Sorry I’ve been busy.
We’ll wait.
Several of my usual news sources skip the coy pseudo-delicacy and just say outright that Twitter responded with a poop emoji 
.
Sam, you and Sam argue it out and get back to us…
Lefty accounts shut down posting. It doesn’t mean they don’t still read it.
This isn’t hard, you know.
I come back to twitter because 12 years of all my curated follows are there, if only Twitter just allowed me to see their posts or content. However, after subbing/following just a few hashtags on mastodon (#ai, #b3d, #canpoli, etc), my home feed starts getting:
- a flood of content,
- only content I’ve actively requested,
- streamed to me from all federated servers without any rate limiting.
I’m sold. It hits all the right points. If only I could find all my old friends too. Oh well.
I’ve been planning on giving both Mastodon and Bluesky a try.
However, as a UI person, the biggest feature I see that makes Twitter what it is, is low friction. Very little UI friction to get past to just accomplish what you are there for. From what I’ve heard about the federated models is that they are harder to get set up with, and somewhat more confusing. If so, that will be a hige impediment to mass adoption. The motivated and the techies will be fine with it perhaps, but the casual users will stay away. But maybe they’ll evolve.
At Twitter I was suffering through waves and waves of near spam posts by some social influencer wannbe, pay-to-win, blue checks. Spam I never requested, nor wanted. And thanks to Musk those posts count me down on some 600 rate limit… then effectively shuts off my access to ANY of my follows.
Fuck it. This isn’t worth it. Too much shit to get to access my curated list of interests. Mastodon isn’t perfect, but I can effectively:
- filter my feed from triggers I don’t like/want,
- sub/follow tags and topics I want,
- join a server with admins that share my sensibilities (FU Elmo),
- generally get what I want from my social news feed, without an algorithmic bait-n-switch.
Plus if I click on the Federated timeline feed while logged in my local server I can watch the flood of posts auto roll through my screen. After a second or two I get used to the lighting fast pace and I can pretend that I’m some all powerful being, watching the matrix cycle past me.
If I had a dollar every time I heard this…
Well… almost no one. The Musk fanboys like Sam do.
There are of course the army of Twitter Blue Checks under all his posts saying things like “great move sir, thanks for making the site better!” seemingly completely detached from the reality that it’s now barely functional.
This was not your average fail whale. It was the social-media equivalent of Costco implementing a 10-items-or-fewer rule, or a 24-hour diner closing at 7 p.m.—a baffling, antithetical business decision for a platform that depends on engaging users (and showing them ads) as much as possible. It costs $44 billion to buy yourself a digital town square. Breaking it, however, is free.
I’m reminded of what’s called “The End-to-End Principle”
If we want those algorithmic feeds to be good, they need to compete with ‘‘the feed of things I asked for.’’ That has to be the baseline; otherwise companies can enshittify their feeds without worrying about damning comparisons between their recommendations and the stuff that you signed up to see in the first place.
Here’s one more thing to like about applying E2E to online services: it’s a rule that even small services can comply with.
any way to sidestep the “need an account to see tweets”? …
I still get this message and will not create one … but I have quite a few people whose UKR-war reporting I follow
TIA!!!
I’m just going to go back to rss. 100% in control and ownership of all my feeds, served directly from the creators I choose, no matter the medium, and throughout the internet.
No more algorithms. No more “got to make sure I click the bell”. No more holding my follows/feed hostage.
…I’m getting rate-limited quite often, but the best way to describe it though would be like “rolling blackouts.” It isn’t exactly random. But I know that I hadn’t seen 1000 posts before the limit kicked in. And the limit only lasted for a few hours before getting lifted. AND it was device specific, so I moved from my cellphone to the desktop and could continue browsing, no problems.
For the last two days, I only get “Nothing to see here” when I try to read another tweeter’s tweets, but “Something went wrong. Try reloading.” for my own.
I got that once today. Other than that, I’ve seen no issues. I haven’t been rate limited yet, but apparently I’m not as heavy a Twitter user as some of you. I’m not sure I’ve ever scrolled 600 tweets in a session. I’ve also got a small feed, as I don’t follow political bullshit on Twitter Purely tech and science stuff and war news, and it’s as good as its ever been for that kind of content, from what I can tell.
For those of you who dumped Twitter: What’s the next best place to get things like AI news? I 've almost completely abandoned Google search as it rarely returns what I want anymore, and the good hits it does come up with have to be found amidst pages of sponsored ads and SEO’d garbage. Life is too short.
For all the talk of Twitter and Reddit failing I’m surprised we don’t talk more about how godawful Google search has become.
From what I can tell, for a lot of that the second best place is right here on the SDMB.
…still not dumping Twitter. I’ve tried everything (except Blue Sky, where I can’t get an invite) : and there really isn’t anything that works for me. My network still persists on Twitter. I’ll hold out until the last of them leaves.
I check about six tweets a day, the ones I get notified about in my E-mail. There’s no way I’m going through that much traffic unless Musk in his Infinitesimal wisdom counts all the replies to the tweets I check.
I’m confused (not an abnormal state for me): What’s all this about ads on Twitter? I never see any. is it because I have Adblock Plus active?