I just hope federal services (like applying for a passport) don’t become Twitter-only after Trump appoints Elon as Secretary of Enshittification.
[Deleted]
I’ve made a huge mistake breaking my personal rule to avoid all political content and I’ve regretted that immediately
Thing is, mate…fascists rarely stay inside their boarders. This is going to be the whole world’s problem in about 3 months.
Maybe for the rest of our lives, however long that is…
upside: maybe fashism will kill us all before climate does? yay?
I’d rather eat rats and survive inside a hole in the ground in 45⁰C weather than die in a war, but that’s just me.
Hey, no eating cute rats
Cute rats are more delicious because they are healthier!
international us policy is very similar between republicans and democrats. you guys are already the whole worlds problem. 🌍🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
im sorry but trump will be your problem. until the empire decides to turn up the violence dial again that is, which is something both parties do sometimes.
Trump wants adulation, not conquest. Push come to shove you can get him out of the oval office by making him figurehead Emperor, as long as it comes with immunity he’ll accept.
On a scale of Mussolini to Hitler, he’s like 250% towards Mussolini.
4 years if laws and constitution stay the same and are followed… first term he had people alienated into him who were at least slightly appropriated for their positions, this time people who has nothing to do with their positions are being appointed simply for being loyal to him… Let’s see if any of them won’t let him do anything drastic within 4 YEARS
It’s more than 4 years. We just crawled out of Trump inflation and now are going right back in.
Dismantling and breaking is easy. They can do a lot of that in 4 yrs. Building takes decades.
There’s also a global effect. Would Putin have ever attacked Ukraine without a Trump term? How about Israel’s taking self defense into genocide territory?
America leads by example and the last example was an impulsive 3 yo with a giant military force and a dead diplomacy department in the executive branch. There’s permissiveness in that.
The new online passport process is unbelievably good
They better not ruin it
oh yah i just renewed using the new process, got my passport back in less than 2 weeks.
Narrator: they ruined it
Ooh, thanks for the reminder! Mine expires next year. Best renew it now before they fuck that up, too.
Just tell all your friends to do a passport. It will be ready if shit hits the fan and they must leave the country.
The fact that this is an actual possibility is absolutely hilarious.
Bummer that isn’t mastodon but any inconvenience to musk is appreciated
I say this as someone who likes fediverse microblogging (Mastodon, MissKey, etc) it will never be Mastodon. Mastodon and its maintainers are staunchly against all the things that would make it a viable replacement to Twitter.
could you elaborate for people who don’t use it?
They don’t like algorithms. They want you to select which content you see.
That’s all I’ve got. Mastodon is a better, more open tech. And it’s pretty easy to get set up, relatively. It’s insane that companies haven’t jumped on it.
You don’t even have to quit Twitter. You can just post to more than one place and give people the option.
This is what happens when someone can’t put themselves into their user’s shoes and then wonder why a product isn’t doing as well as it is.
They proclaim the product is great, it’s everyone else that’s the problem
Why people cannot see that the core problem of twitter is not that it got bought by the asshole billionaire. It’s that the asshole billionaire was able to buy it.
Wasn’t he forced to do so after trying to back out, or am I either imagining that or thinking of someone else?
If I recall correctly he could have backed out but he would have had to pay I think 1billion as a penalty and worse admit things didnt go his way
It’s a little more complex than that. He, like, was buying shares, blew past the 5% ownership disclosure point, failed to disclose, was forced to disclose his stake. He was then offered a seat on the board, didn’t like the lack of control, and made a meme offer on the remaining stake to take the company private, tried to pull out, and was forced to buy the company he didn’t want to buy by the board of directors who didn’t want him to buy it.
He’s the recent Adam Conover interview with the details: https://youtu.be/sxG2Y3E0uEY?si=r0VMY7s3iZ9uaP39
He also bought 9% of it and didn’t disclose it, IIRC that had something to do with it as well.
That isn’t relevant to the comment though.
Okay.
Surely that could never happen again though! /s
Let’s replace one proprietary service with another. It looks so good with its API wide open, like it’s never getting enshittified.
Countdown until it turns out that everybody associated with any competition to Musk’s companies just so happens to be a criminal Trump siccs his DOJ after: 5… 4…
I wouldn’t discount the possibility that bsky is backed by the same dark money pool that bought twitter. putin found that it’s way too easy to buy elections worldwide just using social media. They’ll never give it up.
It should be Mastodon. This is the same shit with a different name
There was a good explanation about why not mastodon the other day. It basically boils down to Bluesky is just an easier transition.
Yeah, that’s what I heard from my microblogging colleagues too. They tried Mastodon during the first wave of Twitter exodus, found it too frustrating/difficult, tried Bluesky and stuck with it ever since.
Mastodon is more of a protocol than a single service. It succeeds/fails on those terms, in the same way the old Web1.0 protocols did. Which is to say, you can’t enshitify a thousand micro-sites at once like you can enshittify one big site that’s under central control. But you also can’t do things like navigate, search, and socialize efficiently.
Mastodon is successful in large part because it isn’t. When you let a single cartel of corporate psychos run a Mastodon account like they would a Twitter or Facebook, you end up with Truth Social (literally just a Mastodon branch instance).
That’s an interesting perspective. Do you think the same about lemmy? While also decentralized using the sameprotocol, it seems reasonably efficient to me. I’m from a small instance from my country, and the global content is easily available to me.
I just have a lot of trouble explaining how it works to people who aren’t tech savy… this is what I consider the main issue withthe fediverse as a whole.
Do you think the same about lemmy?
I think it depends on how the federated sites are administered going forward. We’ve already seen bigger sites - like Threads, for instance - try to integrate into the overall ecosystem. And I could see a future in which one of the larger instances - a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.
I just have a lot of trouble explaining how it works to people who aren’t tech savy…
I’m reasonably tech savvy and even I’d struggle to tell you exactly how it works. How is .world hosted? Is it load-balanced or otherwise optimized? Who controls registration and which other instances does it integrate with? How do you find a list of active instances to federate against? Who do you even talk to in order to federate with another instance? What does the API look like and which instances allow you to crawl them? How do bots integrate with the environment and what can an admin do to limit them? No idea.
There’s a bunch of things I think I should be able to do but I can’t. For instance, signing into .world but only surfing content that’s hosted on .sh.itjust.works.
There’s also a lot of petty politics. Admins deciding on a whim who to block, whether it be individuals or whole instances. Waking up one day and suddenly not having access to a dozen of my favorite subs, because two admins are feuding, is not particularly fun. I never have a problem like that on BlueSky or Instagram.
a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.
Lemmy is federalized. It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance. And I don’t see how the venture capital firm could stop them… For as long as one organization doesn’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we should be unshitifiable. It is possible for enshitification to happen… but it is of a greater difficulty, because the other non-shit instances still exist and they are federated, thus able to access the same content.
They could try and pull up the drawbridge and de-federate from every other instance that isn’t under the control of the firm so that the content of the venture capital instances are exclusive, but for as long as they don’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we are good.
It is not to hard to imagine that, if .world where to be sold like that, half or more would jump ship. At least that’s what I hope.
It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance.
Why? Why wouldn’t they just consume the click bait content and shameless pandering propagated by the incoming owner, just like folks still on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit?
For as long as one organization doesn’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances
You don’t need 60% of instances. You need the plurality of site content. That’s what the users are coming for.
just like folks still on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit?
As I said, Lemmy is federalized. Jumping from Twitter to BlueSky/Mastodon or Reddit to Lemmy is difficult due to the network effect. The people you want to follow aren’t posting on BlueSky/Mastodon/Lemmy because there isn’t an audience there. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
However, Lemmy is federalised, that means you can change instances without loosing access to the people/content you follow. Sure, the fediverse isn’t immune to corporate takeover, but it is more resilient.
Migrating from Reddit means you loose access to all Reddit content. Migrating from .world to, I don’t know…, .ml means nothing sense you can still access .world’s content.
You need the plurality of site content
I wouldn’t say plurality. If the biggest instance only had 10% of total content, that 10% being taken over by a corp wouldn’t kill Lemmy. That 10% would be too little to perform the drawbridge strategy and so people could migrate to a different instance and access the same content.
Very accurate
I wish some entrepreneur had instead created an amazing fucking Mastodon instance and put all that marketing and engineering dollar into the platform. But you can’t own Mastodon so you can’t ever sell Mastodon so those types of folks will never invest in Mastodon. We could just say “fuck ‘em” but they have done a serious job of monopolizing the time of all the talented people who know how to make something like this go.
What’s the difference, really? Aren’t they both decentralized microblogging social networks?
One is a product with investors selling itself on promises of decentralization (bluesky), the other is a genuine community tool (mastodon) that actually provides decentralization.
BlueSky isn’t decentralised yet. Right now the only thing that is decentralized is data storage. You can’t set up an independent federated instance yet. They promise they will add that feature, but it hasn’t happened yet.
X will likely merge with TruthSocial as the defacto Conservative/Right-wing social media site (named something dumb like “XTruthXSocialX”), while BlueSky will become the defacto Liberal social media site.
I think I used to play Halo 3 with that guy
Oh yea, he never turned off his mic. Pretty sure I heard his mom come down with tang and Oreos and he cussed her out
His mom has pretty good tang though 👀👀
That would be great - much better than the current situation where twitter is run like a right-wing site but still has people from across the political spectrum hanging out there due to inertia.
Can you imagine taking X (formerly Twitter) public again with a merger with $DJT? Holy smokes.
Don’t jinx it.
Especially not if they somehow coincidentally get some government funding.
If anything they’ll be able to do it, as well as bringing up some already half-dead stocks back to life and fuck some hedge funds that thought they hit the jackpot… call it the M&A era of America
99% of my Feed on Bluesky was just people saying they’ve left Twitter for Bluesky. No amount of suggest less of this helped.
happens on every “new” social media platform that is similar to another social media platform. Was all over Lemmy when people were “boycotting” reddit…course most went right back to reddit when the boycotting was over.
Well i am on both. A lack of rpg and splatoon keeps me mostly on Reddit
Morrowind would keep me there but i dont really have much to say about it anyways in terms of posts (that hasnt already been said) so ion need it myself :3
Can’t tell you how many “I’m moving to Google+” posts I saw back in the day. I wonder how that panned out for them…
Yeah thats how it was here after the reddit fiasco.
It has improved here though, thank Jeebus.
Tbf, were you on lemmy last summer?
Or on Reddit after everybody left Digg
Haha there is a gigantic wave of people switching over from twitter right now, that’s just what is on people’s minds. The conversation will move on soon enough.
Just like when Threads launched and or when Reddit made the API changes. You get a flood of new users who want to talk about being new users.
On my feed it’s just pictures of pets and people who I don’t know making lists of things they like. But to be fair, I just installed the app today.
These kind of articles always remind me whenever a new MMORPG launched, and then people claimed it would be the World of Warcraft killer.
On the other hand, the track record of old social networks is not great.
And it’s reasonable to posit Twitter is deep into the enshitifiication cycle.
Depends what “side” you’re on and what content you choose to engage with I guess.
Because features wise it’s better than ever I’d say, I’m not even sure what stuff they added or removed that would’ve made the platform worse.
I’d posit the algorithm has turned it into a monster.
Attention should be dictated more by chronological order and what others retweet, not what some black box thinks will keep you glued to the screen, and it felt like more of the former in the old days. This is a subtle, but also very significant change.
Is WoW still that popular though?..
Most definitely.
It’s seen better days and current expansion is kinda meh, but it’s still leading the amount of active players by a lot over all other MMO games.
In truth, every subsequent mimic platform is smaller and more diluted.
Lol if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard about the next CoD killer
I mean, plenty of other games have had way more concurrent players.
Maybe, but they’re not MMO games.
Sigh, that was an eye-opening depresing read… thanks for sharing!
What is TPOT
The author explains in the thread and has links to further info.
Good. Fuck Elon Musk and Twitter.
What’s good exchanging one bad service for another bad service? Elon can just buy it.
Twitter facilitated exactly what Elon set out to do with it.
It costs a lot to become vice president, especially if you weren’t born in America
I’ve started removing trash sites. I blocked twatter and reddit at my router.
It needs A) same functionality B) ban all forms of racism, especially Zionism and C) refuse investment from undemocratic nations like GCC or China
Or USA 🤭 they just killed their democracy hard
They should definitely not allow investment from anyone associated with Trump admin, the Pentagon etc.
What’s with the consistent amount of “American Democracy is dead” rhetoric I’ve been seeing lately? It’s not like Trump is president yet. And sure, Biden isn’t going to make too much impact as a lame duck, but even after Trump takes office again, there’s a lot he can do, and a whole lot more he won’t be able to. The power is still in the hands of the people, especially at the local level. America’s democracy isn’t dead, and saying anything of the sort is obeying in advance.
Have you seen Project 2025, Trump’s unofficial but kind of official election plan? Republicans have all three branches of government now. They would have to willingly choose to not follow their own proposed plan, and there’s no reason to do that. So, logically, they will execute it - and that’s it. The end of US democracy.
Go read it or summaries of it if you think it’s hyperbole.
It’s not a bullet list or headline so they’re going to continue to ignore all 996 pages of it.
Yea, have you heard about project 2025?
With choosing trump, the American people have chosen that they approve that project.
At least, so do I see it.
Oh you sweet summer child.
A key component of 2016-2020 was Trump was surrounded by people who wouldn’t, including generals who wouldn’t entertain his talk of maybe using nukes. It’s not that he couldn’t in 2016-2020, it’s that he was surrounded by people who wouldn’t and he didn’t know how himself.
That’s no longer the case. And the people around him have studied up on how.
One of his first big speeches post win this week, claiming to be about defending 1A, he states he’s going to use/mobilize “my Department of Justice” to prosecute anyone trying to enforce the Hatch Act. The Hatch Act is the thing that keeps polling locations safe and neutral. The Hatch Act prevents the threatening of voters in or within 100yds of polling locations, as well as making the buying of votes illegal. That latter part keeps voting free.
Think about the possibilities. Think hard. In fact, if you’re a creative type, sit down and write a short story about what that could look like on the present political climate.
He’s reading a script, the entire speech lacks his usual meandering bullshit. It’s cagey. He totally didn’t write it. The only piece that smells like trump is the piece about no longer being able to ban social media accounts without a court order, probably because that’s personal for him.
And remember. SCOTUS basically said he can do anything while President without fear of prosecution. It’s simply that Biden is unwilling to go there that we haven’t seen what that looks like yet.
I don’t read hard left media for this info. I listen to direct talk, from Trump, from his people, and listen to/read interviews with individuals in or very close to the 2016-2020 term. I then find a historian or lawyer who can add nuance. I then read the hive mind of We The People and other countries for more perspective.
That’s not going to happen here. Am I the only one who watched Trumps speech claiming to be about 1A? He is coming for social media day 1, to reinforce Elon Musk, not only on Twitter, but all other large social media platforms (he doesn’t name FB and Reddit, but he’s talking about FB and Reddit, maybe as far down as Lemmy, BlueSky & Mastadon too, idk).
He says he’s going to mobilize “my Department of Justice” to do it.
He specifically says: making account removal/banning only possible via court order, removing moderation, and removing any labels of misinformation or disinformation.
He’s already threatening YouTube with removal of section 230, if they moderate content.
Why is no one talking about this?
Wait, Trump is doing what? Can you link some sources?
It’s a YouTube video of his speech. Asmongold has a reaction video as do other people who make their living on YouTube, but the shortest take is the original posted by that dipshit RFK Jr. 6min. Only 234k views, probably because it’s buried on RFK Jrs bullshit. It’s the vid with the giant green crayon all caps subtitles. Idk why they captioned it that way, but, they did.
yeah I don’t think a usa based platform is really “long gaming” the fee speech problem. Bluesky now shifting to monetization plans. Its a matter of time until some rich dildo buys it up. If were lucky it will be mark cuban or somebody buts its still grim prospects.
“Fee speech” is a serendipitous typo. Or maybe you meant it. First I’ve heard it, anyway.
Cuban has deleted much of his anti trump talk, high odds the man is hunkering down.
Remember, trumps been promising vengeance to “enemies” for well over a year now, and now he has immunity from prosecution.
Agreed. It needs to be in a country like Switzerland or some such.
refuse investment from undemocratic nations like GCC or China
:-/
If I was being honest I’d add “literally anyone whos firm has any connections to a NATO government” but then I’d be called a consoiracy theorist. But as for GCC, that’s a more direct threat to lives of dissidents.
deleted by creator
What’s Bluesky?
It’s the hot new non-billionaire controlled social media app for the 2020s: https://bsky.app/
Non-billionaire controlled so far. It’s a public benefit corporation, which is vulnerable to being Altmaned. Once it becomes valuable money will find a way.
That’s where the federated angle comes in. Not quite there yet, but as the network grows the vulnerability to the original node getting taken over by a bad actor lessens.
A feature that makes it easier for their users to migrate to a competitor? Blockchain Capital invests $15M in BlueSky. Insert that Anakin / Padme meme:
Anakin: Now that we’ve invested, let’s make that federation feature priority 0
Padme: As in highest priority, right?
Anakin:
Padme: As in highest priority, right?Is blue sky federated? I thought it was another closed garden. If slightly more open than Twitter.
Bluesky grew out of a project at twitter whose goal was to create a federated protocol. Then when they were split off from twitter when Musk took over they had to start their own twitter-style platform to be the first player in that federated protocol. Now that that part is running they’re gradually building out the originally planned system of allowing more servers to be part of the federation: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-architecture
not billionaire owned, but a bunch of VC firms led by one called Blockchain Capital already put a 15million USD bridle on them
No. Just the same shit with less users. Let it grow (by the millions as lemmy is trying to convince us) and you’ll see. I say we get back to smoke signals
Google will find a way to put ads in the smoke
Oh, ok.
Looking like it’s about time lmgtfy to make a comeback.
