased to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified, and 500 posts per day for new, unverified users, Musk said in a separate post without providing further details. […]
Musk had said that hundreds of organisations were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively”, affecting user experience.
He had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.The social media platform had previously taken steps to win back advertisers who had left Twitter under Musk’s ownership and to boost subscription revenue by making verification check marks a part of the Twitter Blue programme.

I feel like there has to be some way to stop the data scrapers from negatively affecting users that doesn’t also negatively affect those same users, but then again I am not the genius that Elon’s cultists insist he is, as can most clearly be seen by the fact that I didn’t pay an excessive price for a social media platform that wasn’t actually worth the $44b he paid for it and that I then didn’t ruin by firing thousands of staff, some of whom could probably have produced that solution to the data scrapers in a few minutes.

Oy, and indeed, gevalt.

Supposedly this is just a temporary solution, probably until the advertisers start complaining (“you Boer fuckwit, we want people to SEE our ads!”), and one of my Twitter followers suggests it’s actually only happening on the Twitter app rather than the actual website. So it may not be as bad as it initially looks. And, frankly, I don’t think I even read that many tweets per day anyway. It’s still not a good look when you do something like this and it makes major international news; at some point his co-funders are going to start wanting a return on their investment.

Parenthetically, the day this shit started happening was also the day Twitter’s contract with Google Cloud expired, with Oolong apparently refusing to pay the billion dollar tab he owes Google. I’m sure this has no connection to this rate-limiting bullshit.

Anyway, at least one result of the latest Musk-up is a bunch of people coming back to Mastodon, or indeed coming to it for the first time… but whether or not that sticks is something we’ll have to wait and see, cos it didn’t quite do that for a lot of people last November; and this time I suspect that once Bluesky gets over its own current issues, Twitter users wanting to flee the hellsite are more likely to end up there than on Masto… But I have been wrong about many things in the past, and this may well be another one of them. As for me, I’m waiting to see what happens with Tweetdeck, which is pretty much the only way I can use Twitter; I don’t need the phone app and the actual website is just… ergh. If this fucks up Tweetdeck—which I’m surprised Elon hasn’t terminated already—then that probably will be the final end of Twitter and me…

Mastodon’t?

Found an interesting article about what the author considers the failure of the move away from Twitter to Mastodon and other “fediverse” services. I myself was among the Twitter migrants to Mastodon after the Oolong takeover last November (https://aus.social/@inanimatecarbongod should anyone care), but I’m one of those who stayed; I know quite a few friends and other Twitter folks who set up accounts that they then didn’t use or barely used, and who consequently remained on the bird site. Which I also did, cos I’d intended to be one of those people who terminated their association with Twitter entirely, but time went on and too many people I knew kept using Twitter and so have I, though vastly less than I used to.

I dislike the moralising tone some Masto users take about people still on Twitter, that by staying there they’re basically enabling the latest coming of fascism or some similar formulation, much as I disliked the harrumphing against those Twitter users who found the new layout of Masto rather less intuitive than the old place. Cos when I first checked Mastodon out after the Tumblr “no more porn!” meltdown of 2018, it confused the fuck out of me. How the hell did this work? What was this business about instances? Though when I went to finally try it out last year I actually found it a lot easier to sign up and use than it first looked.

But what did Masto actually offer apart from a social media platform not being run by an actual fascist enabler? This is a question the article asks, and it finds Masto wanting, particularly when it comes to the decentralisation thing. I found this particularly pertinent:

Then there’s the absolutely abysmal UX of following someone who exists on another Mastodon instance when you’re linked to their profile, which involves the non-obvious steps of manually copying and pasting a URL into a search box on your home instance, waiting for a connection to be made, then following them, at which point you won’t see any of their old posts, just their new ones. Compare and contrast with Twitter’s handling, which is where you search for a username, can see all their posts and can follow them without having to manually copy and paste a single damn thing.

Yeah, this for me has always been a major stumbling block for Mastodon. On Twitter you can just do things like this without the rigmarole that Masto insists on. That comparative ease of use is going to be a bigger draw for people to stay on Twitter than all the talk of decentralisation is a draw for Masto. The latter is a lot more pleasant to be around than Twitter, and I’ve encountered a bunch of people worth following there, but, to be honest, I’m not using it an awful lot either. In that I have a bit over 2000 posts on Masto since November, but my own original posts are very much in the minority; I find I’m a lot happier reposting other people’s stuff than I am making my own. (Much like how I’m using Twitter, in fact.) What energy I’ve got I want to use here rather than anywhere else.

Anyway, worth reading the whole article, though I was kind of struck by one of the comments:

Mastodon appears to be very welcoming to LGBTQ folks, communists, socialists, scientists, Apple users, and not so much to Democrats not right of Bernie, Microsoft, Corporations, Windows, and positively hostile to Nazis and associated Republicans.

This is basically part of the commenter describing their experience of Masto, and I’d say it’s fairly accurate… I’m just not sure about that last clause. The commenter is not actually pro-fash, it should be said, but I just find the wording a bit… odd. I mean, many Republicans are worth being hostile to, and there’s no reason not to be hostile to Nazis. Just seemed an odd thing to point out.