Username checks out.
Yeah, but the hydrochloric acid in your stomach can turn aluminum oxide into aluminum chloride, very slowly.
Either way, it’s a pretty nutty thing to be worried about.
(And I’ll drop it there. It’s not really related to the nutball this thread is about.)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced they were leaving X.
Twitter-X’s algorithm deprecated EFF posts to the point that it was no longer worth posting there.
A few days ago, Nate Silver made a similar point that X has become more and more of a freak show. The accounts with the most engagements tilt heavily towards influencers, as opposed to sources of decent reliable information.
I put X on hold on Jan 5 when it became an harassment website. I expected they would get it sorted out within a month. I was wrong: grok is still distributing involuntary sexualized imagery. I just can’t post at a place like that. I’m not enamored with Bluesky and Mastodon: they don’t reach enough normies or moderates. Work in progress.
Well yeah. This is the man who claimed he was solving the COVID ventilator shortage by sourcing 1,000 ventilators, and they turned out to be ResMed APAP machines for sleep apnea. Same guy who boasted he could get the Thai kids out of the cave with this amazing submarine, but all he delivered was slander against the guy who actually did deliver.
So yeah, if he funded a perpetual youth effort, it would be denigrated, because we know he’s full of shit, and a lot of the things he funds are full of shit.
Idiot futurism is the worst affliction society has right now. “Dude, anything could happen in the future with enough money.” Okay buddy, sure, but it seems unlikely that a carnival barker with a history of overpromising is gonna be the guy who solves perpetual youth.
Not to mention how most scientific progress comes from academia; the private market just monetizes it.
Came: between AI, university support thereof, and funding changes, we’re not going to see innovation like we used to.
Or we will, just not from the U.S. academia.
One can hope!
I almost never see Mastodon posts, but I see more and more BlueSky posts. Probably a bit biased because I mostly read and get posts from progressive sites and people.
Let’s get some perspective. X has 550-600 million monthly active users. Threads has 200-250 million monthly active users. Bluesky has 30-40 million users, an order of magnitude smaller than X. Cite.
It’s a leftie niche virtue signaling website, broadly speaking. Normies reside elsewhere; moderates are often shouted down. The ideology at Bluesky isn’t too far from my own, but I’d rather have a wider variety of voices. I’ll admit that Bluesky’s worst tendencies have moderated within the past half year or so, maybe. Also, Bluesky does have academically inclined posters. Nate Silver (who is hardly the final authority on this) has written about Blueskyism which he defines as, “… not a political movement so much as a tribal affiliation, a niche set of attitudes and style of discursive norms that almost seem designed in a lab to be as unappealing as possible to anyone outside the clique.”
I’m thinking of setting up a DuckDuckGo browser to access the Meta environment (Threads, Instagram) with a stronger privacy firewall as it were. Meta is a bad actor, but maybe I can thwart some of their nonsense.
Follow me on BlueSky! 
I’ve honestly had few spats there, but I’d like to establish a presence somewhere with greater reach.
Oh yeah. Only Mastodon and other member of the Fediverse universe have protections against what Cory Doctorow called Enshittification - Wikipedia, aka platform decay. BlueSky doesn’t, nor does Substack. Both are solid platforms now, though only Substack is financially viable. BlueSky doesn’t have a revenue model AFAICT.
Cory Doctorow:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Krugman notes that they don’t necessarily die: network effects can insulate them from their exploitative decision making.
Yes, but how many of them are bots?
That’s a very fair question. I don’t have the answer, but like others I’ve heard that the bot population has grown under Elon’s ‘promote the right’ imperative.
A quick Google suggests that the answer is “no one knows”, because estimates of the bot population vary wildly. But typical estimates run between 10% and 45%, with some suggesting that as many as 80% of X accounts are bots. So, just as a total WAG, it would not seem out of line to suggest that somewhere around half of them could be bots.
Also worth keeping in mind that (a) Elmo totally controls the platform, (b) has explicitly said that he doesn’t give a shit about advertisers and has publicly invited them to fuck right off, and (c) has absolutely no ethics and no principles when it comes to promoting his crazed world view.
All that’s true. Which makes it especially annoying that “x” continues to have so many users.
Just say no.
Jan 2026 comparison of X with BlueSky (there are other comparisons on the web, but they are dated). This one says that Bluesky’s algorithm and general management is better, but that it attracts a certain section of the left, few moderates, and fewer conservatives so is stultifying. Basically, that’s it. I wouldn’t bother with the article:
Bloomberg from last week, sub req. I can gift an article, but it will only last a week.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-04-05/bluesky-needs-to-burst-its-american-bubble
The platform’s failure for me is that it still hasn’t matched the international reach X inherited from Twitter. When global news breaks, such as the US and Israel starting a war with Iran, X still hosts the largest community of real-time voices. “No one likes to hear that the Nazi Bar serves better drinks,” a security and diplomacy professor recently put it, “but if you’re professionally interested in coverage of the hard security aspects of the war Bluesky is not enough.” And it’s not only during crisis. Even for casually tracking tech trends from Bengaluru to Tokyo that have nothing to do with US political melodrama, X remains annoyingly useful.
I understand X is filled with misinformation, so I’m dubious about that perspective. Still.
Many argue that Bluesky’s largest constraint is ideological, that it’s become a liberal echo chamber. But the biggest thing holding it back is not that it’s a progressive bubble, it’s that it’s an American one. Almost half (47%) of Bluesky’s daily active app users are from the US, compared with just 15% of X’s, according to Sensor Tower. That’s on top of a much smaller base: The market intelligence firm estimates X has 31 million US mobile app DAUs versus 2 million for the upstart.
Frankly, I think it’s pretty good that only half of Bluesky’s users are from the US, though I’d like to see that share fall further.
I’m curious what percentage of X users are non-Americans pretending to be Americans to influence Americans.
Certainly that describes the majority of the bot owners. And hence the majority of the bot army.
Considering EM ostensibly wanted to clean up the bots, it’s going about as well as any part of his projects that he decides to lead himself.
X has a huge inertial advantage (and so does Meta FB/IG) in that the regular user can’t be arsed to keep on a neverending socialnet pilgrimage fleeing the apparently inevitable enshittification of successive legacy venues, and “institutional” posters will feel like they should stay as long as so many of the regular public do.