Now, at a geopolitical inflection not seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall, all that is gone. Updates are delayed, scattered, and unreliable. "Verified" accounts are just every slack-jawed yahoo with $8 to burn and no professional or reputational incentives for accuracy. 2/
— Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek) June 24, 2023
I want to thank all the $8 fauxticks for coming out of your fever swamps to flood the replies and prove exactly what I said beyond any doubt. You crushed it. Great teamwork, everyone.
— Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek) June 25, 2023
For all its myriad, very obvious flaws, Twitter has been enormously useful — for one thing, I’d never have been able to produce the Daily Covid Update posts without it. And until there’s a single-source platform where all the ‘real’ news media and actual scientists gather that also has an efficient embed function WordPress can handle, there won’t be a viable replacement for Original (pre-Elon) Twitter… not for me, and not for a great many other people.
Have been meaning to front-page this very worthwhile article since Satby sent me a link, but there’s never been the time and the space…
The Sabotage of Twitter Is a Disaster for Democracy
I wrote about Musk’s destruction of the virtual public square – and what democracy is losing: pic.twitter.com/hALOCKzYk8
— Thomas Zimmer (@tzimmer_history) April 23, 2023
… An egomaniacal rightwing billionaire taking over a social media company and running it into the ground – does that matter? Unfortunately, it does. Because no amount of snark or schadenfreude will change the fact that the Twitter situation is a disaster for democracy. There are some real stakes here. Twitter has always been a mess. But it’s also, at its best, been a crucial instrument to democratize the political and cultural discourse – and in that sense, help democratize America.
There are two distinct, but intertwined issues here: There is the fact that a tech oligarchy, animated by an inherently anti-democratic worldview, holds so much power; and there is, more specifically, the deliberate dismantling of what used to be the world’s most important political communications platform…
Twitter established a conversation between journalists, politicians, and public figures who are shaping the public imaginary with people who would otherwise never have had access to those levels of influence. For instance, Twitter allowed people from the academic world to share with a broader audience what they think and observe – and thereby inject their analysis and commentary into the public debate to an entirely unprecedented degree (yes, that’s people like me, a historian from Germany who, four years ago, was sitting on the other side of the Atlantic with almost zero connections outside German academia and no public platform at all).
Most importantly, Twitter has been instrumental in amplifying the voices and demands of traditionally marginalized groups. That’s where it really demonstrated its democratizing potential. Much of the moral panic over “cancel culture” – which animated Musk to buy Twitter in the first place – is a reaction to precisely this: Traditionally marginalized groups have gained enough influence and have acquired the technological means to affect the political debate.
Twitter has been crucial in this uphill struggle of traditionally marginalized groups finally making their demands heard, being able to extract a political cost for certain discriminatory speech and behavior: a tool for organizing, a platform, a global amplifier. It has enabled people with absolutely no traditional access to power, no powerful institutions to back them up, to speak to elites directly, criticize them in the public square. How valuable this has been is evidenced by the fact that many of those elites are so consistently bemoaning “persecution” – and, like Musk, wish to sabotage and destroy this instrument for public criticism. To the extent that traditional societal elites – and elite white men, in particular – face a little more scrutiny today than in the past, that they have been deprived of their supposed “right” to unquestioned deference and affirmation, Twitter has helped democratize public life.
Losing this hurts – it will hurt the attempts to finally make America live up to the promise of egalitarian multiracial pluralism, to become the democracy it never has been yet. It is a massive failure of those elected to safeguard democracy that they have seemingly cared little about this…
I am, however, also still on Twitter (although far less active than before). Why? Basically, as I see it, the alternative to Twitter, as of right now, is not “All the good, none of the bad” – it is “Less of the bad, a lot less of the good.” There is a real cost to every option still left on the table. Which is why it’s best not to lecture anyone. There are certainly very good reasons to leave Twitter behind. But I am over there not for entertainment, but for work – and Twitter still offers a lot I can get nowhere else.
For everything I do, for my own understanding of the world, I need not only the thoughts and ideas of people with whom I’m mostly familiar. I need exposure to new, challenging perspectives. At its best, Twitter has been an excellent tool for providing that. No other place offers the kind of diverse input I used to get there – information, analysis, perspective. No other place can, as of yet, provide the kind of platform for any output that results from my work.
It’s not just about my output, of course. Some of the smartest, most incisive analysis I have encountered is coming from writers, academics, and activists who a) have no or little traditional platform (through a big institution) and b) depend on Twitter to find an audience. I fully understand why people want to be done with Twitter. But let’s at least remember that the livelihoods of some really important voices out there depend on the community and platform they have built there. Once that’s gone, they simply won’t be able to keep doing their thing. In effect, many of those voices and perspectives from outside established institutions are going to perish because they won’t be able to make the transition and build anew in time. And this will disproportionately affect people who happen to be not white men. I have learned so very much from perspectives to which I would have never been exposed without Twitter. Where is that going to come from? Because if it’s not coming, my own analysis and politics will be so much worse.
I worry that we are going back to what it was like before. It was significantly less diverse, less interesting, less innovative, less daring, less challenging, less smart. It was worse…
It takes real skills to build (or maintain) something, Mr. Musk; but any two-year-old can break stuff…
Many "good" Twitter bots like @PossumEveryHour & @MakeItAQuote have now shut down after Twitter suspended their API access
Elon Musk previously said he'd make exceptions for automated accounts like these
read more on which accounts & what's happening:https://t.co/QhCh4iTlTA
— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) June 24, 2023
killing them off in an attempt to monetize them is absolutely insane, like buying central park and bulldozing all the trees because they won't pay rent
— flglmn (@flglmn) June 26, 2023
It is crazy that in less than a year a blue checkmark went from something that suggested someone was notable in some way to being a 95% chance that the person in question lacks object permanence pic.twitter.com/h5uAIouVwJ
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) June 26, 2023
bbleh
So here’s a question. Management has taken away the water cooler AND the coffee machine because too many employees were Wasting Time and Affecting the Bottom Line with their loafing and their gossip. And things have settled into a sullen silence: everybody in their cubes, arriving in the morning, leaving in the evening, much less of that aimless chatter that Management dislikes.
How long does THAT last?
It’s a setback, but it strikes me as sticking fingers in the dike. Good luck in the long run.
NotMax
Ah, Bigfoot is alive and well, i see.
;)
Suzanne
@bbleh: I thought the aimless chatter was How We Collaborate and Innovation At Work and thus why we need to RTO.
Jeffro
Zitron is clearly on to something, and that something is the near-destruction of what almost resembled a platform for free speech, worldwide, 24/7, with completely equal access and reach.
Dare I say, a…meritocracy…of discourse?
LOL
Of course not, but it wasn’t a bad attempt. And now it is just…bad.
Jeffro
Now then – let’s talk about how that trump CNN tape is going to peel off another couple percent of his primary AND general vote. Because it (and its subsequent, related indictments) surely will.
different-church-lady
We never should have let Twitter dominate our information flow in the first place. It was a bad way of doing things that became essential only because it became ubiquitous.
Ken
@Jeffro: Sorry, I haven’t checked the news today. Is this a new video of him alternating deranged ranting with confessions to crimes, or the one from a couple weeks ago?
Suzanne
Twitter is just a shitshow of ads and random people I don’t follow who somehow show up on my feed. I don’t find it the great content deliverer others do.
Jeffro
@Ken: my bad! it’s a new video
West of the Rockies
Twitter has been with us for 17 years. Most of us lived without it for most of our lives. We will survive its possible collapse, and something better will almost certainly fill its void.
Anyway, it’s just a thought…
MazeDancer
If anyone needs a handy copy of the tape of Trump criming, here it is.
Both Rachel and Lawrence played it in their shows as well.
Ken
@Jeffro: Ah. So he’s either not hired a new lawyer, or is paying no more attention to this one than to the last dozen. Good, good.
Carlo Graziani
OK, sure, yes to all of that, Musk is a Prince Among Assholes, no question. But why is Jack Dorsey spared all vituperation for how Twitter turned from a shit-accented show into a full-up shitshow?
I mean, I’ve read complimentary profiles of Twitter’s ex-management that revolved precisely on how they legally cornered Musk into buying Twitter, and in so doing made a fortune for themselves and for Twitter investors out of an enterprise that everyone seemed to agree was an ultimately doomed business whose profits, to the very limited extent that there were any, depended on the ability of their army of content moderation experts to stay no more than two or three steps behind the ever-mutating legions of imaginatively evil trolls that endemically infest their site.
But if Twitter really is a public good, then isn’t Dorsey just another corrupt Tech-Bro who sold out the rare Socially Good Thing to come out of the Bay Area for a nice payday? How come he and the rest of the old Twitter board don’t get their turns with the stick?
prostratedragon
@Jeffro: Do you mean the newly released audio of him bandying about a DOD report about Iran? That’s the one mentioned in the indictment, but the actual sound is even more offensive than the transcript. I’m sure it was met with cold fury in the DOJ.
Odie Hugh Manatee
I believe the asshole intended to blow up Twitter and I believe that his other ‘investors’ are only paying their share to destroy it as a communications platform that progressive/liberal types could utilize to their advantage. The wealthy and powerful can’t stand something that they have no control over. Now they control it.
No FAFO for the wealthy. When you have fuck around money you can afford to find out…lol
Alison Rose
@MazeDancer: JFC
Alison Rose
@West of the Rockies: There are many things that most of us lived without for a long time that we would not want to see disappear. I mean, you could say the same about the internet in general. As explained in the post, Twitter was a vital service for many reason and many people, and none of the replacement sites seem to be ready or able to fully take its place.
cain
The fediverse is where at least the LBGTQ+ folks are going – not sure where the black diaspora is going – I think they still like Twitter. But with twitter going down the tubes, and even reddit showing signs of the same malady that Elon has brought to twitter – I’m led to believe that only community supported social media is going to be safe and viable.
Of course, Meta plans to make sure and join the the metaverse and already people are planning on divesting themselves of any server that joins with Meta. Honesty, I can understand why – gonna bring in a bunch of Facebook like energy – no thanks.
Scout211
@Jeffro: Discussed downstairs a bit. It’s the audiotape of Trump bragging about the military plans for attacking Iran. In a room full of giggling aides and an interviewer who was writing a book on Meadows. The DOJ has the tape but CNN now has it.
Exclusive: CNN obtains the tape of Trump’s 2021 conversation about classified documents
dmsilev
@Scout211: Got to wonder who made that recording.
Cameron
I don’t think I’m going to check out that recording. Listening to the swinish oaf showing off his toy with all of his proud kindergartener energy wouldn’t be good for my health.
Kay
I’m sympathetic to this but unfortunately I don’t think it matters. Musk bought it and he has no interest in maintaining “a virtual public square”. They are going to have to transition to somewhere or something else.
Jeffro
@Scout211: I missed the earlier discussion but I feel like I’m all caught up in terms of cold fury here.
The U.S. could have squared this whole deal on the Capitol steps on the morning of January 7th, 2021 but unfortunately we’re just a kinda laid-back “republic” that doesn’t take these kinds of threats too seriously.
Well, until now.
Go Jack Smith!
Kay
@Cameron:
It’s interesting though, especially the shameless ass kissing from the low quality hire in the room with him. They’re as awful in private as they are in public.
lgerard
@Cameron: You most definitely want to hear it, just for the perfect ending. I laughed out loud
The jury will too
Jeffro
I have to agree. A campaign to get most reasonable folks over to Post or Spoutible or whatever would do us all good in the long (or even not-long) run.
gwangung
@Carlo Graziani: Dorsey has ALWAYS been a corrupt, proto-fascist, who favors authoritarians in the guise of “free speech.” Absolutely unsympathetic to marginalization and oppression and shows no sign of changing.
Scout211
Any of these people who were there. My guess is the writers were recording the whole time because they were interviewing for the book on Meadows. The tape was likely subpoenaed by DOJ.
But someone keeps leaking to CNN. That is what I am curious about.
Kay
@Jeffro:
I just think them staying benefits him because it gives him cover – “see?- it’s not 100% Nazis!”
If they go he’s screwed.
dmsilev
@lgerard: That closing line was, in retrospect, inevitable.
Scout211
Yes, all those giggling females in the background. 🤮
Martin
@Carlo Graziani: Because Twitter *isn’t* a public good. It’s private good that temporarily acted like a public good.
Cory Doctorow had a good piece a bit back on the Enshittification of TikTok.
So the ‘good to the users’ stage is only possible because of Venture Capital. I know, I know, they’re the bad guys, but they provide startups with windows in which the startup doesn’t need to worry about revenue because a bunch of billionaires are paying for that directly.
The idea here is during that period they build up the value in their product/service/etc. and during that period they’re great. And without the VC, they literally couldn’t exist. There’s no way to build a few billion dollars in value off of nothing but the collective input of millions of rando without someone else paying the bill because the go-to-market problem for social media is impossible to solve under any normal market model.
So during that building value phase, it acts like a public good because nobody is siphoning cash out of it. Then they reach some arbitrarily defined level of scale where ad revenue should be able to cover the bills because the platform is a certain size, then you hit the 2nd stage of making things better for business customers and that’s when a lot of the real complaints about Twitter started under Dorsey, because now the moderation systems interact with the ad impression systems, and if you moderate this way you get more money and that way you get less, and all that jazz. Musk buying Twitter marked the 3rd phase, because all of the investors instantly cashed out. It was an unusually rapid 3rd phase – usually it grinds on, but Musk did it in weeks. And what’s left are the survivors of that nuclear blast, wandering around in a daze, or blinded, with a growing number of wolves feeding on the corpses.
It was never intended to be a public good. Ever. It felt like one when it was profitless and for a bit longer because Jack did an okay job of not going insane during that 2nd phase. He kept the peace better than, say, Facebook did. But it was always going to end this way.
Investors are vampires. They suck the blood from the entities they are invested in, with not a lot of downside if they drain the victim to a point where death is inevitable, provided they can bail out before that point is broadly recognized. Jack was always going to lose to that, and did, with Musk being the mark.
Reddit is going through that same cycle right now.
I went to Mastodon because it is largely resistant to this cycle. But it substitutes a number of new problems – without the VC money scaling is a function of volunteer labor to spin up and moderate instances. The protocol avoids virality to make those tasks easier, which makes it much slower to spread information. The upside is that there’s basically nothing for investors to buy, and how you finance your instance is up to you – ads, Patreon, subscriptions, benefactor that finds it cheaper to pay the hosting bill than collect the donations, etc. It’s more stable, if less useful. But also less abusive because virality and abuse go hand in hand.
Reddit had been a decent substitute for information flow to Twitter. Very different in organization, but ultimately pretty similar in terms of outcomes, but they’ve decided to open an artery as well.
I too found Twitter to be useful during Covid, if only as a series of signposts of where to go. It had been critical for fire information here in the west, but that’s since been replaced with tools like WatchDuty which are in many ways superior – and funded as a 501c3.
I think we’ll find our way to solutions to the loss of Twitter in time.
Jackie
@prostratedragon: Per various lawyers on MSNBC, the newly discovered audio tape being played tonight, sounds like a possible second indictment to be issued in NJ.
This Special Council Jack Smith guy is a conniving SOAB! I like him more and more!
prostratedragon
@Jeffro: Remember, the long-time national pasttime is baseball, in which large people with bats on one side face others who are throwing 90mph missles in the vicinity of their heads. We do this for fun. It’s the kind of deliberate sublimation that will track your ass down when aroused.
Kay
@Scout211:
So gross how she brings up Hillary Clinton and takes a completely nasty shot at her just to kiss Trump’s ass.
Low quality hires. He hires from the bottom of the barrel.
patrick II
@prostratedragon:
I bet it is being met with a colder fury at DOD
Sister Golden Bear
In today’s edition of trans genocide, Kansas’ AG is suing to list someone’s assigned at birth on all their legal ID, even if they’d previously changed their birth certified to reflect their true gender.
It’s also intended to make trans people easily identified targets for a state legalized discrimination law that takes effect next week.
Martin
@cain: The fediverse was effectively built by the LGBTQ community back when Twitter was as unsafe as it is now – particularly the trans community. That’s why it’s so nice, IMO. They insulated the place well.
It’s a shame that the public entities haven’t stepped up. Every university should be running instances. If you host a journal or center, you should be hosting an instance around that journal or center. Municipalities should be pooling effort to run instances – police blotter, etc. They have been incredibly reliant on platforms like Twitter to reach the public, and the correct solution is to build their own little piece of that which can’t be taken away.
Another Scott
@Kay: +1
Back in the olden days, InfoWorld magazine had an online discussion thing where people talked about their articles, some of the writers participated, etc. It was great.
Then their management and senior editors decided that it was a distraction and eventually shut it down. Lots of us were really pissed off, but they owned they place and they decided what they wanted to do with it.
People moved on. It’s the cycle of life on the internet.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@Martin:
Me too. I think people “perishing” and never being heard from again is overly dramatic. They probably have to let it die by removing their free content first though. If all the non Nazis leave it collapses in a month.
Martin
@Scout211: I bet it’s Alito.
Scout211
That female may be one of the aides but I think she is one of the interviewers for the Meadows book. Her voice is the loudest and the nearest to the microphone.
So that would be one of Meadows’ low quality hires (for his memoir). LOL
Martin
@Kay: The never-ending conspiracy thinking got my attention. Literally everything is a conspiracy in that world. No wonder they can’t function.
Eolirin
@Kay: Some people run businesses through Twitter, so I get the difficulty involved in doing that. It could legitimately end their ability to continue running those businesses, in a number of cases. Having to rebuild an audience is hard when you change platforms, and that can turn into a race with operating costs.
Kay
@Eolirin:
Oh I get it. It’s just that it was never a public square and a Righr wing asshole bought it. Now all they’re doing is providing free value and legitmacy to the asshole’s property . Musk needs them. Without them he has Truth social.
I think it’s a shame. I liked Twitter.
NotMax
@different-church-lady
Been shouting the same sentiment into the gaping void for years.
Social media is neither.
Kay
@Scout211:
I don’t follow them much anymore- the Trump Show bores me- but this is fun because it will send them all into full blown paranoia.
“It’s a DISTRACTION from the FALSE FLAG….”
Sister Golden Bear
@West of the Rockies: Perhaps you missed the bit about how it connected marginalized communities, empowered them, and enabled them to influence public conversation.
Losing this will have a huge impact on people like, and currently there’s no replacement (even in Twitter’s current state). Yes in the long run something better may — or may not — come along, but in the long-run we’re all dead. And right now trans people, and others, absolutely need Twitter’s capabilities as we literally fight for our lives.
So yeah, I’m not nearly as sanguine about losing it.
different-church-lady
@Martin: That deserves to be front-paged. But even if it was, it wouldn’t be more than three days before we were hearing exactly the same laments about how indispensable Twitter was.
patrick II
What kills on that tape is the reaction of the Trump staff synchophants’ to what Trump is showing them. He has been maintaining that they were just “some papers”, but his staffers’ reactions belie that story.
Sister Golden Bear
And before I get yelled yet again for staying on Twitter, let me point out that sometimes marginalized people do need to use the master’s tools against him.
Sister Golden Bear
@cain: Any queer/trans fediverse recommendations?
Carlo Graziani
@Martin: 100%
gwangung
@different-church-lady: Intent is not the same as impact, and that applies to things that act as positives, as well as negatives to marginalized communities.
The question should be “how do we save the positive impacts for marginalized peoples” and not “Die! Die! Die! Tool of satan-spawn!”
Another Scott
Worth keeping in mind, but I’m not worried about it in this case.
(via 7veritas4)
Cheers,
Scott.
Chetan Murthy
@Sister Golden Bear: [full disclosure: I don’t have a Twitter account, block all Twitter cookies, and read Josh Marshall’s Twitter lists via nitter.net; I use no other social networks except Linkedin (as a rolodex)]
A lot of the same people who yell about how people should stop using Twitter, are also FB users. And that …. well, that’s pretty damn hypocritical, b/c Zuck was a fascist when Twitter was still a gleam in Melon Suk’s eye. It’s a rare person who literally uses none of these oligarch-controlled social networks.
West of the Rockies
@Sister Golden Bear:
Good point (and Alison Rose above). I’m sorry for offering an short-sighted hot take.
Is Mastodon just not taking off? Are their user numbers declining?
different-church-lady
@gwangung: There is no saving it on Twitter. The guy who runs it is trans-hostile. I’m not happy about that, but there’s nothing any if us can do about it now.
prostratedragon
@Scout211: Presumably the tape was part of the discovery package, so if the defense didn’t have it before, they do now. Kind of doubt DOJ would have leaked it. Maybe the defense is trying to seed a poisoned jury pool claim, ridiculous as that is.
gwangung
@different-church-lady: So what about the community in question? How do we save them? I have to say, ignoring what they need to survive is not being a good ally.
Ron
staying on twitter and continuing to quote it is just propping up musk and his nazi acolytes. moving to mastodon was easy. I found many of my old follows, found new ones, and the ones that haven’t moved, oh well.
different-church-lady
@gwangung: My whole point is there are other means of communication. It sucks that people have to migrate and rebuild, especially at such a critical time, but laments and sympathy aren’t going to fix it.
Let’s not make the same mistake on the next go.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@gwangung:
Out of curiosity, what do you think should be done?
Chetan Murthy
I just want to note: if you don’t want to support Twitter, and are really adamant about it,
Between those steps, you’ve pretty much sidestepped all attempts by Melon Suk to track you and monetize your views. Sure, you can go further and not even use nitter.net to view tweets. But really, at that point, you’re pretty done.
prostratedragon
@patrick II: You betcha. Before this is over it might become clear just how badly this guy is wanted. I think a lot of people have no idea.
Chetan Murthy
Another thing: one of the things that makes Twitter so useful, will be *extremely* hard to replicate in any non-centralized system. Hence, in the fediverse. That thing is “discovery”. “discovery” means that somehow, Twitter shows you tweets that are related to the ones you’re already viewing, but that you had not subscribed to. There are two kinds of discovery:
#2 is, for sure, a shitshow, b/c the algorithm could be showing you Ian Miles Cheong (or whatever his name is). But #1– that’s critical to any kind of self-assembling communities on Twitter, and it’s going to be pretty damn difficult for the fediverse to replicate that. Its protocols just aren’t designed for it. I say this as a technical statement, not one about “community”. It’s a matter of the software not being designed for that function. And given that it’s already been deployed to many, many servers all over the globe, fixing it at this point is going to be …. *difficult*.
So I think we should cut twitter users some slack: until some other platform arises that allows the kind of discovery that Twitter does, they’re kind of stuck. Imagine the gay kid in some Texas shitkicker town in the 1970s: he had no idea that there were people like him all over the world, and certainly no way to contact them, talk to them, get their advice and sympathy. Twitter is a way for him to do all that. And sure, for such an obvious example he can do that on Mastodon. But replace that with some suitably niche thing, and it’s difficult, unless you already know where to look.
piratedan
@Martin: have to agree, I’ve decamped to Mastodon as well and am extremely reluctant to try out BlueSky, which is the closest equivalent to Twitter, since it’s run by the same asshats that sold out Twitter. I’ve no reason to think that they’ve changed who they are, so I’m hoping after time, there will be a viable alternative to the function that Twitter evolved into.
It seems that each time that something becomes of use, someone on the right co-opts it and turns it into shit. Radio, Television, Newspapers, the internet etc….
prostratedragon
@Sister Golden Bear: Your second paragraph is the main point I suppose.
Martin
@gwangung: I’m not sure they need saving.
I don’t think the problem is that there are no trans communities out there, but if *your* social graph is on Twitter and you want to preserve *that* social graph, that’s not really problem that someone else can solve. That group need to organize and choose where to go – and yeah, that’s really hard.
It may come down to what you are doing in the space. If you are using Twitters algorithm to get reach beyond your social graph, to engage in advocacy, etc. that’s hard to replace, as Mastodon doesn’t really do that because it doesn’t have an algorithmic feed. If you just want a community to interact with that won’t dismiss who you are and what is weighing on you and has experience in your particular flavor of life challenge, that’s not that hard to find. But it may not include the specific friends you made. And that may be too big of a cost to pay.
I look over at BlueSky who is now discussing their moderation rules – and it’s just a perfect storm of avoidance of responsibility. Instead of bans you get 3rd party lists of bans you can subscribe to. Instead of moderation you get 3rd party lists of content tags you can subscribe to. Want to publish Nazi shit – go for it. Just make sure it gets tagged somewhere.
That system is going to end the same way. You may get some years of stability but you’ll find yourself back in this moment. And if that’s a bargain worth taking then by all means take it. But please don’t act surprised when some billionaire asshole hijacks it to power some AI service and tears it down to the studs. There’s an old observation:
We call people who can see the future ‘futurists’, we call the people who can tell when the future will happen ‘billionaires’.
I know BlueSky will implode, but I don’t know when. So I’m disinclined to jump in there. I’d rather invest time and energy in getting my corner of Mastodon working better. It might collapse under the collective community weight, but it won’t be because some billionaire bought or poisoned it.
But there are discord servers run by the trans community, lots of Mastodon instances, my daughter is in a LGBTQ Elder Scrolls Online guild with a strong trans population – there’s lots of spaces depending on what you’re looking to do. But nothing is going to be a drop-in replacement.
And there can be value in occupying the space that doesn’t want you. You do advocacy in the space where the people who need to hear the advocacy are.
Sister Golden Bear
@different-church-lady: The effort needed to migrate and rebuild literally will take away time and energy needed to defend ourselves from trans genocide right now. Look, I’m definitely not wild using run by a transphobe who’s made the words “cisgender” and “cis” bannable offenses.
Yes, ultimately we will need to move on, but right now, Twitter has a reach that other platforms simply don’t have, and we need that reach right now, as I said above. Let’s not make perfect the enemy of the good.
moonbat
I know no one here apparently wants to hear this, but Spoutible is a minority-owned, open platform with virtually the same interface as Twitter and is vigilant about protecting its members, particularly those of marginalized communities, from harassment. NOT venture/vulture capitalist funded and dedicated to creating a public commons that can be the force for good that Twitter never quite was.
They just launched their Android app and are days away from launching the iOS app. All they need to do is attract a critical mass of journalists and experts and BOOM, all the things about Twitter that is being mourned here will have been recreated in a non-poisonous form.
I urge folks to give it a look.
Sister Golden Bear
@Chetan Murthy:
That’s exactly what I’ve found lacking on other platform, and as you said, it’s absolutely essential to building communities.
Exactly.
Omnes Omnibus
@Sister Golden Bear: I have wondered about quitting Twitter, and I ended up deciding that, as long as people like you and other members of marginalized communities find it useful/necessary, I will stay around and shout into the void with you.
Jay
https://www.mediaite.com/online/get-the-fk-out-proud-boys-surround-unmask-neo-nazis-in-violent-confrontation-at-oregon-rally/
Alexia, order all the popcorn.
Brachiator
Yes, Elon Musk has broken Twitter and seems determined to run it into the ground. Similarly, recent decisions about Reddit may wreck whatever usefulness it has to its users.
But Twitter is not the goddam virtual public square. It is a private company, and one that was losing money. If Musk destroys it, and he probably will because he is an arrogant fool who does not understand how useful Twitter is, it will be a shame and a real loss to the world. But he owns it and can do what he wants with it.
This may force people back to more traditional news media, at least until someone else can build something better than Twitter. And this is a likely outcome. This new technology age has seen incredible innovation within a relatively short time. Musk is an interesting outlier. Since the rise of the Industrial Revolution, I am not aware of another individual who so thoroughly sabotaged a useful product or service. But while Musk can hurt himself, and turn Twitter into a useless husk, he cannot prevent others from building something better.
And hopefully more profitable.
sstarr
You’ll have to work really hard to convince me that Twitter was vital for anything. We seemed to do fine before Twitter.
Martin
@Sister Golden Bear:
https://tech.lgbt/explore is a decent sized instance with a little focus on tech.
https://lgbtqia.space/explore is a smaller but more broad instance.
In lieu of Twitters’s algorithm you’d want to follow hashtags like #Trans which will add posts from the fediverse that are tagged with that to your regular feed.
I’ve found that the choice of instance is good to find people, but if you are trying to discover content following hashtags helps a lot and your instance, so long as it’s well moderated (and those appear to be) won’t really matter much.
BR
I used to read twitter regularly a year ago and for 9 months have been using mastodon where I forget that twitter even exists. I have found a huge number of interesting people to follow there, only a few of whom are people I used to read on twitter. In fact I follow more “randoms” on mastodon and read all kinds of interesting posts from them daily, so much so that I’ve unfollowed the big name accounts that seemed to dominate the twitter world.
Kent
The OLD Twitter gave us Trump.
So I’m not so sure about the whole “Old Twitter = democracy, New Twitter is a disaster for democracy” meme.
Kent
Someone like Google will eventually buy up Twitter at fire-sale prices and more or less restore it to mostly how it was before.
Alison Rose
@sstarr: If you actually read the post and some of the comments, you’d have seen the explanations. You just apparently don’t want to agree with them.
And again, this “we were fine before [x] existed” argument is absurd. We were also “fine” before the internet existed – do you want it to completely disappear permanently tomorrow? We were “fine” before cell phones existed – would you be happy for everyone to go back to nothing but coil-corded landlines? We were “fine” before basically every invention because we didn’t know anything different, but that doesn’t mean the invention is meaningless.
NotMax
Anyone mentioned the enough is enough defamation suit filed against Kari Lake?
JWR
Lol!
Speaking of Joe Biden, do we know what the classified papers found in the trunk of his ‘vette (joke) had to say about anything? I remember something about notes to and from family, but what else?
TriassicSands
@Sister Golden Bear:
The United States of America, where freedom was once almost a goal.
First, I was surprised by African American Republicans. Then, I was amazed by the Log Cabin Republicans. If I hear about a trans Republican, I don’t know if I’ll even be able to process that.
I have always maintained a certain amount of skepticism about federalism. I’ve always believed that people should have the same rights, responsibilities, and penalties in every state. But, now, although it doesn’t affect me directly, though it does personally, I am grateful that there are states that are refuges from the fascism that Republicans are spreading as far and as wide as they possibly can.
TriassicSands
@JWR:
They were all highly classified documents about his son’s laptop and Joe and Hunter’s plans to steal trillions of dollars from every country on Earth. But other than that nothing important.
NobodySpecial
I don’t think we do much good in getting equal rights for all if we don’t go into the greater world and cause good trouble. The kids who overwhelmingly use these medias don’t seem to have much of a problem with gender and sexuality simply by being exposed to LGBTQIA+ individuals.
Build supportive internal networks, sure. But abandon everything for our own little ghettoes and bantustans? Doesn’t seem to be a good solution in my eyes.
Jay
@bbleh:
as nobody has touched this,
When I started my last job, loved it, even though i wasn’t paid a living wage. All I had to do was fix stuff.
Then, no raise, and well I won’t say his name, but the moron thought if costs were cut, he would get the same raise none of us got. New manager, clueless, 3 managers, ( no name, Manager, part time parts guy), so couldn’t even fart with out getting criticized, then no coffee breaks, tons of other petty shit,
We have some money, so I just walked away.
A job that I used to love going to after Orange, for a few months, until Mgmt changed, well, T said walk away, so I did.
West of the Rockies
@TriassicSands:
Trans Republican… does Caitlyn Jenner count? She’s pretty Rethug.
JWR
@TriassicSands: Ah, so only the best stuff. Got it. ;)
Mai Naem mobileI
@NotMax: i paid attention to Stephen Richer during the 2020 GOP primary and honestly I am shocked that he’s turned out to be quite technocratic. I really thought he would turn out to be a Thomas Massie kind of a-hole. The guy he was running against in the primary was a real nutjob. Obviously I wanted Adrian Fontes to win but this was one of those blessings in disguise because I doubt Fontes would have run for SOS if he had won the recorders election. All that said I am not sure if Richer will win the primary next year. He may not even run. Death threats aren’t exactly inductive to running for elected office. I hope he wins big $$$ against Kari Lake and collects on it. Kari Lake was a prime time anchor here forever so she should have some deep pockets.
TriassicSands
@West of the Rockies:
I’ve honestly never paid any attention to Jenner. I wonder if that will change with all the hate being spewed. It’s one thing to go with a party if they aren’t actively trying to punish or eliminate you, but when that starts only very unhealthy individuals are likely to hang around. Or so I would think. I guess time will tell.
Shalimar
@sstarr: Many people have explained why Twitter is so important to them. No one gives a damn whether you or I listen. Everything doesn’t have to be about us.
Ruckus
@different-church-lady:
I agree that it wasn’t the best, but the reality is/was that it was pretty good. If nothing else it sufficed as a reasonable communications platform with a very large following. But it really can’t do that as the play thing of a pompous arrogant ass.
karen marie
@NotMax: Glorious, ain’t it? 🤣
rikyrah
@Kay:
This is so true. I was most pissed off at the muthaphucka who had the nerve to bring up Hillary😠
karen marie
@TriassicSands: How could you forget Caitlyn Jenner? She’s not only Republican but she’s joined the trans moral panic. She is joining Lance Armstrong to do a “trans ‘fairness'” podcast.
rikyrah
@Carlo Graziani:
Jack is not spared in the least. He is a rotten dudebro😠
rikyrah
@Jackie:
If Smith does indict in New Jersey, there should be no pushback…
I know.. That would take the GOP to grow a pair.😒😒🙄🙄
rikyrah
@Sister Golden Bear:
Their heinousness knows no bounds. These are ADULTS they are taking about…
So much for ” we are doing these laws to protect the children ” bullshyt😠
rikyrah
@moonbat:
I have signed up for Spoutible too😊
rikyrah
@Kent:
That was Jack. Jack is responsible for Trump😠
rikyrah
@TriassicSands:
African American Republicans…
Stephen from Djaingo always existed; he was a case study, not a fictional character.
Sadly, the people Harriet would have shot have always existed😠😠
Amir Khalid
@karen marie:
The hypocrisy of Caitlyn Jenner, who is among the most prominent trans women, helping to stoke public hysteria against trans people is breathtaking.
Brachiator
@Kent:
Google isn’t smart enough to make Twitter work. They know how to create products, but their people get bored easily and have little interest in improving or even maintaining anything outside of their core products.
JPL
@Amir Khalid: Jenner just wants to be noticed.
Debbie(Aussie)
I can’t remember exactly where I read it ( guardian, maybe) but the recording was apparently made by Trumps assistant (?) who always recorded the discussions requested by book writers.
found it
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/26/donald-trump-classified-documents-recording-pentagon-iran?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Martin
@TriassicSands: There’s a really interesting video that explores a related phenomenon.
It’s long. It’s Contrapoints exploring cringe, specifically cringe in the trans community and how it is sometimes a way to attack your own marginal group as a defensive mechanism against others that would attack you as part of that group.
But as Rikyah points out, there’s a long history of any group under attack for some members to join the attackers as an immediate defense against being attacked. And, I mean, it’s worked pretty well for Thomas, no? You think he’d have gotten that level of enrichment any other way?
Martin
@Amir Khalid: See the link in my previous comment. There’s always someone who will argue you’re being trans/gay/black/jewish/atheist/liberal wrong to secure their own credibility and status with people outside of those communities and your own doubts that maybe you’re the one doing it wrong.
JPL
@Martin: Thomas and the rest will release rulings today, and since they view themselves as the privileged ones, be prepared to be outraged.
mrmoshpotato
Fixed. And I won’t even charge Ed $8 per month (week? day? nanosecond?)
satby
And again, the point of the article, not just the excerpted parts, was how marginalized communities worldwide were able to connect with a wider audience, not just in the U.S.
Adam’s updates on Ukraine: via Twitter.
AL’s updates on Covid and scientific breakthroughs worldwide understanding this new disease: via Twitter.
Possible coup in Russia: a clusterfuck of no or misinformation interspersed with some real updates: thanks to the gutting of Twitter.
It’s weird how so many regular readers of a blog that prides itself on its community think they’re somehow not using social media.
Tony Jay
@piratedan:
There exists no weapon that the oppressed can wield that their oppressor cannot pick up and wield against them.
And that goes for everything, even weapons like anti-racism campaigns, giving a voice to marginalised groups, or exposing powerful offenders. They will take them and turn them around and use them to lie and misinform and divide and any voices raised in complaint will be drowned out by false accusations of racism or intolerance or misogyny.
Which is depressing, but shouldn’t be surprising. When the invention of cannon and firearms threatened the supremacy of castles and armoured knights, they just monopolised the foundries and created close-order musket drill to ensure that the bullets went in the right direction.
Betty Cracker
@Martin: I don’t have time right now to listen to the whole thing, but the first 10 minutes was intriguing and hilarious, so I’ve saved it for later. Thanks for flagging that!
Betty Cracker
@satby: I had a similar thought this weekend when trying to follow what was happening in Russia. It threw the degradation of Twitter into sharp relief!
JPL
@Betty Cracker: This past weekend was when I realized that the information on Mastadon about Russia was more accurate than twitter.
Barry
@Suzanne: “I thought the aimless chatter was How We Collaborate and Innovation At Work and thus why we need to RTO.”
To the office, yes.
At the office, of course not 🙁
Baud
@Tony Jay:
Truth.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
This whole “Twitter was awesome before Emmo Musk broke it” reminds me so much of the romanticization of the ’50s and ’80s as a some kind of golden age. People seem to forget that the blue checks were put in their in the first place because of trolls claiming to be public figures. Also, Musk buying twitter at the behest of dictators doesn’t understand Musk; Musk is a grifter and part of his scam is his fan bois amplifying his bullshit and twitter is how he keeps his cult of personality going.
WereBear
@JPL: I adore Mastodon and never regret the decision to leave Twitter. I had a whole network of nice people working in rescue. It was a way for me to support and learn from shelters all over the world.
But these folks work on a knotted shoestring. Twitter is how they raise money, and in fact, Mastodon has a bit of a non-commercial culture which must be navigated differently. But they could build it there.
But most of them are volunteer and don’t consider it. Even though it’s something they can get a knowledgeable volunteer to do, they have to protect their main sources until they build a new list.
satby
@JPL: individual pockets of accurate information are available in news media, but the rapid aggregating and almost immediate debunking of bad or deliberate misinformation was pretty good on old twitter. Mastodon, by design, won’t replace that. Spoutable hasn’t so far.
Besides, most people in the US are oblivious to how Twitter has been a tool of freedom in non-democratic countries like Iran. Trying to “splain” away why this is no big deal…, well maybe not here. Huge deal for other people around the globe though, and we are entitled to feel sad and frustrated that a spoiled autocrat stripped that away even as the quest continues to find an adequate replacement.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
I’m still using Morse code on telegraph machines for social media though I admit it’s hard uploading cat memes
satby
And ironically, the complete fuckup he made of that acquisition and the unveiling of his abject ignorance on what is supposed to be his engineering genius has been brought to us all by … Twitter.
I’m not a nostalgic person, and never thought Twitter had a golden age. It was a very useful tool for many groups that needed a platform, now it’s far less useful and no replacement has been identified. None of the other wannabes cut it so far. Hopefully one will eventually.
Matt McIrvin
Fortuitously, I’d left Twitter several months before Musk took over because it was just bad for my mental health–I know there are people who manage their feeds better, but for me, it encouraged doomscrolling and paying attention to terrible “counterintuitive” hot takes that the system seemed to amplify.
I’d always intended that to be a temporary break, but when the Musk asteroid hit I just stayed off.
I use Mastodon, I like Mastodon but by design, it’s less addictive and so I find myself staying away for long periods. The trouble is that the things that make a social network higher-quality in this way also make them less sticky. The incentives are against making a truly useful forum.
I’d say I’m not sure we should have a “Twitter replacement”–that thinking in that kind of centralized way is too fragile–but the thing is, Twitter did provide a global community for whole classes of marginalized people, simultaneously exposing their concerns to the wider world, in a way that it’s hard to replace. That really was precious and it seems to be the thing Musk specifically saw as some kind of tyrannical conspiracy and was out to kill.
Ken
Special guest Meghan McCain will lead the panel discussion of the dangers of nepotism.
Betty
Speaking of low quality hires, it is nothing short of a miracle that Meadows hired Cassidy Hutchinson. She has been invaluable in outing the criminals.
Matt McIrvin
@Martin:
“So nice” is a relative thing though–the fediverse also created new places for white supremacists and similar trolls to go once they started driving them off Twitter. They get defederated eventually but it can be hard to keep up with. And some of the most notorious hard-right fora either started out as, or went through a phase of being, forks of Mastodon.
One of the most interesting things that happened when Musk started to damage Twitter was that a lot of Black posters revolted by what was happening started exploring Mastodon as an alternative… and ran smack into a lot of clueless old white guy behavior as well as intensely racist trolls, and whether you could get your instance admin to do anything about it was of course a complete crapshoot, because of how the fediverse works. They eventually found/started some relatively good instances but also argued forcefully that this shouldn’t have been necessary in the first place. It feels like Mastodon hasn’t been as good for them as it is for not-Black LGBTQ people, and it’s troubling.
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: Thanks for the report.
I noticed that Teri Kanefield set up her own Mastodon instance. It looks like there are 2 users.
Transitions are hard and annoying and disruptive and cost people real time and money. But it’s how things are changed for the better, also too. Ultimately, the only way to have a chance to control your own destiny is to do the work to take the steps to control your own destiny and not rely on for-profit entities to do so.
Cheers,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: I mostly read Teri Kanefield through Mastodon–she’s one of my favorite posters there.
Geminid
It may be that I’m just obtuse, but I have not noticed much change in the Twitter feeds I followed before last October when Musk took ownership. Those include Ragnarok Lobster, Michael Paulauski, March Wheeler, Laura Rozen, and Cheryl Rofer, as well as Ukraine war commentators like Tendar, Noel Reports, Oryx and WarTranslated.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: One of the biggest ongoing fights seems to be “should/should not Mastodon behave more like Twitter in some way”, with recent refugees from Twitter arguing that the Twitter-like feature was essential to their community and Mastodon old guards saying “no, that’s one of the toxic things we built this to get away from”.
With the biggest hot button being the intentional absence of a “quote tweet” function. The old guard say QT encouraged terrible negative behavior, recent Twitter refugees argue that some calling out of bad behavior that is stigmatized as “toxic” was actually an important corrective.
Note, it’s always possible to fork Mastodon to make something still in the fediverse that has the features you want, and people have definitely done this, but there’s a certain inertia that keeps the more exotic ones from catching on.
Matt McIrvin
The specific Mastodon instance I’m on, a very geekly instance centered around mathematics called mathstodon.xyz, has support for LaTeX math markup in posts, which is amazing as long as your intended audience is other people on mathstodon.xyz (full support is at the rendering stage, so it won’t carry over to other instances that don’t have this same extension installed–and there aren’t many). The feature does have the ability to convert simple markup to Unicode equivalents, which makes them readable elsewhere, but that only goes so far. Still, it’s a cool feature.
The other nice thing is just that my least favorite “feature” of Twitter from the beginning was the paltry 140- or 280-character limit, which exploded every conversation into these atomic nuggets that could too easily be propagated out of context. While Musk seems to have made long tweets a paywalled feature, on Mastodon it just depends on your instance. I think the default cap is 500 characters (with some special accommodations for links and alt text), but mathstodon.xyz has lifted that to 1729 characters, which now means you can put whole short essays in without breaking them up into tiny snippets–or if you must break them up, the divisions can be less jarring.
Matt McIrvin
Oh yeah, BUT… one of the worst things about Mastodon/fediverse to me is the way that other posts in a long thread might not even propagate to other instances. The rules for this are a bit obscure but the trouble situation seems to be when someone on another instance RTs a post out of the middle of a longer thread. On Twitter, you’ll generally at least see this was the middle of a thread and if you click on it, you can scroll up. On Mastodon, it looks like a first post, and you likely won’t see any indication that the earlier posts existed at all–you can only access them by jumping through some hoops that are not obvious.
That makes multi-post conversations irritating: it’s even more likely on Mastodon than on Twitter that you’ll get responses bringing up something you just said as if it were a novel point you hadn’t considered. When it happens on Mastodon, it’s not the respondent’s fault–most likely they genuinely could not see your earlier post.
The longer post limit mitigates this a bit–but for this reason, it’s actually more necessary on Mastodon.
satby
@Geminid: Except for more ads to block and block not working as well, my feed hasn’t changed much either; but I block bad actors pretty relentlessly. I have both mastodon and a spoutible accounts. Mastodon I doubt I’ll ever use and would go back and delete my account if I cared enough to visit; and spoutible is just too boring.
Layer8Problem
@Another Scott: I believe Kanefield’s instance’s two users are herself and her system administrator, Mr. Kanefield.
Shalimar
I was reading a story about Musk’s future fight with Zuckerberg, and Musk tweeted that he trained in judo and no-rules street fighting. Watching West Side Story over and over is not training. How do you train in street fighting? By experience, sure, but i am trying to imagine how one qualifies as a trainer.