(For new readers, this is what I’m talking about.)
Former front-pager Cheryl Rofer wrote a piece on her search for a Twitter replacement the other day. The short answer is there isn’t one, yet. She’s tried Post, Spoutible and Mastodon. To me, Post is too restrictive, Mastodon is too complex and Spoutible is too new to tell. But I’ve never been a big social media person, so I’m not the one to ask. AOC is the only political account I follow on Instagram — I use it to follow travelers, overlanders, hikers and the like.
From what I’ve seen, one of the barriers to “a new Twitter” is that younger social media users like many of their posts to be semi-private and ephemeral. Instagram has a feature called “stories” where posts are shown to followers and disappear after 24 hours. AOC uses this a lot to give behind-the-scenes glimpses to educate her followers. She’s currently on a CODEL in Japan and Korea, and she shares inside glimpses of her day in her stories. Few of those make it to her feed. In addition to giving a degree of privacy, Instagram stories (and reels, which are videos in the feed) allow the follower to control the degree of engagement. I’ll watch some stories and reels, and ignore others, depending in how interested I am in the topic and how well I know the poster.
Twitter tried to do roll out some kind of live/video stuff in the past, but Instagram seems to have copied this feature from Snapchat a little better than the others social media platforms. Instagram also has had a younger and more engaged following from the beginning, and even though Zuckerberg has shown that he can really fuck stuff up, he hasn’t completely ruined the platform.
Another obvious reason that a “new Twitter” hasn’t arisen is that we’re trying to replace a service that was working, was intentionally damaged (it still works but we all know in the end Musk is gonna ruin it) and pretty much had become a standard for people who wanted to get their news from social media.
I always tell customers taking on tech projects that the only thing harder than going to the moon the first time is going the second time. In other words, version two of any successful system is in many ways tougher than version one. That’s because everyone thinks it’s a solved problem, and expectations are high. You’re expected to do it cheaper and better than V1. Building a successful social network to replace Twitter is a much more difficult job that V1 of Twitter, and there will be far less patience from users (remember the “fail whale”?)
cain
I don’t understand the whole ‘Mastodon is complex’ argument and I never will. Do you all think that email is complicated – you all get the concept that you can have more than one email account, and have more than one identity – so I don’t know why you can’t approach that same mentality to your social media?
different-church-lady
If newspapers can drop Dilbert you can drop Twitter.
There: I said something stupid and I didn’t even need to create a password.
cain
@cain:
I love bidets though – it’s almost required due to a weird medical issue that causes irritation of the the hemorrhoids – I even have a travel version because otherwise a lot of pain is involved over time. In the end, I just love that feeling of clean – of course, us indians have been using water based toiletries for some thousands of years. :-)
It sure beats the chamber pot. ugh.
cain
@different-church-lady: Scott Adams deserved every bit of being canceled. What he said was pretty damn racist and he knows it.
$8 blue check mistermix
@cain: A loosely federated group of servers run by a diverse set of administrators is gonna be complex. The fact that the first decision one has to make when signing up for Mastodon is “which server” means that it is obviously more complex than any other social network. Also, this network is only as good as its weakest link, and social media users are used to sub-second propogation of posts. Mastodon is social network nerdvana, and as a nerd, I get it, but as a potential user, I’m skeptical.
(Also, before others chime in on this: I get that, internally, Twitter and other social media networks are probably distributed across data centers and therefore they, in some ways, resemble Mastodon. But they are all under control of Twitter, and Twitter controls the backhaul between data centers, the size and scaling of the data center, and the whole software stack. This isn’t the case with Mastodon.)
Geo Wilcox
Post has migrated to Pulitzer and looks almost exactly like Twitter with out the racist, sexist, bigoted bull shit spewed every where like a fire hose. It is now dark screen not that blazing white.
artem1s
Ruined is subjective I guess. Some will wait for the code to completely crash before they will give up on it. I doubt that will actually happen though. It’s already ruined IMO. The trolls and bots are completely out of control. I won’t subject myself to scrolling thru responses on any thread anymore. And casual browsing is just out of the question. Too toxic by far. Anyone who insists on making customers, friends, family, etc wade into that cesspool isn’t someone I want to follow. My experience with it was relatively short though and I’m pretty much off all social media again. It’s just a matter of time before I delete the account completely. I honestly have been praying for the social media craze to die for a while now. But I completely understand those who haven’t been able to give up their crack-twitter though. The obsessing over Musk though, that’s a non-starter. It’s time for the MSM and everyone else to stop giving him the attention he so obviously craves.
different-church-lady
@cain: don’t get me wrong, dropping Dilbert was plenty smart.
different-church-lady
@Geo Wilcox:
It’s doomed to fail then.
$8 blue check mistermix
@Geo Wilcox: I finally got an account. “A civil place for real people” is too controlled for me. There’s a balance between civility (and using handles instead of real names) and utter anarchy.
justawriter
@cain: Which is why he said it. Racists these days are worse than the stereotypical “crossfit vegan” in demanding that their vile opinions not only be heard but be honored.
different-church-lady
@$8 blue check mistermix:
Right. You can’t have a social network run by nerds. You need to have nerds do the coding, but sociopaths do the running.
Musk’s problem is he thinks he can do it with only the sociopath part.
cain
@$8 blue check mistermix: I think it’s more that people are applying twitter standards to mastodon. Twitter optimizes information distribution – it’s why it’s so good at political stuff.
Mastodon doesn’t work that way because the initial folks were all LBGTQ+ people. So Mastodon is more based on safety. It’s why when I”m reading mastodon my heart rate or even my sense of despair is a lot less because bad shit isn’t propagating like it does on Twitter. There isn’t a right wing noise machine trying to amplify noise.
As for “joining a server” I agree that the experience could be better – again because folks are used to a monolithic. I mean, when you get an email account – you’re also thinking “which server”? Based on your needs you pick one. If you can grasp that you can grasp mastodon.
Honesty, we aren’t living in a age where the majority of the people are computer illiterate. Most people know how to use computers and social media – it shouldn’t be a problem.
different-church-lady
@$8 blue check mistermix: Everyone has their own number on the kink dial.
cain
@justawriter: I think he knew exactly what he was doing when he went on that rant. The man isn’t dumb, he’s been exploiting IT workers for years, usimg their stories for personal gain.
He’s probably got another source of income and it’ll likely involve some project with a right wing establishment.
Betty Cracker
I’ll check out Cheryl’s post. Despite its faults, I loved Twitter, and none of the replacements work for me for various reasons. It sucks, but I’ve accepted that thanks to the personal whims and stupidity of a goddamn overhyped egomaniac, the platform I enjoyed for many years is gone forever.
different-church-lady
@cain: Then it strikes me that Mastodon would be better at those kinds of vertical specialty communities that everyone was saying they were going to miss Twitter about.
@cain:
different-church-lady
@cain: Next up: the age where the computers know how to use us.
Amir Khalid
I don’t think we’ve heard from the Bloglord since he announced his impending nuptials. Is he okay?
oatler
You wear my bee-ret
And I’ll use your bee-det
Toujours Laaamour
schrodingers_cat
@different-church-lady: They will either harvest us for energy (Matrix) or kill us all like (BSG reboot)
TaMara
@Betty Cracker: This. I’m on Spoutible and as far as a twitter replacement – the structure it there, but I don’t have the enthusiasm I did before to go find people to follow.
Honestly, other than following FB to keep in touch with distant family/friends, I’m doing very little social media these days.
Which has actually been good, I’ve found. I’m forced to waste less time and I’ve actually been doing quite a bit of research on climate solutions in the interim…and of course, finally finished and published the latest novel.
So, I guess, thanks Elon? Ugh how I despise that little twerp.
BR
Mastodon has been my go to for the last few months. I joined with no expectation that I would enjoy it, but have found there to be a lot of interesting people there. I shared these threads from Mekka Okereke on Black History Month a week back, and since then he’s posted even more interesting ones:
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109789295728917242
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109785330115485502
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109795292010229762
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109801619225078087
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109824167630690347
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109852961583118407
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109868909309043919
Easiest places to sign up are mastodon.online or for tech-y folks hachyderm.io or even a regional server like sfba.social — the choice of server really doesn’t matter as much as the articles make it seem.
Unlike commercial sites, it won’t tell you to follow anyone or force you to read anyone. Here’s a list of people you might follow for interesting posts:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34413641
CaseyL
I’m by no means a tech nerd, and had no trouble at all joining Mastodon.
I joined when one of the big waves was happening, and deliberately chose a server that could take new subscribers right away – New Zealand. So far the only downside is that the local feed is 99% NZ/AU – but I enjoy that, so it’s not really a problem.
Other than that, you do need to curate your feed more. As everyone notes, there are no algorithms, so you need to grow your Home feed by judicious use of follows, attentive use of the Federated feed and of Search to find people/topics that are important to you, and so on. (There’s also a list tool that is supposed to push you items by topic, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to set that up.)
I did join Post, but Mastodon became my regular daily go-to; I only check Post when I remember I have an account there, which isn’t often. And Spoutible just had its first kerfuffle with the Romance Writer community over confusion, obfuscation, and what appears to be bad faith arguing about what constitutes obscenity/sexism/non-consensual content in their posts. Bouzy did not react well to being challenged, so I’m dubious about his endeavor now.
As to the format – I did change my viewing theme to look more like Twitter, because the dark blue, while quite lovely, is also hard on my eyes. So I went with black font on white background, and am perfectly happy with that.
TaMara
@BR: I freed you from purgatory, but just so you know, BJ has a 3-link limit before it makes your comment have to be approved by a FPer.
schrodingers_cat
I am still on Twitter. mainly for the people I follow from India. It would be difficult to build that network elsewhere. I follow accounts in multiple languages, political parties, activists and on-the-ground reporters.
There is no substitute for that. Since Apartheid Clyde has taken over I have stopped tweeting as much.
schrodingers_cat
@TaMara: Its a WP thing.
TaMara
@CaseyL: OMG, the Romance writers – my first introduction to them was an interpersonal kerfuffle on Twitter. It was epic and months-long. They are kinda…sensitive.
Johnb
See, for many projects, I see it like this:
This schema will probably not map to actual version numbers, especially since the Version 2 pros often think that the best way to get people to love it is to bump the version number.
Brachiator
@cain:
I have been using computers for decades and am still fairly computer illiterate. Part of this is because good applications often are very accommodating. You can get stuff done without a lot of customization or optimization.
I used Twitter for some very limited uses. I have no interest in looking at alternatives.
But if, as is likely, Twitters collapses, people will look for alternatives and learn to use them.
BR
@schrodingers_cat:
There seem to be a lot of people in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Kerala on Mastodon. I don’t know about other regions.
schrodingers_cat
@BR: The political nerve center of Indian politics is Delhi. As an ex- Mumbaikar I am interested in Mumbai and Maharashtra.
IDK whether political parties and news organizations (small independent ones not beholden to Modi or the BJP) have the resources to be on Twitter and Twitter substitutes
Plus Marathi and Hindi are the two languages I am fluent in. South Indian languages I don’t speak, read or understand.
pacem appellant
@cain:
Mastodon isn’t complex at all! I don’t know how it got the reputation as complex. It feels like a smear campaign to me, but it’s likely innocuous Somebody had a bad experience once and that message got amplified.
I do not find Mastodon complex at all. I much prefer it old Bird Site, too. For those looking for accounts on mastodon to follow, I recommend mine. :-)
daveNYC
There’s no Twitter replacement yet because Twitter was barely making money and Twitter still exists and sort of still works. Nobody is going to pony up cash to build something that is barely profitable while a direct competitor to it exists and still has oodles of users. It’s just too risky.
CaseyL
@TaMara: They can really get into it, yeah. It’s fun to watch and, no, I would never want to piss them off.
This dispute, I’ve only seen their take on it, but it does seem like Spoutible put itself in the position it’s in. It yanked a post on the grounds of – I’m not sure what, possibly something to do with harassment? – but the topic was how to deal with issues of harassment, which is hard to talk about without mentioning the terminology.
And then, apparently what happened, was Courtney Milan (A romance writer, activist, and Attorney with whom you do NOT want to get into a fight) says she asked, politely, for clarification of the policy that got her post yanked. And there followed (again, according to Courtney) gaslighting, obfuscation, and refusal to deal honestly with her asks. I think she got banned from Spoutible altogether. The screenshots I’ve seen of the dispute appear to back her up: things got pretty ugly.
pacem appellant
@daveNYC:
Twitter is dead. What you see are maggots devouring its putrescent corpse.
Redshift
@cain:
But you’re not, really, in anything like the same way. You’re thinking which service, which is much more about user interface, spam filtering, etc. There’s no part of choosing an email that affects what emails you get, which is the whole thing for choosing a Mastodon server.
Honestly, I think the barrier for migration to Mastodon isn’t choosing a server, it’s that choosing a server is presented as a big deal, and something you have to decide before you know anything. Most people migrating are most interested in seeing content from people they follow (the Home feed), and the server Local feed is a nice add-on feature they could discover later. The only missing piece is an easy process to switch servers, if that existed, the migration instructions could be “pick a server that’s accepting new users and doesn’t look sketchy, and get started.”
BR
@Redshift:
Yeah that’s exactly what I tell people. I give them a server or two that are accepting users and are not sketchy and tell them to sign up. Then I give them some people to follow to get things started. After that it’s straightforward.
The Moar You Know
I retrofitted bidets onto every toilet in the house. It’s fucking awesome.
JustRuss
@cain: I bought a hand-held bidet when The Great Covid TP Shortage started. Best 30 bucks I ever spent, and only took about 10 minutes to install.
JPL
Steven Dennis of Bloomberg news is on Mastodon and posted links to Friday Night Zillow, so all is well.
Roger Moore
Fred Brooks talked about what he called the Second System Effect, which I think is some of the problem here. People look at the original and think of all the stuff they would have liked to include but didn’t, so V2 tends to be incredibly bloated. I don’t know how important this is when it’s a different team doing the implementation, but I assume there’s something in this direction. You mention all the great stuff you want included in a Twitter replacement that isn’t in Twitter now. Making the basic functionality all work and adding all that extra stuff is a ton of work, and it’s likely to result in a bloated product.
RSA
This is the second system effect, first described by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man Month. Eric Raymond:
gwangung
@CaseyL: Well, anybody who made Courtney Milan an opponent has one strike against them.
And Bouzy apparently did the same thing with another somewhat respected political poster, and all his fans responded with that they both were lying and making things up.
Sorry, but I know the work of these two people and I know who’s making shit up…and it ain’t them
@BR: Yeah, those were some epic comment threads. Educational and check full of references.
Frankensteinbeck
@cain:
I don’t know this particular rant, but I know the Scott Adams Saga. He’s been getting steadily more bigoted for decades, and has been pretty damn bigoted and angry for years. His obsession is misogyny, but he has a big ‘ol chunk of “Why can’t I say the n- word if blacks can?” racism too.
His comic has also been going downhill in popularity for a long time. Every time he gets cut out of a chunk of newspapers for money reasons, he screams he’s been canceled by liberals for his truth telling. If he finally got kicked off of some for his bigotry, I guarantee they were considering it because he makes them no money.
Ruckus
@cain:
Mastodon to me does not work as widely as twitter or spout, which means I don’t get the level of connection. Sure there may be ways to make it work, my mast is better after a bit of work, but I don’t want to have to work on it or at it. Sproutible started out of the gate to be a bit wonkie but it has gotten much better in a short time. I like that it is aimed more as communication medium rather than a street corner to yell crap. Because twitter sure has that feel anymore. I used to be on Facecrap but that didn’t go downhill as much as fall off a cliff.
I also think that if you want to communicate on a short forum then you need to try all of them. Twitter had a good run till SFBjr paid way too much for it and is working to make it unusable. Plus, who wants to have anything to do with that useless child billionaire?
Cameron
So, Scott Adams, Mastodon, and bidets have…what in common?
$8 blue check mistermix
Thanks to everyone who reminded me that, of course, Fred Brooks said it first and better, as with most software engineering wisdom.
Ruckus
@artem1s:
One can make twit work better by blocking the useless assholes but who wants to work an hour doing that for every 15 minutes of actual communication?
Pete Downunder
@Amir Khalid: What???? I’ve been travelling. Did I miss some major announcement?
pacem appellant
@Ruckus:
I like that Mastodon can work as both a shout-at-the-street-corner medium as well as a long-form blog site. As a big proponent of not having my de facto public spaces owned by corporations, I especially like the Fediverse model (on which Mastodon runs) and will shamelessly promote it.
Also, Twitter is dead. We’ll all just gaping at its rotting corpse (which is fun, don’t misinterpret me, but let’s not pretend it’s still a viable social media platform anymore).
Old School
@Frankensteinbeck:
In case you care…
Steeplejack
@Amir Khalid:
Whenever you want to do a wellness check on Cole, look at his Twitter feed. If he’s commenting (about anything) he’s presumably okay.
Old School
@Pete Downunder:
Apparently.
karen marie
@cain: Hear hear.
I’ve customized my mastodon experience by creating lists – a tool that was abused on twitter because it notified you if you were added, incentivizing assholes.
I found a number of people I followed on twitter, which made it feel less foreign, and then I set about looking through my local and the federated feeds to find other amusing/interesting people to follow.
My experience there is very close to what I was experiencing on twitter, with a lot less outrage generation, nazis and racists.
Perhaps I was lucky in that a reliable person I followed on twitter posted an invite link to mastodon dot online – one of the larger servers and well run – making account creation a breeze and putting me in with a lot of pleasant, thoughtful, intelligent people.
Steeplejack
@TaMara:
I think the limit is now five.
cain
@BR: oh man, I love that guy – we follow each other – lots of interesting stuff. There is another black woman who I love who talks about all kinds of stuff although her first love is mathematics!
There are in fact, lots of great content to read about on Mastodon that doesn’t have to do with politics or even nerds. There is a huge history/social science community on Mastodon because – guess what? It’s a safe space from right wing trolls who want to gaslight history and social science. Being able to discuss those things without having right wingers show up makes for easier conversation between people.
I think spoutible and post is great if you’re looking to follow journalists and get their hot takes on politics – but I think from a pure social media and talking about things – Mastodon is clearly the best choice right now simply because you can have proper discussions without idiots joining the thread.
Baud
Re: Mastodon servers, is that something that can be made easier by cloud service providers using virtual servers?
trollhattan
Worry not Twittermavens, the CEO is tending to the important things.
Racist? Guess he’d know.
West of the Rockies
Related to this post: is Twitter truly crumbling? We heard reports that within a month Twitter’s infrastructure would be in smoking ruins. Evidently not so. Has Musk rehired engineers or is the platform, indeed, notably beginning to sag and tremble?
cain
@schrodingers_cat: I had the most weird thing happen to me. I was on twitter yesterday I think and I somehow found that I was following Dinesh D’Souza. Never in a million years would I make a choice to follow that asshole.
Also, my family is all in a tizzy over the latest indian billionaire thinking of joining the presidential race. The asshole is a MAGA asshole.
karen marie
@pacem appellant: Sent a follow request – Axomamma.
Pete Downunder
@Old School: Thanks. I was on a flight from downunder to the USofA and totally missed the announcement. That’ll learn me to go back and see what I’ve missed
schrodingers_cat
@trollhattan: I have blocked Musk’s account and the word Musk forever. I don’t see his racist blatherings on my TL.
trollhattan
@West of the Rockies:
SWAG it will be revenue loss and stock price, rather than technology issues that will determine Twitter’s fate. Can Hobby Lobby and the My Pillow dude prop it up by themselves?
schrodingers_cat
@cain: Oh yeah I saw that, he is a casteist asshole too.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@West of the Rockies: what sane person would take a job at Twitter now? Only a Musk sycophant I think. That IMO is why Twitter is doomed.
Roger Moore
@Frankensteinbeck:
It’s going downhill in popularity because it hasn’t been funny in a long time. The majority of cartoonists only have enough ideas to keep their strip running for a decade or so. If they try to stretch it further than that, it starts to get really stale and boring. Scott Adams wasn’t smart enough to pull a Watterson or Larson and quit while he was ahead, so Dilbert fell into the great morass of once-funny strips. Newspapers were willing to keep it the same way they keep Andy Cap and Beetle Bailey, but once Adams made himself controversial there just wasn’t enough of a dedicated fanbase to justify keeping it.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
So how do you find out about the latest scent for men?
BR
@Baud:
That’s what’s starting to happen. The official server mastodon.online and soon mastodon.social will be protected by Fastly against denial of service attacks. Other cloud services are starting to step into the fray as well.
Roger Moore
@schrodingers_cat:
I wouldn’t count on that continuing to work. There have been reports of Musk demanding Twitter engineers prevent people from blocking him and removing the blocks from people who already have.
Ruckus
@pacem appellant:
What I find most is that I use all of them far less than I did twitter.
We all have quirks and points of contention. We likely will fall into groups that like one site more than others. And we will likely have issues with all of them. They have to be somewhat restrictive in use or they fall apart because – humans. They all have to have text limits and will all have issues because they are made by humans. Spoutible will have issues because it’s owner/creator has specific limitations on it’s use and has been very open about that from the beginning. But that is also one of the things that makes it different. I’m rather amazed that twit got so big but then it did because it was first. There are now options. Will manboy in charge ruin twit? Rather likely. Will a lot of people leave – they already have. Will many of us see that we were spending way, way too much time on twitter? Many of us already have. I’m on twit, mast, spout and I spend far less time on all 3 in total than I did on twit. If nothing else it’s broken me of the habit. And that’s not a bad thing. I’m retired, which means I have a hell of a lot of time to waste (and am enjoying the hell out of it after 60 yrs of working) and limited comment social medium is there to do almost anything but enhance communications. Even if it seems the opposite.
Baud
@trollhattan:
There is no stock price. because it’s private. There is a mountain of debt.
Matt McIrvin
While Mastodon’s format was broadly copied from Twitter, I don’t think it was really intended as a replacement for Twitter–it was fundamentally designed to be this quieter, less broadly popular thing–and there have been some interesting cultural clashes coming from the influx of Twitter refugees.
Ruckus
@West of the Rockies:
I think a lot of why it’s still running is so many people have left. The traffic level has backed away from rush hour crawl speed.
But what do I know…..
The man/child that owns twit seems to have a far more important/valuable view of himself than most humans do. It seems that a lot of the people that don’t agree with his views have left twit. I certainly spend about 1% of the time I did before he overpaid for it so that he could turn it into the man-child rant village.
Ruckus
@Baud:
So how do you find out about the latest scent for men?
Would you really want to know his views on this subject?
dnfree
@Roger Moore: I read the post and came here specifically to mention the Second System Effect if someone hadn’t—and you did! I’m glad to see it remembered. That book is still relevant.
cain
@CaseyL:
We are talking about people who are the masters of english writing and can probably find lots of ways to insult you via a thousand cuts with words you’ve never heard of. :)
My very first online community was back in 1986 I think or was it 1987? Anyways, it was all fantasy and science fiction writers and the system was quite a bit like mastodon although it was using phone lines. It was called Opus and they had something called the ‘point system’, you’d subscribe to various groups and every night or multiple times a day you’d download all the messages and then you’d respond to them and then it’ll call the host bbs and then that bbs will call other bbs’s and somehow it will route the message to all the right places. :)
But those folks were hilarious because they’d get drunk and mock bad prose. :)
cain
@JustRuss:
That you can clean yourself with essentially 3 cups of water – imagine how much paper we are wasting on this stuff!
WereBear
I love Mastodon. I even like choosing a server. It’s C dot IM. It’s in Germany, which has some of the strictest social policing online, and I am certain all the upgrades will be promptly managed.
I have had more conversations on Mastodon since November than I had with all my years on Twitter.
lowtechcyclist
@pacem appellant:
The way I use Twitter, I can’t tell that anything’s different.
MomSense
@gwangung:
Not a Bouzy fan.
cain
@Ruckus: Sure – and yes, you do have to put some work into it since there is no algorithm – it is only a matter of time before someone finds a way to use AI with mastodon.
Betty Cracker
I got an email with a community update from a Mastodon instance I tried to join after I quit Twitter. (I was unable to actually join it because I never got a confirmation email.) It was sort of…wistful? It sounds to me like that instance at least got a huge influx of people and then they migrated back to Twitter.
I have no idea what Twitter’s user base is now. I know lots of people left — an outmigration was detectable even in my smallish account. But probably a lot of Musk fart-huffers joined, so maybe it balanced out? Since the company is now private, we’ll never get an accurate user number again.
The thing I’ve watched for is whether journalists, public figures and brands stay on board. It looks like almost all have. Until that changes, I’m not sure anything viable can rise up in Twitter’s place. On the other hand, Musk seems perpetually teetering on the edge of going full Scott Adams, so maybe he will blow it up that way.
Feathers
@West of the Rockies: All of this doom and gloom drama doesn’t reflect my Twitter experience at all. Elon is losing money running Twitter. My being there is making him lose that money faster. Win!
If the founder of Spoutible thinks romance novel covers are “porn,” than that isn’t a safe place for a lot of people. He posted a screenshot of the section of Courtney Milan’s Wikipedia page which about her reporting the sexual harassment she experienced as a law clerk as proof that she had an agenda. You can be all for civility, but at a certain point that does just become silencing people who are questioning the status quo.
Anyway, here’s the File 770 post about it all. The TOS bans posting or linking to sexually suggestive material. They are banning people asking what that means and accusing them of harassment and bullying.
cain
@Old School:
It’s not a free speech issue – it’s a market issue – the market eg capitalism does not make money from your hate speech at scale. You can find some OANN type publication – you’ve chosen to focus on a smaller audience.
gwangung
@MomSense: Yeah. Was positively inclined towards him at first, but how he carries himself and how he behaves is repelling me. And that he’s generating fanboy worship is not a positive either.
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah, it IS interesting. The LGTBQ emphasis on safety vs. the Black community’s use of drawing attention is interesting. And Mastadon inherently damps down on social memes catching fire…
Cameron
I sense a Newsmax gig in Scott Adams’ future.
WaterGirl
@CaseyL: Interesting. I thought the kerfuffle was not with romance writers but with bad faith attempts to bully Spottable into allowing explicit sexual content on the site, and I thought Bouzy handled it fine. Unless there were two separate kerfuffles, about explicit sexual content?
His point, which I appreciated, is that even with sex workers it’s impossible to know whether they are voluntary putting up explicit information, or if it might be someone who is being trafficked, obviously against their will. Also, his saying that sexy pictures are fine to post, but pleasuring yourself pictures, for example, are not fine.
Unrelated to that, I have heard that in general the romance writers stuff is tricky, and people are often feuding.
Kelly
@cain: We put in bidet toilet seats a while back. I like them but man when last year’s colonoscopy prep rolled around the bidets were worth it for that alone.
Never used a chamber pot in civilization. However most wilderness river require you to pack out your poop. I use a 5 gallon bucket with a threaded on Gamma Seal lid. Holds 20~30 user days allowing for sufficient clearance. Really get to know your camping buddies.
realbtl
Adams is 65 I believe and probably saw the hammer coming. What better way for an asshole to go out than being CANCELLED!!!
patrick II
When I lived in Japan, ’68–’70, toilets were some porcelain around a hole in the floor. They have come a long way.
WaterGirl
@Feathers:
I listened to the Q & A Spoutible had on this, and he made it very clear that suggestive material is fine. It’s sexually explicit material, like someone masturbating, that is not fine. I heard nothing to indicate that they are banning people for asking questions.
I did hear someone on the line asking questions who was outright lying about something Bouzy had said earlier in the Q&A – repeatedly – which led me to conclude that she was not acting in good faith.
CaseyL
@JustRuss: OK, I have to ask this, because it’s one of the factors stopping me from getting bidets: how do you, um, dry off?
schrodingers_cat
@Roger Moore: I can mute the people that retweet him or quote him. and I do that even now.
patrick II
.
An advantage of her age — AOC really knows how to use social media which I assume helps her with younger voters. I happened across a video of her assembling an Ikea cabinet in her new place, she is very pleasant company. My favorite was when they put out a video of her dancing on the rooftops in college to embarrass her and her answer was a video of a little dance in the halls of Congress. You may not like her politics (I mostly do), but she comes across really well on social media.
trollhattan
@lowtechcyclist: I don’t even have an account, never found a need. Just read embedded threads and such, in a browser. It will eventually become My Space but that requires a viable replacement, which evidently has not yet entered the room.
Oddly, Twitter was making it much harder to read content without an account right up to when Herr Oberfuhrer Musk took over, now it’s seamless. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Cameron: is it gonna be like when Roseanne was on all the Fox shows last week and all the hosts had to pretend like her semi-coherent ramblings were hilariously funny? I thought Tucker was gonna strain some innards forcing a near-hysterical high-pitched giggle for a full 90 seconds when she trotted out Ted Cruz’s year old pronoun joke for the seventh or eighth time that day. I was worried about him.
MrSnrub
@Redshift: Trying to follow someone on a different server is cumbersome and I hate it.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
One of the things that limited social media seems to have a problem with is people that have a limited understanding of the used language, either born with limit, or an acquired don’t want to limit. And that covers a wide range of humans. We all have limits to our understanding of what we read and hear, some are a lot more limited because they want to be.
Geoduck
@cain: I suspect Adams wasn’t prepared for as big a backlash as he’s got. He was just “telling obvious truths”!
Betty
@Betty Cracker: My Twitter feed has not been inundated with crazies. I still follow a number of good people and find both interesting and fun posts, just not as many as before the exodus. I only see Elon’s nonsense when someone I follow retweets him to mock him. He gets mocked regularly. My experience with Post has been disappointing. I haven’t tried the other options.
Major Major Major Major
The main barrier to “a new Twitter” is that we already have a Twitter.
Agreed that Mastodon isn’t very complicated.
I’ll note that one of the reasons it took off is because it was not just a Twitter clone. It had a new, fundamentally-different feature–federation–that helped it gain traction.
“The new Twitter”, when it comes, will resemble Twitter as much as Facebook resembled MySpace.
I love my Mastodon ([email protected]), love the combination of being-on-a-writing-forum-as-my-home-instance and following-a-lot-of-twitter-style-accounts for my home screen. And it’s much more civil etc. etc. as many have noted, which can be a feature and/or a bug depending on what you want. Posts are a little roomier too which is nice. And content/spoiler warnings are awesome.
Ruckus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
You watch any Fox crap?
I figure that if they are going to be that shitty right up front, I’m not giving them the eyeballs. Sure it’s possible that it may be my loss but that loss pales in comparison to my gain. So I give zero eyeballs to anything fox. I see no other way to having anything to do with diminishing their power.
Barbara
@Old School: I don’t understand what Rasmussen was polling exactly, and I would love to see the results of a parallel poll of white people. But seeing a single poll as a basis for extrapolating a general aversion to being around black people more or less tells you all you need to know about Adams, which is that he was looking for validation of pre-existing views anywhere he could find it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Ruckus: I see clips floating around twitter
Anoniminous
@West of the Rockies: Word in the Tech world is there’s been outages that were repaired because Twitter engineers could access institutional memory stored on Slack.Musk has just cancelled Twitter’s Slack account.Thus the engineers have lost access to over a decade of institutional knowledge.
Twitter is in a classic High Techy-Tech downward spiral, see: MySpace, AOL, GeoCities, etc.
Paul in KY
@West of the Rockies: ight have been some hyperbole or wishful thinking there.
Paul in KY
@cain: Some crazy lady just entered race on Dem side.
kalakal
It appears we have a new
smugglers chartertrade deal between the UK and the EU that ‘solves’ the Northern Ireland border problem. All goods will now have a choice of going through the “Nothing to declare” or “Goods to declare” lane – some may even be checked to see that no one is fibbingNothing to see here.
WaterGirl
@Anoniminous: I had read that Musk hadn’t cancelled Slack, it’s just that he was behind on payments.
I also read that Slack had cancelled Musk because of non-payment, but then read that Slack had not done that, but some Twitter employee had done something to make Slack unusable.
It’s hard to keep up with all the crap, and half of it must be wrong, or at least a day out of date, which probably makes it wrong.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
Pre-Musk, Twitter was #14 in number of unique visitors among the universe of so-called social media platforms. Anything new that captures the marketplace’s fancy is going to be something that replicates or builds upon systems with a wider audience.
Paul in KY
@Roger Moore: Occasionally, as an IT person, he had some gallows humour (to someone making a career in IT) stuff that elicited a chuckle. I won’t miss him.
Ruckus
@$8 blue check mistermix:
I have a mastodon account, I don’t use it a lot, it seems less than ideal to me. I will likely close my account at some point.
I also have a spoutible account and find that it has improved a couple thousand percent since I opened my account the first day. Yes it has some restrictive rules, which seem OK to me. Yes some people have and will continue to lie about what it’s founder has said, some do that about anyone they disagree with. Some people seem to think they own whatever site they are using, they haven’t got the concept that they are the product. And probably never will. Some people will lie whenever it seems to benefit them and they always will. I find it a waste of my time.
cain
@Geoduck: As I understand it, he did admit he fucked himself.
You can always fight back this “you canceled us” by just going the capitalism route. It’s hard for them to push back when you’re just talking markets. They expect liberals to be all outraged about social stuff – but a calm discussion that the market didn’t want that – fucks them up.
Paul in KY
@Baud: In MAGA-world he’ll be selling: Musk Musk. Or for the incels he might do MUSK(little number 2 for squared).
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@NotMax: when they held that silly hearing and Lauren Boebert was shrieking about how twitter had stopped her from communicating with her constituents! I made a google and less than 25% of the country is on twitter. I’d be curious to see what that number is in rural, western Colorado.
Ruckus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
That is a lot different than watching any of their crap on TV. What I hate is going to a place that has TV and having them show fox anything, but usually the fox not the news.
gvg
@Ruckus: Twitter used outrage to drive engagement which unfortunately for us worked. If these new replacements don’t then naturally we should not end up using them as much, which is good for us and what we say we want. Sombody is going to try designing an outrage twitter replacement for the rage junkies that miss that (they exist). We need to resist following them to whatever it is and stay on the sane sites so that there isn’t as much money for the rage sites and quite a few will get bored performing in the echo chamber. They really want our attention. Need to get the non rage sites well established quickly. Best if there are a few so that no brat billionaire or movement can ever hijack it from people who like it. I never got into the social medium thing so I’m just an outside observer with an opinion, nobody special.
cain
@Ruckus: hey, go with what feels good – the point of social media is to be in a room that you’re comfortable with and able to interact. As long as you’re getting that good vibe then it’s all good.
I think having one platform that caters to everything is never going to work anyways and clearly there are some fundamental issues you have to mastodon that isn’t scratching your itch.
JustRuss
Just use toilet paper, but I use a tiny fraction of what I used pre-bidet. A few squares and I’m done.
Paul in KY
@CaseyL: Shake, shake, shake. Shake, shake, shake. Shake your booty :-)
CaseyL
@JustRuss: Thank you. Now I know :)
Paul in KY
@Barbara: Have white people in general been so nice & good to black people that they’d want to hang around us (said by pasty white person)?
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax:
This is a classic mistake in thinking about Twitter. It’s not relevant because it’s the #1 most-used social media site, it’s relevant because it’s the #1 engagement driver among journalists, opinion-havers, politicians, and culture warriors–and it is the place where they all congregate and snipe at each other. Failing a migration en masse to a clone (and if it hasn’t happened yet it won’t happen)… the product is the social graph.
So you aren’t looking for the marketplace’s fancy so much as the “marketplace of ideas”‘s fancy.
Paul in KY
@kalakal: Capital idea, what!!!
Hoppie
Never got into “social’ media – in fact I hated the whole idea, but I could never convince the t-shirt-designing spousal unit to go with “Not a twit, don’t get in your face, I have a life!” She didn’t think it would sell.
But a trip to Japan did convince her to let me buy a Toto toilet, so there’s that.
Cameron
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Tuckle probably had to stick his balls under the UV lamp for a couple hours after that.
Paul in KY
@JustRuss: Yours is probably a better idea…
Splitting Image
Scott Adams finding such a creative way to retire reminds me that he guested on Newsradio in one episode back in the ’90s. Appropriately enough, it was an episode spotlighting Andy Dick and Joe Rogan.
cain
@JustRuss:
Yep, same here. Fancier ones have a built in dryer – but i don’t have that level of patience.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
This is why I don’t own restaurant franchises. One reason why.
trollhattan
@Paul in KY: I would like to compare against a poll from 1861 before I decide “he has a point.”
These de facto conservatives know in their bones everything is against them (oy, the struggle!) they just need a steady flow of new reasons why. Me, I’m fully aware of how conservatives are against me and do not require new material. SSDD
kalakal
@Paul in KY: My favourite bit
“A new scheme to label some “high risk” food products as “not for EU” will be phased in soon to make sure they don’t slip through the cracks of the new green lane system, he says”
Translation: “The poisonous shit that crooks are now selling in the UK will be labelled, so people not living in the UK will know not to eat it”
trollhattan
@Splitting Image: Does anybody recall he once tried being a restaurateur?
https://www.gayot.com/restaurants/staceys-waterford-dublin-ca-94588_3sf080290092.html
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
@trollhattan: Modeled himself after Papa John, did he?
Randy R
CODEL is? (Google says a brand of fiberglass door)
NotMax
@Hoppie
Been saying it for years: Social media is neither.
;)
@Major Major Major Major
Yes, in the sense of perception. That is to say perceived influence, whether justified or not. As with anything else rooted in a mob mentality, said mob can shift its attention on the proverbial dime.
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: Perceived influence is influence when it’s all the influential people doing the perceiving.
trollhattan
File under “beatings will continue until morale improves.”
Geminid
I see that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen visited Kyiv today. There was a picture posted on “Noel’s” twitter account of the Secretary being greeted at Kyiv’s railroad station.
Baud
@trollhattan:
Is that an euphamism for the really bad racist stuff
Paul in KY
@trollhattan: I don’t know if that poll was bogus or not. I’m just saying that if any black person responded that they didn’t like/want to be around white people, I can certainly understand where they are coming from (in a meta manner).
ian
@Old School:
The belief that they alone possess free speech rights has always boggled my mind. Do USA Today and The Cleveland Plains Dealer not have the free speech right to choose what goes and does not go in their newspapers?
Paul in KY
@kalakal: That’s very progressive of them. Is sawdust technically ‘poisonous’?
Baud
@ian: Rights are the things that you exercise against Others.
JoyceH
I’m still on Twitter because Jorts is still there.
Paul in KY
@trollhattan: If I had been fired from there and they made the mistake of not getting my company laptop, it might accidently fall out of a window into a woodchipper or some other unfortunate happenstance might occur.
Major Major Major Major
@trollhattan:
I don’t really understand why people keep being surprised/outraged by this. It’s pretty standard, otherwise you risk sabotage on the way out the door.
Feathers
@WaterGirl: This is what the TOS says, as I linked above:
It doesn’t matter what Spoutible says in its Q&As, what matters is what is in the TOS, which is vague and leaves users with no sense of what is and isn’t allowed. If the CEO is defining romance novel covers as “porn” then I’m not going to trust him with deciding unilaterally what sexually suggestive material is. This guy seems to have the right personality for fighting bots, but doesn’t seem a good fit for trying to create a community.
There’s a new prudery welling up, with quite a bit of it coming from the left. I’ve been through this before, it all ends up being co-opted by the right and used to shut down women and marginalized people.
ian
@Baud: The nature of your upcoming presidency is becoming much darker :)
Mr. Bemused Senior
@ian: these are dark times.
dr. luba
I stay on Twitter for Ukrainian Twitter. It’s a thing. Just like Black Twitter.
P Thomas
@CaseyL:
There are bidets that have little dryers built in. My Toto washlet gets me kind of dry. I have a number of small washcloths in a container next to the toilet and use them to pat myself dry. Note that I said “pat myself dry” and not “wipe”! One time use, then get washed. For those of us of a certain age, bidets are a game changer.
I bought a large pass around pack of TP at Costco about August of 2019. At about the same time I bought the small washcloths to see how they would work. I think the TP package had about 24 rolls. I gave away one 6 pack of the TP when the “shortage” hit. The little washcloths worked so well I still have about 16 rolls left from the pack of 24. Bidet towels are a thing.
I have a portable bidet for travel, and I use one in my RV, which simplifies the RV waste tanks considerably.
But a 30 dollar bidet from Amazon to try it out.
caring & sensitive
@CaseyL: When I installed mine last year I bought about 60 washcloths from Amazon. Use once, drop into a container and launder
piratedan
some observations on the social media platforms ….
most of the main politico journos that I followed on twitter have not moved platforms… and if you’re a political junkie, it appears to make twitter still look viable. IMHO political posters are the the slowest to move because they’ve invested a huge amount of time and content to get established and are loathe to lose it by moving. In a way I find this very disheartening because that means that they’re still subject to the whims of Elon and he can do whatever he wishes to boot people off his platform (and has done so) or conversely, elevate other voices to have the same volume promoting misinformation and hate compared to those wishing to keep us informed.
Curating your feed is like anything else, some people you add, some people you drop, it’s like finding a favorite restaurant not just because of one dish, it’s because of everything on the menu is so good. If your approach is just that one thing, then that matters to you based on what your platform will be. Whatever approach works for you then good on you, these days one size fits all can be just as elusive as anything else.
For me, I find Mastodon works for most of my non-political needs, the other efforts make me a tad suspicious because of the backgrounds of those who run their platforms just leave me a tad too squishy for comfort after watching what happened to Twitter, but again, that’s very much YMMV.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Feathers:
Which is the chief complaint of right wingers, just about different issues. You and I might argue the content right wingers think should be allowed to question the status quo (like whether or not vaccines are evil) is actually harmful. However, on the subject of sexually explicit content, there are plenty of people who see harm in that for many reasons. When you draw lines in the sand, there are always going to be people who don’t agree with them. At the end of the day, the owner of the platform gets to draw the lines. If people don’t like it, there are lots of other options now.
cain
@P Thomas:
I’ve been using ‘hellotushy’ (do not use any other word combination, you’ll get porn) – it doesn’t have a heater or anything, so you have to connect to your toilet water – you’ll get cold water – but it does the job. The one I have in our main bathroom has nice warm water so feels very pleasant.
Ruckus
@gvg:
@cain:
Both of you hit on at least one problem with any social media. It means different things to different people. I used to be on wastebook (wait, is that the correct name?…..) and it was good for a while. But it degraded. Just a wee-wee bit. Haven’t been back for years. Twitter works after a fashion but you have to be willing to block the shit posters the very second you see them for what they are or you get inundated into a rage fest. Social media will ALWAYS be like this, even Spoutible with it’s hard rules. And I Like Spoutible. It works, it’s building, it’s rules are intended to keep it friendly. We’ll see if it works or if it breaks from an overload of BS. Is it twitter? I think it’s better if you want communication rather than a town hall meeting turned into a Capital riot, which twitter is heading towards.
Not all the people in the world actually like most everyone else. They want a world that suits them rather than a world in which they at least attempt to fit into. For prime/extreme example think vlad, a person that wants the world to like him while he continues to piss off everyone with his indubitable style.
Gravenstone
@Major Major Major Major: The outrage is the lack of official notice beyond being locked out of resources. A very backdoor way of saying “you’re fired”.
The Moar You Know
@ian: the conservative position on this is that those entities absolutely DO NOT have the right to make that decision. Oddly enough, if the speech affected is liberal, as if by magic, they then not only have the right but the moral imperative to decide to not carry such speech.
This is also the same theory that is behind the slew of lawsuits and legislation aimed at section 230. In conservative world, the “big tech” platforms MUST carry all conservative speech in full unmoderated form.
Roger Moore
@gvg:
It’s worse than that. Any network gains from network effects as it grows, which makes those outrage clicks extremely important. The network that can capture them has a huge advantage over the one that can’t, because they have a built-in user base that won’t move to the competition.
cain
It’s because they believe they are the only true Americans. Everyone else are illegitimate. It’s why you have all these schemes on who and who can’t vote.
The Moar You Know
@Feathers: it’s from young women who are tired of being treated by men of all ages as nothing more than potential cum dumpsters, and while I agree that this is the sort of thing that the right is in a great position to benefit from, it’s something that the left opposes at its peril. They’re dead serious and pissed, and I can’t blame them.
Manyakitty
@Randy R: A CODEL is a congressional delegation.
Denali5
I am on Post and am there less and less because TFG appears there. I don’t want to see his image or anything he might have said. I feel this way very strongly.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@The Moar You Know:
Amen.
Major Major Major Major
@Gravenstone: Fair enough, an email to the personal account would be a nice touch.
My work did a “disconnect first, notify second” layoff last fall, so it’s not just an evil-company-that-hates-HR thing, is all.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
Sexual liberation includes the right to say both yes and no.
J R in WV
@CaseyL:
With a small hand towel, or a washcloth, used specifically for that purpose. In 5* French hotel, they had special terry cloths of a specific color on a tiny rack by the bidet. Or at home, with toilet paper… easy peasy~!!~
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
@J R in WV: I’ve had bad experiences drying from a bidet with toilet paper. Probably use some form of towel.
JustRuss
Yeah, that blast of cold water first time I used it was a bit of a jolt. Once I got the pressure adjusted and developed a bit of throttle control, it’s more…”refreshing”.
NotMax
@J R in WV
Installed this gizmo (metal coupling more durable than is plastic, IMHO) around five years ago. Happy camper since.
Princess
@Paul in KY: The phrase used in the poll (something like white people are okay?) is evidently something from 4-Chan intended ironically and picked up by white supremacists. So not exactly an innocent question.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
@Princess: I think it was “is it ok to be white?”
Question leaves a lot to interpretation. Any non-white person interpreting it as it relates to them personally, the answer would generally be “of course not.”
glc
@$8 blue check mistermix: Not complex for the user. I never was on Twitter and couldn’t imagine having to deal with the challenges that always presented. To pick a server I looked at some random recommendations that have been here and similar places and picked one, and if I ever learn enough to think I should be on another one I can click two buttons and be there.
Whereas you can’t do anything of the kind on Twitter or Facebook. Maybe “impossible” is simpler in some sense than “two clicks” but I really don’t get that point of view.
At some level of sophistication it might actually becomescomplex but for the truly naive user like me it’s completely straightforward.
Can you explain to me how to get the feed on Twitter or Facebook to show you the people you follow and nothing else?
George
Maybe someone else has already noted this, but Scott Adams probably did what he did as a career move. Dilbert has gotten stale, and Adams–probably rightly–figures he can make more money by claiming censorship or that he was cancelled than he could continuing with the comic strip. He’ll go on a virtual speaking tour, have guest slots on Rogan, etc.
When I was a student journalist in the 1990s, I went to a conference at which he gave a talk to a break-out session. Toward the end of his talk, he told everyone in the room to turn off their tape recorders. He then began telling us about how we can bring good things into our lives if we think about them hard enough. He used the example of the beautiful younger woman he had brought into his life using the same tactic.
It was an odd thing to hear, and it smacked of something more than a little cult-like.
Roger Moore
@The Kropenhagen Interpretation:
Maybe a dead thread, but I’ll post anyway. There was a kerfuffle a while back about Baby It’s Cold Outside, where people criticized it as the man pressuring the woman into having sex. The counter position was that the woman was just as interested in sex but was forced by social mores at the time to refuse, and the song is about him providing her with plausible excuses for why it was OK to spend the night.
The upshot is that for someone to say “no” convincingly, they need a genuine option of saying “yes”. Otherwise, the “no” might just be them going along with convention when they really want to say “yes”. It’s a really nasty situation, since it justifies rape culture.
grumbles
There will never be a Twitter Replacement(tm). There already are New Things, but even if someone cloned the code and data and stood up an exact duplicate, it still wouldn’t be the Twitter we used to know and, uh, had emotions about. Services like this are a product of time and place. Space Karen broke it and there’s no going back.
I miss Usenet – specifically the pre-Eternal September days. AOL broke that well before a lot adults using the net now were born (and I’m showing my age) but my point is you have to roll with the death of information services. You never get a replacement, but do get substitutes.
I’m personally having a lot of fun with Mastodon, but I’m a career techie. I get that it confuses non-nerds who acclimated to siloed commercial platforms. My personal advice to them is roll with it for a bit – don’t feel like you have to fully understand everything about what’s going on before playing around. Most people seem to get it as they use it for a bit. But a lot of people won’t want to try the crazy nerd hippy stuff, and that’s cool, too. Folks will have to re-congeal around services that work for them.
That said, Space Karen can choke on it. Fucking douchebag threw a lot of my friends out of work and turned one of the few usable social media properties into Nazitown on the way to bankrupting it, all because he’s too emotionally incompetent to play troll without fucking everything up. Feh.
This got long, and I didn’t see that this conversation was done. Sorry.