It’s not just lemmy that’s benefiting from Elon Musk.
There were stories that Tesla had a team in place to distract Elon any time he showed up to the office, and I absolutely believe that. Now that Elon has Twitter to distract him, I wonder what that team is up to.
Xport to
I like the idea of referring to it only as “The social media site formerly known as Twitter” from here on out.
I’ve been trying to stick to Mastodon and ditch Twitter, but honestly, even though I’ve gotten into the habit of using Mastodon every day, it’s pretty hard for me to resist accepting information from Twitter.
It’s ok to get information from places like X/Twitter or Reddit. It’s even fine to have an account. But it’s better to post your OWN material to platforms that best align with your sensibilities.
This. I still lurk reddit for information, but I will never contribute. Advertisers these days only care about interaction anyway, so I doubt lurking significantly impacts the profitability one way or the other.
I think you should do you and browse whatever you want. I still use Reddit when looking for opinions on products and services because there’s nothing close to the discussion on there. But visiting the site (without an adblocker) 100% still generates ad revenue and is what matters to ad companies, regardless of actually participating in the discussion.
So wait visiting with Firefox+ad block doesn’t make Reddit money?
The clicks, even with an adblocker, are still worth something, right? Especially if they’re tied to an account.
What? I’ve been using Squawker and lately it stopped working because monkey boy elon borked something again in the twitter api. No tweets for me.
My issue with Mastodon is that many big companies still use Twitter/X as their main way to publish news outside of of their websites and press releases.
It’s all about what matters most to you.
I’m not usually interested in what big companies have to say, but I follow some journalists who fortunately cross post to Mastodon, but all discussion takes place on elmo’s X site.
And the award for the worst rebranding decision goes to Elon.
Soaring? 2.1M users is soaring? I’m all for the Fediverse, but it will never reach mainstream social media numbers, and honestly I hope it doesn’t.
YouTuber Ctop is soaring!!!
I honestly hope the Fediverse does become the predominant medium through which online social discourse takes place. Probably not going to happen, but I can dream.
As long as no single instance dominates the entirety of the Fediverse, I think it could avoid many of the pitfalls of centralized social media platforms.
Good, isn’t this what people want? Twitter to shut down? I’ve been hoping he just closes up shop and gets rid of it.
His ego is too big.
I don’t think I cared about Twitter, the entire duration of its existence, and now there’s a whole new thing that’s apparently the same and I still don’t care about
I wanted to use mastodon, but I haven’t even used twitter in years, so then I realized I just don’t social media that way anymore (or much at all for that matter).
I was finally super duper permabanned from Reddit, and decided to give up. No more workarounds, new accounts, new emails, spoofing MAC addresses, multihop VPNs… And I’ve got to say, I have gotten more done in the past few weeks than in the last year combined.
super duper permabanned from Reddit
What the hell did you do?!
I got permabanned for canning a right wing troll a loser. Apparently I had repeatedly violated the rules ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I posted unpopular opinions. Perpetually for over a decade.
I got permabanned for shitting on russians (I am a Polander so it’s my default behavior).
I got it and I’m trapped in a weird bubble of shit that doesn’t really interest me and I don’t like microblogging I think
Same. @squizzy, I don’t like microblogging in general either. I was raised in the golden era of forums (the days of phpBB and vBulletin). My twitter account hasn’t been touched for years now.
I mostly used twitter for checking trending topics for news
I never used Twitter save for occasionally hearing about tweets, but I have been enjoying using Mastodon because in practice it’s basically just a way for me to have a feed of cool astronomy pictures.
I found cool astronomy pictures on Reddit, and some now on lemmy! Cheers for random cool pictures of space.
Good.
I root for Mastodon like everyone else but as long as there is some very good improvement in discoverability and intelligent feeds, it will never be the same in function as Twitter (not X, Twitter). Especially when it currently has a fraction of the creators Twitter had.
For real, I just want to open an app and scroll. I’m not going to put effort into reading funny microblog posts. It’s why tiktok is so successful, the app is really really good at delivering relevant content.
Discoverabily is like crack. It’s what hooks you, and it’s what drags you into hell.
Musk trashed Twitter with intent, by design, and on purpose. Elon Musk is worth 95 Billion more now than when he bought Twitter.
The continued forced cognitive dissonance is the grandest example of info_corpo_kabuki i’ve ever seen. It’s all just so fucking dumb.
Elon bought it to trash it so he could have access to Saudi markets for his electric cars and rocket ships. The face he’s a fascist fucking cunt who gets to stick it to liberals where they most liked to exchange news, information and organize online was just a bonus for him.
He didn’t want to buy Twitter. He lost a lawsuit that forced him to buy it. None of it goes that deep.
That Twitter had essentially become accepted as an official source of communication and Elon’s purchase of Twitter so near to the time that he was experimenting with his ability to perform market manipulation on his own companies using Twitter, those things combined made me assume a large part of his reason for purchasing Twitter was to see how far he could take market manipulation and if he could influence other companies. In my darkest version of this scenario, I think Elon was just testing how far his reach is.
Maybe the verified checkmark debacle really was created by incompetence and Twitter tried quickly to fix it, or maybe it was a nefarious way to undermine legitimacy and cause a multi-billion dollar blip on the stock market. Either way, I could easily imagine Musk telling politicians and CEOs after that, “look at what I was able to do just by moving a single finger. Now imagine what I could do to you if I really wanted to.”
I really like the razors, here Hanlon’s razor is relevant:
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”
I’m sure Elon has no grand plan behind any of this, just a chain of impulsive actions.
This assumes all other things are equal.
Elon musk and Donald Trump and others are not stupid. They may act stupid. Their brains may be psychologically damaged by the distance their money allows them to put between themselves, others, and the consequences of their actions.
But they are not stupid. If they were stupid, their stupidity would sometimes bite them in the ass in a way that actually has consequences for them. Since that does not happen, we can be relatively certain that their actions are going according to plan…their plan? Maybe. Or their accountant’s plan. But until a mistake costs them actual money that they cannot recoup through tax shenanigans, I find it hard to accept that they aren’t just evil.
Oh, the conspiracy side of the story is just to sound saucy. I don’t think these were calculated moves, but I still wouldn’t be surprised if he tried to profit from his incompetence by labeling it as a flex to those he wants to control. Like, a dumbass who accidentally shoots their own foot and then shouts, “yeah bitch! And that’s MY foot! You think I won’t cap you too?!”
Well put. He’s been too busy sniffing his own farts. He’s out of touch with reality, as most ultra rich people are.
Little wonder what he is trying to turn Twitter into with X. He’s tried it several times with several other companies, all of which either failed or ejected him.
He’s even tried it with the “X” name more than once.
He is impulsively trying to manifest this idea of something into existence despite the fact that it repeatedly fails. Because the idea just isn’t good.
He wants to make the western equivalent of WeChat, when a good amount of the functionality is already hadled by Whatsapp in Europe and non-Sino Asia, and Americans are pretty resistant to the idea domestically. He failed the moment he politicized it. Hell, he failed before he even bought it because Twitter has always been a narcissistic den of toxicity–Tumblr, all grown up. There’s a reason that Jack created a Twitter clone under a different company with different everything while CEO of Twitter. It was a sinking ship, and Elon was in the wrong place at the wrong time because he thinks he really is something special.
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Yes thank you, this is what’s happening for sure. He’s so immature and petty and he can’t hide it.
Honestly, I think he did what worked for him before. He came in like a tornado, shook things up, and then tried to fall back on the people he depends on. Those people weren’t there because they thought he was ruining what they built (former twitter guy and the other peeps). Also, he was forced to buy at a higher price so he’s constantly desperate which he isn’t used to, so he’s acting from a different place. Now he’s trying to pick up the pieces from a loud fail that he also isn’t used to with no PR, because he’s now convinced that the odds are always in his favor even when they’re are going to be a percentage of fails 100% of the time. He’s fucked up basically and hasn’t in awhile, and has no one to blame so he’s imploding.
This. He’s on the hook for a relatively small percent of his personal wealth. He has a ton of government contracts, which equate to cash flow. To insulate that cash flow, he needs a loss. He can get that loss by destroying the value of Twitter, which he also artificially inflated by making an insane offer in the first place.
The thing that folks don’t get is that money is different when you have none, some, and a ton. When you have none, you are effectively living moment to moment - when youre out, you spend what you have on your immediate needs, and make it work the rest of the time.
When you have some, which is most of us, you may live paycheck to paycheck, but you can still plan two weeks at a time and may have some long term plans.
Elon musk and others in his bracket could literally burn 99% of their wealth and still have more money than almost anyone else. This level of rich is marked by planning years in advance, and having contingency plans to take advantage of set backs. For example, a market crash for most of us means we lose wealth and still probably never recover it. But for Elon musk, a market crash is just a fire sale on stock. He can sell at a loss for tax benefit, or he can buy up stuff at step discounts. The benefit of wealth is that ever situation can make you more money.
I don’t buy this, simply because he bought it. He didn’t need to destroy it, could could have just turned it off.
Someone in an unrelated discussion, wrote on LinkedIn that blackberry was profitable and grew for a few years after iPhone was anounced. The same for blockbuster after Netflix came to business. Then he was asking on what technologies today will be obsolete because an iPhone has emerged. For me lemmy or mastodon although slow but slowly will eat the competitors as they develop.
For me I am still reading Reddit since lots of information is there. But I am avoiding on participating there.
Any android app recommendations? I’m yet to use Mastodon.
Use https://elk.zone as a PWA. It’s really good!
It’s a Twitter UI clone, perfect for replacing behaviors without being too jarring of a UX switch.
Megalodon is definitely the one.
moshidon
Anyone using tooot ??
I also recommend elk.zone
Only tried Tusky from F-droid store, no complaints.
It’s in the playstore too if you’re not familiar with f-droid like I was.
Megalodon is quite good.
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‘Trunks’ is a brand new one I’m liking an awful lot.
Edit: they have a web based front-end as well: https://trunks.social/
Tusky, Fedilab
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Megalodon or moshidon would be my recommendation
I use Tusky on android, I’m happy with it.
Apparently, as a competitor of any major platform you just need to get close to the features your adversary has and wait for that site/service to start the process of enshittification, let’s see if reddit makes more blunders
I feel that reddit is already at this stage. It started feeling more like a half-bombed corporate minefield so I decided to flee the site one week ago. This site feels much more like things should be. You can even browse on a decent site on your phone.
Try Voyager/WefWef from a browser, it improves the UX a lot
