Elon Musk's Perfect Disinformation Machine

November 12, 2024 7:02 AM

Hidden changes are warping the already broken ecosystem that determines how many citizens—particularly in America—construct their sense of reality. (slSubstack)

Y'all, I know there are folks who don't like Substack/NYT links but here we are and I thought this was worth posting in the aftermath of a disastrous election.

posted by Kitteh (119 comments total)

If you want to read something about the fractally fucked (by design) disinfo ecosystem, read Kate Starbird
posted by lalochezia at 7:35 AM on November 12 [8 favorites]

I always feel a little dumb when this topic comes up, because I don't know how people are finding all the bad stuff on twitter. I do very little to curate who I follow; people who say something interesting get followed, people who say something that makes me mad get unfollowed, and I end up with a feed full of journalists, economists, and climate scientists...and none of the really bad stuff he's describing here. I'm not even sure how I would get to the bad stuff. Meanwhile Youtube pretty reliably throws craziness at me via its recommendations, so it's a little more obvious to me how that works.

How do you get lost in a world of twitter disinformation without kind of wanting to in advance, by choosing who you follow?
posted by mittens at 7:43 AM on November 12 [14 favorites]

Do you let Twitter choose for you? I only look at my curated feed so I don't get random stuff, although I do encounter some reposts and commentary on various awful people. Every once in a while the "following" tab will come unchecked and I'll start getting "for you" instead and it's immediately obvious because it's fatuous ragebait. But I think a lot of people use "for you" to "explore" twitter. That said, the final exodus seems to be underway and it's pretty clear that I'll be on Bluesky only pretty soon because everyone will have left.
posted by Frowner at 7:48 AM on November 12 [13 favorites]

> How do you get lost in a world of twitter disinformation without kind of wanting to in advance, by choosing who you follow?

The disinfo ecosystem has gotten very good at finding the marginally convinceable.

Community spaces for special interests that are prone to entering the ecosystem have on ramps. The stuff you're describing has mostly resisted it.

E.g., video game communities focused around first person shooters. Contractor and blue collar focused content. MLM and men-focused "get rich" // "self help". Crypto.

They don't care about your eyeballs, so why spend time getting in front of them.
posted by constraint at 7:48 AM on November 12 [19 favorites]

Just yesterday I finally deleted the five twitter accounts I had: one with my real name, one with my Metafilter alias, one a sockpuppet, and two for past projects.

I hadn't actually interacted with any of them since around the time of Musk's takeover. Well, others had interacted with them, and by 'others' I mean hundreds of 'follows' from porn bots. I was always surprised when I accidentally clicked on a Twitter link, to see what user I was still logged in as on that machine. My work PC, my name; my home PC, the sockpuppet; the Mac, one of the projects. Now I won't be able to see anything on twitter. Oh, no. Not that.

Twitter, like TikTok, seems to devote all of its computing power to try and drag me into these disinformation loops, and I refuse to participate, and by deleting these hopefully hurts some analytic numbers somewhere.

How do you get lost in a world of twitter disinformation without kind of wanting to in advance, by choosing who you follow?

The trick is they keep throwing hooks in the water until one grabs you; the more hidden, the more surreptitious, the more 'tastier' it seems, they hope eventually you grab one, you follow someone who doesn't look threatening or like something that has a hidden message, and then they slowly reel you in. Even though I also had kept my feed pared down to the right things, I still got to a point where I was just like, why am I still going to this website if I'm constantly blocking and reporting things?
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:49 AM on November 12 [14 favorites]

I was just like, why am I still going to this website if I'm constantly blocking and reporting things?

Where I'm at with Facebook now (fled Twitter in '23), though a high % of it is just increasingly nonsensical AI garbage. I'm sure, outside of the bubble I spent 10+ years creating there, it's AI generated Nuremberg rallies, though.

I'm in the process of closing down a community page I run w/~50K followers (at least 20K of which I'm pretty sure are real people?) I can see a near-term future where social media use itself is a flag of being a low information person.
posted by ryanshepard at 7:59 AM on November 12 [17 favorites]

I had Twitter for about a week six or seven years ago, and it went from "ooh cool astronomy pictures" to me hurling hateballs at people I didn't know, so I deleted the account back then and have never interacted with Twitter other than reading screenshots people post elsewhere. And this was well before Emerald Hairplugs bought it and turned it into LiveNazi.

I went to delete Facebook a couple of days after the election. I long ago got rid of anyone who would have voted Trump, but it's still algorithmic social media no matter how many blockers I have that delete ads and sponsored posts. I put up a post saying I was going to be taking the account down and to send me your personal email if you wanted to keep in touch, and just got bombed by >100 comments about no no you're one of the people I enjoy following, so I decided to keep it for now. I defriended about 10% of the 600 "friends": anyone who wouldn't vote for Harris because of fucking Gaza, anyone who won't stop constantly harping about their pet issue and getting one like and zero comments, anyone who posts their Wordle results. I'm going to try to make my own posts nothing but cat pictures, pretty much, and leave it at that. As shitty as FB is, I honestly do enjoy hearing what people are up to, and I'd never find out about 2/3 of the events I want to go to without it.

My doing this is a microcosm of one of the several reasons Team Blue lost the election: like a lot of reasonably aware people who want to preserve their mental health, I just don't interact with conservative media. And so I entirely missed the incredible firehose of propaganda telling people with very poor media literacy and critical thinking skills that Harris was a crazed Communist and Hero Trump was going to help lower grocery prices despite all the evil socialists and feminazis persecuting him—all with zero pushback from Team Blue, who was under the impression people could distinguish fact from bullshit. More fools us. I don't know what to do with this at all.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 8:15 AM on November 12 [20 favorites]

I'm not on Twitter, but I am still engaging with other problematic businesses. Metafilter users are in the 1% of intelligence, media sophistication, and self-control (you're welcome!), but I try to think about how I'm happily engaging with something (like Twitter) that can only exist at the expense of other people. I don't ever want to become a small-L libertarian.

What's wrong with Twitter? I have no problem with it.
What's wrong with online gambling? I have no problem with it.
What's wrong with capitalism? I'm doing fine.
What's wrong with drugs and alcohol? I have no problem with them.
What's wrong with IAP mobile games? I never spend much on them.
What's wrong with apartheid? I'm white and doing great.
What's wrong with voting for Trump? It's working out great for me.
What's wrong with YouTube? I only find cool repair videos.

Twitter is 100% a primary contributor to the recent Trump victory, and the owner is poised to finalize the corporate state forever. We need to be thinking more like: "Well, space is cool, but if it's going to have Elon Musk and capitalists leading the way ... maybe we just shouldn't go. Maybe we know plenty about the cosmos, fuck it."

Yet I just ordered a movie on Amazon Prime.
posted by caviar2d2 at 8:18 AM on November 12 [20 favorites]

I agree with ryanshepard, above. I think the shine has worn off of most social media and pretty soon it will be like reality-based-tv. Just pablum for the low-IQ slobs of society.
posted by hairless ape at 8:19 AM on November 12 [4 favorites]

ok. but. low iq slobs vote.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:20 AM on November 12 [11 favorites]

They vote now. What difference would that make?
posted by hairless ape at 8:22 AM on November 12 [1 favorite]

I never go to Xitter. Deleted my long-lived access awhile ago. Alas, I still cannot escape the hard-right “suggested for you” bullshit. Reddit constantly pushes r/conservative at me, as well as even worse subs.

At least those are pretty easy to spot. YouTube, otoh, seems bound and determined to get me to click on all manner of hard-right culture war channels, despite me never taking a look at anything remotely similar, or really anything even opposite. I don’t do politics at all. Just music an a tiny handful of LGBTQ+ podcasts/vlogs. Maybe that’s what’s making YT think I need to watch some tradwife vlogs?
posted by Thorzdad at 8:23 AM on November 12 [2 favorites]

I don’t do politics at all. Just music an a tiny handful of LGBTQ+ podcasts/vlogs. Maybe that’s what’s making YT think I need to watch some tradwife vlogs?

This is likely it - to the algorithm, you do do politics. Because queer stuff is politics. So it shows you other politics stuff - the most popular politics stuff. That happens to be Rogan, Peterson, and their ilk.

The only times I've had right wrong bollocks in my suggestions has been after watching things like hbomberguy and similar lefty video essayist. The upshot is that I don't watch them either anymore, because I don't want the bollocks. If I stick to repair videos, skateboarding, and Tom Scott, YouTube doesn't think I'll be interested in politics generically.
posted by Dysk at 8:39 AM on November 12 [6 favorites]

I don’t do politics at all. Just music an a tiny handful of LGBTQ+ podcasts/vlogs. Maybe that’s what’s making YT think I need to watch some tradwife vlogs?

clearly you need to be reprogrammed
posted by chavenet at 8:40 AM on November 12 [2 favorites]

It does drive me a little crazy that FOX news now has this talking point of how much smarter Trump was with his money, how his campaign spent so much less than the Harris campaign and still won.

Yeah, because he outsourced most of his campaigning to conservative-interest groups like Turning Point USA and ran his campaign as cheaply as possible - only 12 full time staffers! - so he could illegally divert campaign donations to pay his legal fees (again).

More relevant to this post, somehow FOX news doesn't consider the forty billion dollars Elon Musk spent to buy twitter, specifically so he could re-platform Trump and get him re-elected, when they talk about who "spent more" on the election.
posted by subdee at 8:42 AM on November 12 [20 favorites]

I was trying to monitor wildfires around my house here in NJ, but the NJ Forest Fire Service was using Xitter as its method of communication. I seem to be able to follow those links as a non-user of Xitter, but our institutions - certainly our public safety ones! - need to drop their reliance on Musk's propaganda machine.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 8:43 AM on November 12 [30 favorites]

I attended a lecture back in '89 and the question presented was,"Which came first, writing or speaking?" Of course, most people would say that speaking antedates writing. However, the professor invoked Derrida, saying, "Men drive paths through forests." If driving a path through a forest could be considered an act of writing, then writing could feasibly have antedated speech. Here's the quotation:

“one should meditate upon all of the following together: writing as the possibility of the road and of difference, the history of writing and the history of the road, of the rupture, of the via rupta, of the path that is broken…of the space or reversibility and of repetition traced by the opening…the silva is savage, the via rupta is written…and inscribed violently as difference, as form imposed on the hylè in the forest…it is difficult to imagine that access to the possibility of a road-map is not, at the same time, access to writing” (Derrida, Of Grammatology)

As instructed, I've meditated on this connection between writing and ecology for a long time, and it seems to me that there is no firm conclusion to be drawn; maybe we could save the planet through writing, maybe we could destroy it, but under the circumstances, I think it is best to err on the side of caution. Writing has a weighty ecological dimension, exabytes of new writing every year, and yet no government will consider this at COP29. I personally think that truthful writing should be part of our stewardship of the planet, and it is likely that Disinformation Machines like X pose serious existential risks.
posted by Tarn at 8:53 AM on November 12 [7 favorites]

It really burns me how much vital government information is distributed through walled garden social media. In the specific case of NJ Forest Fire Service, they do provide updates on a different walled garden, Facebook, that I think are the equivalent to what they post on Xitter, if you can stomach that platform any better.
posted by mollweide at 8:54 AM on November 12 [7 favorites]

I seem to be able to follow those links as a non-user of Xitter, but our institutions - certainly our public safety ones! - need to drop their reliance on Musk's propaganda machine.

Agreed but then what will they use?
posted by warriorqueen at 8:54 AM on November 12 [1 favorite]

Mastodon is available. If public service agencies started their own server, people might even use it.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 8:57 AM on November 12 [13 favorites]

Don't they have websites? Can't we just as happily go to [local group].com as x.com/[localgroup]?
posted by Dysk at 8:59 AM on November 12 [11 favorites]

Bluesky is growing exponentially and I hope it becomes what Twitter ought to have been. It's had its flaws but is working those out.
posted by Pallas Athena at 9:00 AM on November 12 [10 favorites]

Bluesky is growing exponentially and I hope it becomes what Twitter ought to have been. It's had its flaws but is working those out.

Does anyone have a sense of how - or if - they're preparing for all the ratfuckery that is coming their way if it becomes an effective organizing platform?
posted by ryanshepard at 9:03 AM on November 12 [7 favorites]

Relevant note from a recent Foreign Affairs article (archive) about Russian disinfo, “The Lies Russia Tells Itself”:

Meta’s vigilant internal intelligence teams and relentless takedowns blunted the project’s overall reach: after Meta kept shutting down Doppelganger-associated accounts on Facebook and Instagram, the SDA (“Social Design Agency’) appears to have dialed down its efforts to sow disinformation on Meta’s platforms, although some abuse continues. An SDA project proposal disclosed by the FBI argued that X, formerly known as Twitter, had become “the only mass platform that could currently be utilized” in the United States.

posted by migurski at 9:05 AM on November 12 [7 favorites]

some years ago (2000 or thereabouts), I was working for a dot.com that didn't have a clue of what to do with all the money it had somehow raised. All I had to do was show up for work and the gravy kept flowing into my bank account.

At some point, I got curious about this "building online community" stuff that was getting talked about a lot by the money types. So I did a bunch of research which led to one rather obvious conclusion:

The very idea of an online only community (ie: a functional culture where the people involved didn't know each other out in the real world) was bollocks.

It was, of course, still early days for the interwebs but it had already become clear to those who cared about such stuff, that the only actually healthy online communities had real world aspects -- spaces and/or situations where those involved (maybe not all of them but enough of them) could get to know (or already knew) each other. They could hang out, have a coffee or whatever, maybe not agree on everything, but they could at least see that it was other human beings they were dealing with -- not just abstract presentations of various opinions, emotions, arguments and whatnot.

Anyway that was then. We (the culture) obviously didn't bother to learn the above lesson and now we are where we are with trolls and ogres and other sorts of imaginary monsters in ascendancy here-there-everywhere. Should we even be surprised?

Meanwhile, I found myself hanging out with some younger twenty-something types last night. They were discussing a small, contained social network they were hoping to create with a key guideline being that the people involved had to actually KNOW each other, or certainly that everybody involved could be vouched for by somebody who did know them.

The name they had for it was HEALTH FOOD SOCIAL MEDIA. No toxic ingredients.
posted by philip-random at 9:08 AM on November 12 [10 favorites]

I never followed the blue bird and always felt I was missing something. Maybe I did for the 23 minutes that Twitter was at its apex, but now that it's stinky and musky, I'll stay far, far, far away from Shitter.
posted by BlueHorse at 9:11 AM on November 12 [1 favorite]

a key guideline being that the people involved had to actually KNOW each other

One, that expects honesty on the parts of the people;

Two, LinkedIn is very focused on enforcing this, and like if someone tries friending me and I decline, I can literally say "I don't know this person" which should penalize them. (should). I have met people who only use LinkedIn as their social network because it expects professionality and they don't get hit with all the political and opinion BS (not that it's completely gone; I was reviewing applications for a entry-level data entry job and found one woman who aired all of her right-wing opinions on her LinkedIn page, hundreds of words per post)
posted by AzraelBrown at 9:13 AM on November 12 [2 favorites]

Does anyone have a sense of how - or if - they're preparing for all the ratfuckery that is coming their way if it becomes an effective organizing platform?

Blocking. And blocking works so well on it! Like, if you personally block a ratfucker, then you cut off their air because then everyone you know that follows you, the blocker, will never ever seen the blockee (unless you go look for them or if they go after you). Like, Blue Sky users do the work to keep their accounts tidy from ratfuckers. I mean, some folks like to engage the ratfuckers and do you, I guess, but I appreciate that the community definitely blocks assholes from polluting their own accounts and others.
posted by Kitteh at 9:15 AM on November 12 [8 favorites]

Regarding youtube, I find it very useful for DIY, but I have to aggressively curate my history. At the moment, if a video starts to autoplay on Roku, it counts as a view. At least once a week I have to go in and remove stuff from my history. And...it's effective. So far. But yes, every few months Rogan or Peterson try to sneak in. Every garden needs weeding.
posted by chromecow at 9:23 AM on November 12 [5 favorites]

The YouTube and Instagram algorithms are shockingly good at curating my experience towards things that don't suck and keep my attention. Maybe I'm easily entertained.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:28 AM on November 12 [4 favorites]

I have met people who only use LinkedIn as their social network because it expects professionality and they don't get hit with all the political and opinion BS

That ship sailed long ago, unfortunately.
posted by mykescipark at 9:33 AM on November 12 [14 favorites]

Bluesky is growing exponentially and I hope it becomes what Twitter ought to have been. It's had its flaws but is working those out.

Catturd tried to join Bluesky and was banned in 43 minutes. When Laura Loomer tried to join, she was booted off in not much over an hour.

I consider this a promising sign.
posted by orange swan at 9:51 AM on November 12 [33 favorites]

LinkedIn's ethos of professionalism has its own politics regarding labor, worker rights, and the bootstraps myth of success.

Just yesterday, I started following people on my BlueSky account. It's nice to see voices that chose not to move to Mastodon, such as Professor Jess Calarco. I haven't yet felt any impulse to post or repost there, which is in no little part due to my strong preference to lurk in any online setting but also a reluctance to put effort into for-profit spaces.

As for government-to-public communications, I'll throw my vote in for RSS.
posted by audi alteram partem at 9:54 AM on November 12 [5 favorites]

Even if you have never logged on to Twitter, or even clicked a link, I guarantee you that the journalists whom you read have. Absolutely guarantee. The disinformation doesn’t have to reach you directly.
posted by The River Ivel at 9:55 AM on November 12 [16 favorites]

Don't they have websites? Can't we just as happily go to [local group].com as x.com/[localgroup]?

That works if you are in a situation where you KNOW you need to get a public safety information update. It doesn't work if you're just truckin along doin whatever and don't know that a small wildfire has started somewhere that you might want to keep tabs on over the next few days.

Social media feeds that include public service entities have the benefit of alerting you when you don't know you need alerting, but before you get to the "phone is screaming with emergency alert, you are fucked" stage.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:56 AM on November 12 [14 favorites]

Does anyone have a sense of how - or if - they're [Bluesky] preparing for all the ratfuckery that is coming their way if it becomes an effective organizing platform?

As Kitteh says, they've put real effort into thinking about tools for social interactions. When you block someone, not only do they vanish from your point of view, but they vanish from your interactions -- let's say some jerk replied to you, and you block them; their posts in your thread are no longer visible to others. Similarly, if a jerk quote replies to you, you can detach your post from them and the quote dunk is left hanging out in the ether.

The other key component is that there's no built-in algorithm. This is good because it means nobody is tweaking the algorithm to give anyone's posts better positioning/visibility. It's bad because I like movies a lot and sometimes people I don't follow say interesting things about movies, and there's no built-in way to surface those other posts for me. However, there are a few ways to apply user-built algorithms: feeds and labelers.

A feed is just a collection of posts chosen by, wait for it... an algorithm. The filmsky feed captures any post with a couple of specific emojis, a few specific words (Letterboxd, for example), links to a few sites, and so on. It filters out posts from a specific list of problem users. It's run by a third party, not by Bluesky. That means more work for me because I have to decide who I trust, but that's OK by me.

A labeler is quite similar, except that it applies labels to posts and users. You only see those labels if you subscribe to the labeler. This can be moderation focused; I subscribe to a third party labeler that has labels for defamation, copyright infringement, catfishing, brigading, and many more. I can choose which of those labels I care about seeing -- for example, I don't have the copyright infringement label turned on. If I report a post, I can decide which of my labelers I want to report it to.

Labelers can also just be fun. I also subscribe to a labeler that randomly applies D&D classes to people who request them.

The combination of feeds and labelers puts much more power in the hands of the users, which doesn't magically make all problems go away but it does provide some insulation. All that said, if Bluesky as a company goes horribly wrong, well... we're probably not yet at the point where the underlying federation is sufficiently robust to preserve the community.
posted by Bryant at 9:59 AM on November 12 [13 favorites]

Reddit constantly pushes r/conservative at me, as well as even worse subs.

Not defending reddit, which is just 2020s usenet. Actually just asking.

How does reddit push stuff? The icky subs almost seem to almost never appear in r/all or /popular. Is this one of those things where using their stupid app is very different from the web version?
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 10:18 AM on November 12 [4 favorites]

GCU, the reddit app does indeed have some kind of algorithm at work that pushes posts getting a lot of engagement, even if you have never visited the sub the post is on. This is one of the awful things about the good 3rd party apps going down.
posted by TheKaijuCommuter at 10:27 AM on November 12 [6 favorites]

Mastodon is available. If public service agencies started their own server, people might even use it.

There is no way the general public is going to figure out Mastodon so that they can follow transit alerts, parks and rec deadlines, and the odd emergency. You have to go on platforms people actually use, not the reverse. (Sorry this is true but it is.)

Don't they have websites? Can't we just as happily go to [local group].com as x.com/[localgroup]?

No, not in emergency or emerging situations. It works for people waiting for a bus maybe (if the bus companies make their sites/apps obvious) but not so great for people who need the kind of information they don't know they need until they need it. Sharing/trending in your area is what made Twitter great at this.
posted by warriorqueen at 10:30 AM on November 12 [7 favorites]

→ I don't know how people are finding all the bad stuff on twitter.

I've recently logged in to twitter after some months away, just so I can request my archive and delete the account. My "Following" feed is full of AI clickbait, ads and promoted tweets from types I never want to encounter online. A reply thread is ad placement every other post, and then degenerates into replies from accounts with Pepe icons.
posted by scruss at 10:43 AM on November 12 [3 favorites]

No, not in emergency or emerging situations. It works for people waiting for a bus maybe (if the bus companies make their sites/apps obvious) but not so great for people who need the kind of information they don't know they need until they need it. Sharing/trending in your area is what made Twitter great at this.

Why do we keep coming back to this gray-area where there's some sort of situation that's important enough to be made aware of via a social media-based push notification but not important enough to require your phone to blast an emergency notification?

What are these situations? Is this like when there's a shelter-in-place issued two towns over or are they like when a celebrity has been sighted in your neighborhood?

It seems people want to be aware of their surroundings, but don't want to proactively do what's needed inform themselves, especially if it requires any amount of effort.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 10:46 AM on November 12 [6 favorites]

I'm following people on Threads from my Mastodon account, now. Still trying to get BridgyFed working so I can follow and interact with Bluesky users from my Mastodon account, as well. I think that's the future. More like what the internet was meant to be. All of us using our own different servers and services, but able to interact. No one person or company owning the whole infrastructure.

In a perfect world, RSS, AT, and ActivityPub would all interoperate in such a way that it doesn't MATTER whether my local weather bureau posts to bluesky, threads, Mastodon, or its own website with an RSS feed -- I'll be able to follow them all in the same app.

I'm almost at that point with my own personal Mastodon feed, and I think savvy bluesky and threads users can almost get to that point too? We just need to make it transparent and simple for non-savvy users too.
posted by OnceUponATime at 10:49 AM on November 12 [10 favorites]

Knowing about the weather is important enough for me that even if the National Weather Service switched all of their push notifications to email, I'd make sure my phone's email client were configured to audibly "ding" when one of those alerts came in.

I just can't understand why having to switch platforms is such a burden for people who say they want to be informed.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 10:50 AM on November 12 [2 favorites]

I think if you spend (x) amount of time on any algorithm based social media per week, you should be wary of trusting your own mind/opinions. I include myself in this, as someone who has (shamefully) struggled with periods of almost addict-like behaviour towards Reddit, Facebook, and TikTok. I think we are being influenced and manipulated in ways much more subtle than even the most skeptical and astute of us comprehend, and I have no doubt this had an outsized impact on the current election results.
posted by EarnestDeer at 10:54 AM on November 12 [22 favorites]

I don’t do politics at all. Just music an a tiny handful of LGBTQ+ podcasts/vlogs. Maybe that’s what’s making YT think I need to watch some tradwife vlogs?

The purpose of the algorithm isn't to bring you content you want, it's to get you to watch more of anything.

And pushing reactionary conspiracy theories and rage bait works well at scale, regardless of any one person's perceived desires.
posted by Reyturner at 11:10 AM on November 12 [6 favorites]

Logged into Twitter as a test. Instantly saw this ad with 3.7 million views:

CoinMinutes
@coinminutesnews
Ad
#Tesla, led by billionaire Elon Musk, continues to hold #Bitcoin valued at $780 million, despite recent large transactions involving its cryptocurrency assets.

Logged off.

Yup, still a shitshow.
posted by lock robster at 11:14 AM on November 12 [1 favorite]

They vote now. What difference would that make?
posted by hairless ape at 8:22 AM
I would say:microtargetting and insulation from other messaging. Misinformation is so precisely curated at this point, internet tech is required to get this granular.
posted by Golem XIV at 11:16 AM on November 12 [2 favorites]

Mastodon is available. If public service agencies started their own server, people might even use it.

I'm worried that y'all are misinterpreting the causes and intents of folks using social media as their primary means of broadcasting. Facebook and Twitter and a thousand other wannabes spent literally years and hundreds of millions of dollars establishing themselves as low-effort platforms where you could maintain a web presence without having to hire IT professionals to administer it for you. That's it. That's the appeal. For a while there, peaking ten to fifteen years ago, "Facebook page" and "Twitter feed" were synonymous with "web site" in the vast majority of people's minds, because they were functionally identical. This was because there was no barrier to entry, and the platforms hosting (e.g.) restaurants and governmental agencies' pages weren't screwing with the levers to distort the presentation of user data. And, just like every other actor of predatory capitalism, they did this just long enough to grow their user base past a critical threshold, then they yanked the rug out. Now you can't see today's menu if you're not logged in, or you have to scroll past a bunch of ads that are visually indistinguishable from what you're actually looking for. Or you can't view posts from the goddamn Parks Department about wildfire alerts, because the order of the feed is randomized unless you're logged in. None of these are mistakes, or misguided attempts at improving the user experience; these are purposeful changes to monetize users who are now trapped on the platform. That's where their customers are. That's the only place where they know how to make updates.

I truly don't mean this to sound unkind, but it needs saying: telling people to start their own Mastodon server is the most preposterously out-of-touch thing I've read all week. Every person who's using Twitter as their main communication medium is doing so because they don't have the money or the expertise to do anything else. Creating and hosting a web site is difficult, or expensive, or both. Maintaining a consistent web presence, where you can post updates frequently without any tech savvy, is quite expensive. Running your own Mastodon server (is it privately hosted? Or are we assuming that Mastodon is going to avoid the same monetization trap that literally every other big social media platform has fallen into?) is so far beyond the capabilities of the average human that I'm having trouble communicating the scale of it without breaking some guidelines.
posted by Mayor West at 11:36 AM on November 12 [45 favorites]

I learned a trick recently that will eventually be broken by a Facebook update, but on desktop you can use https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr to see your feed.

?filter= gives you only the posts that match the category. ?filter=favorites is a bit algorithm-based because it's picking your 'favorites' but at least it seems to be only from entities you follow. ?filter=groups and ?filter=pages should be self explanatory.

&sk=h_chr forces the feed to display in reverse chronological order. I've seen that one fail and then start working again in the past, but it's working right now.

Yes I am still on Facebook -- there are a handful of people there I co-ordinate with that I cannot drag onto a different platform. I've kept it bearable by deleting the app and using a plugin and these "url hacks".
posted by Karmakaze at 11:41 AM on November 12 [9 favorites]

It seems people want to be aware of their surroundings, but don't want to proactively do what's needed inform themselves, especially if it requires any amount of effort.

YES! EXACTLY THIS! THE FUTURE WAS SUPPOSED TO MAKE OUR LIVES EASIER IN ALMOST PRECISELY THIS WAY WE WERE SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO TAKE A BUS WITHOUT MAKING IT OUR GODDAMN JOB TO RESEARCH THE TRANSIT SYSTEM INDEPENDENTLY EVERY DAY. I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:42 AM on November 12 [37 favorites]

What are these situations? Is this like when there's a shelter-in-place issued two towns over or are they like when a celebrity has been sighted in your neighborhood?

Just off the top of my head - testing on our CAERS emergency alarm system, gas leak, Eras tour and other road closures, firearm discharge near my kid’s school necessitating a lock down, backed up sewer flood blocking his bike route to school.

If you’re someone who distains social media you may have missed that schools, cities and agencies, police, hydro and other infrastructure orgs have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring social media comms and building those out as channels, and it’s been pretty effective. If you are a parent of a kid in school (in Toronto anyway), social media is where a lot of the information about schools lives.

I do feel like I’m taking crazy pills. I can only think y’all sit on computers all day or have inordinate amounts of time.
posted by warriorqueen at 11:44 AM on November 12 [13 favorites]

I just can't understand why having to switch platforms is such a burden for people who say they want to be informed.

Because it becomes 27 platforms or hundreds of emails. I’m not even going to get into the difference for say, comms staff having to send out an official email about a school lockdown to the appropriate parent list vs tweeting “there’s a lockdown at Xschool due to Z, stay tuned,” plus shit like I don’t want email for every broken water main (!! I live in a city of 2.5 million) or every library closure but seeing it hit my feed in the morning where I can scroll past or notice in my area while I also see other stuff.

I can’t even sometimes. Maybe y’all live where less goes on but here it’s a firehouse and very short tweets with feeds I could curate was so nice.
posted by warriorqueen at 11:52 AM on November 12 [14 favorites]

I went through my twitter account and deleted every post, reply, follow, message, whatever a while ago, (when it was still twitter). But I still held onto the empty account itself for the handle, which was associated with a creative thing of mine, with the very slight hope that the site would one day stop being a complete shit show. That's obviously not going to happen now, so today I nuked the account entirely.

I've been on Bluesky for a year or so, it has a good vibe overall, I quite like it. People who have clung to the wreckage of Xitter for a long time, some with pretty large follower numbers, are now setting up shop on bsky properly, and it's starting to feel something like a nicer replacement for what twitter used to be years ago, like pre-2016. Not sure how long that can last, but I'm enjoying it for the time being.
posted by tomsk at 12:09 PM on November 12 [8 favorites]

Running your own Mastodon server (is it privately hosted? Or are we assuming that Mastodon is going to avoid the same monetization trap that literally every other big social media platform has fallen into?) is so far beyond the capabilities of the average human that I'm having trouble communicating the scale of it without breaking some guidelines.

This is a drum I have been beating for ages over here. And only here, because literally only one other person in my meatspace world (and I travel in fairly educated and informed circles by US standards, I'd say) even knows what Mastodon is.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:12 PM on November 12 [11 favorites]

I just can't understand why having to switch platforms is such a burden for people who say they want to be informed.

RonButNotStupid, I'm IT support for my 90yo mom. Switching anything in darn near impossible. I'm not alone in this.
posted by chromecow at 12:28 PM on November 12 [8 favorites]

there's no one 'mastodon' to be monetized, is there? there are at least two big forks out there that I can think of, not even counting how something like threads, which doesn't exactly offer protection from monetization, does demonstrate that a corporate-backed activitypub client doesn't irreversibly poison the community (so far).

it doesn't feel like there's been the consolidation of hosts - or the motivation for that sort of consolidation - that would allow for a Musk-alike to buy them all up and enshittify them.
posted by sagc at 12:29 PM on November 12 [3 favorites]

I just can't understand why having to switch platforms is such a burden for people who say they want to be informed.

I stopped using Twitter a while ago, even with a locked account. I did use to love that I could still check the hashtag for my city for breaking news/road closures/etc but then the local ratfuckers started using my city's hashtag for their ratfucker thoughts and they ruined even that.

I like Blue Sky for very simple reasons: no algo (at the moment), really cool people to follow who got tired of reacting/reading/arguing with the ratfuckers so they tell you how to live a ratfucker-free existence on Blue Sky, and using what I like to use social media for -- making terrible jokes, posting cat pics, liking cat pics, and generally just being silly.
posted by Kitteh at 12:32 PM on November 12 [1 favorite]

You don't have to run your own Mastodon server to be on Mastodon. MeFites can join this instance, for instance: https://toot.metafilter.com/about

Anyone can of course join mastodon.social, and that's where I started. But having everyone on one server sort of defeats the point (which is NOT having everyone on one server, and thus held hostage to whomever owns that server.)

So I encourage people to choose any server from this list, and not worry about choosing wrong, because it's pretty easy to move to a different server later without losing all your followers: https://joinmastodon.org/servers

You can follow and interact with people from Threads and now Bluesky. You can get Wordpress blog posts in your feed, and your replies will show up as comments on that blog. You can also follow any Mastodon account via RSS.

Reddit and Instagram and YouTube users can't interact with Mastodon users or vice versa, yet. But Lemmy and Pixelfed and PeerTube are attempts to make a version of each of those services whose users can interact with Mastodon, and also, with each other. Not a thread to Google or Meta, yet, but each is a pretty successful proof of concept.

What's even the point of the internet if you can't talk to other users?

I'm not trying to talk you guys into joining Mastodon. But if you're on Threads, please do go ahead and enable sharing to the fediverse. And if you're on Bluesky, go ahead and connect to the bridge.

Use whatever social media service you like. But don't insist that you'll only talk to people who use the same social media service you do!
posted by OnceUponATime at 12:34 PM on November 12 [13 favorites]

now Google has the opportunity to do the funniest thing in a long time and resurrect Google Reader
posted by away for regrooving at 12:43 PM on November 12 [20 favorites]

Yeah, but, how do we chivvy all the school departments and public works offices and highway departments and weather alerts and stuff to move? I am on mastodon, sure, but it will be years before any of those agencies move. Having bots that repeated twitter posts into Mastodon posts was sweet, but a (the?) main platform for those is shutting down, and not all of them were done anyway.

I will set up an account wherever they are -- but I ain't going back to Twitter, so I need to get posts by those offices onto someplace sane.
posted by wenestvedt at 1:00 PM on November 12 [2 favorites]

I started reading the article but the tone was insufferable. Could someone précis (aka tldr) what is promised in the headline?
posted by lokta at 1:01 PM on November 12

Okay, rn I am loving that Amanda Palmer has joined Blue Sky and so many of the folks I follow who have been mistreated by her are like BLOCKITY BLOCK BLOCK. To me that is a public service right there.*

*a reminder that AP said in 2016 that Donald Trump would be good for artists and musicians but promptly fucked to Australia where any of his policies couldn't touch her
posted by Kitteh at 1:22 PM on November 12 [11 favorites]

My X use case is largely when waiting in line browsing the feed. The reason I still use it is it can update when all the others I've looked at are spinning. And it has gotten worse, I have no trouble flipping past ads and stupid stuff but there are definitely fewer tweets of quality. And the seriously right wing are stupid and annoying but I read some to *stay informed* -- somehow it had not warped my core world view.

I expect there are more use cases in the world than a brief MiFi series of short anecdotal observations.

But yes my world view contains serious concern for clear thinking about random posts from varied sources. Well and the non-random and actively false.
posted by sammyo at 1:23 PM on November 12

The next step is Trump declaring that Twitter is the only approved outlet for government announcements. If you want to know what's going on, get a premium account.

As far as Mastadon goes, I'm a computer professional and I can't be assed to learn how to use it. If I can't then there's no way the average user is going to even think about it.

I'm hoping Bluesky takes off, cuz Threads is just Facebook in disguise with all the Zuck crap that implies.

Not that Bluesky is saintly or anything, but it's apparently not run by Fascists and it's as easy to use as Twitter with the same lack of barrier to entry.
posted by sotonohito at 1:46 PM on November 12 [5 favorites]

By the way, if any MeFites are on Threads or Bluesky and want to be friends with me on Mastodon, please feel free to shoot me a MeFi mail, and I'll try to follow you. It will only work if you've turned on federation in your settings (for Threads) or followed the bridge account (Bluesky).

Other MeFites who are on Mastodon can also send me messages, and I'll follow everyone.

I think the main reason Mastodon is "hard" is that you do have to choose to follow anyone whose posts you want to see. Most people don't post that often, so your feed will feel dead unless you follow hundreds of people. I have solved this problem by happily following hundreds of people, and am always ready to add more.
posted by OnceUponATime at 1:48 PM on November 12 [7 favorites]

I just can't understand why having to switch platforms is such a burden for people who say they want to be informed.

Who wants to download some new app when you go visit another city, because the 'notification' apps aren't standardized between metros?
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:49 PM on November 12 [4 favorites]

Okay, rn I am loving that Amanda Palmer has joined Blue Sky and so many of the folks I follow who have been mistreated by her are like BLOCKITY BLOCK BLOCK. To me that is a public service right there.*

It's another arena for this kind of drama that makes me look at Blue Sky and ask if I really want any of this in my life at all, TBH.

For the first time in 10+ years of hardcore use, the general environment of all of it makes whatever benefits social media offers a lot less appealing that just offline (relative) peace and quiet.
posted by ryanshepard at 2:06 PM on November 12 [17 favorites]

Agreed but then what will they use?

I mean, call me an idealist, but I'm pretty sure a broadcast system that doesn't rely on underregulated private social media companies is a basic component to a functioning government.

The fact that we've allowed that role to be shifted from television or radio onto social media companies is not a good sign. I'm not sure how we get from here back to there - but until we do, we're lacking something fundamental as a nation.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 2:54 PM on November 12 [31 favorites]

My municipality and county agencies have SMS channels I can subscribe to. I’m subscribed to change news about specific bus routes. And they aren’t mixed into my whole social feed, I can see what’s been announced recently.

Plus there’s the American Red Cross app for push alerts of regional risks.
posted by clew at 3:27 PM on November 12 [2 favorites]

Related: "I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is", by Charlie Warzel, the Atlantic.

My self care steps have involved:

1) Making my Twitter account private and only using it to tell friends they should leave

2) Starting Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads accounts a while back.

I am planning to reduce my activity on Threads. It is an algorithmic bubble that feeds you a lot to follow, but doesn't help with actual connection and conversation. Bluesky and Mastodon are superior by doing less feed intervention, and more for moderation.
posted by kmartino at 4:06 PM on November 12 [5 favorites]

1) Making my Twitter account private and only using it to tell friends they should leave

it occurs to me that it may just be a brilliant maneuver for everybody who's not on the Trump-Musk-whatever train to just pull out of Twitter/X with little fanfare. Just do it quietly. Which would suddenly leave the resident piranha culture with nothing to do but devour itself, all the bots and trolls and fierce free speech advocates gorging on each other and ultimately themselves in their ongoing race to the bottom ...
posted by philip-random at 4:59 PM on November 12 [3 favorites]

Having good alternatives like BlueSky is obviously important. But hoping the fully shittified/nazified right wing media ecosystem just collapses under its own shittiness feels a bit like wishful thinking to me. There's too much content out there getting too much attention and engagement.

I think we need a technological and legal environment that will make platforms (private technologies with network effects that lead to huge concentrations of power and money) unfeasible. But even if that existed it's not clear that we could build a media ecosystem that helped enough people navigate cause and effect and figure out the truth. For that we'd have to have the attention and trust of enough people.

I also think we have to get people out of silos and into actual dialogue. NOT out of silos and into a big mess of algorithmic engagement -- into dialogue, with sustained interaction, mutual respect, and a sense of shared goals, however tenuous. Current social media platforms (including YouTube) are terrible for this for a ton of reasons: the algorithms, message length limits, etc. Even MetaFilter is mostly terrible, both in terms of being a silo and a platform for dialogue (despite the extremely valuable work our mods do). Even face to face it's hard. And I have no idea whether some hypothetical dialogue-conducive new media could sustain anyone's attention. (hilariously, I wrote that last sentence having completely forgotten that I spent years trying to build one such platform, and zero people used it)

Finally, we need to be be cautious of using media as an excuse. I do believe it was an enormous factor, maybe the main one, but it's also an extremely convenient, elitist excuse. Moreover, even if people are making stupid, uninformed(, sexist, racist) decisions about policy, you're not going to change anyone's mind by typing that at them.
posted by ropeladder at 5:15 PM on November 12 [5 favorites]

Mastodon is available. If public service agencies started their own server, people might even use it.
I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago and every single government agency speaking there was telling people to follow them on Twitter to get updates. Yes, Twitter, not X and including the bird logo. Eighteen months after that change started.

Getting anything close to a critical mass of public agencies to make a change like this would be akin to the many years it took to get them to start using digital media for announcements etc in the first place. In a perfect world, governments would have a dedicated, secure channel to send out announcements via a single channel that could be filtered by users according to what they need/want to be told about. If you have ever tried to get any kind of digital platform up and running in a public service environment, you know why this will never happen. Maybe there's an opportunity for someone to build something like this and convince governments to use it. Maybe pigs will fly first.
posted by dg at 6:11 PM on November 12 [12 favorites]

In the last year I've only used twitter to interact with companies when I had a problem -- the phone company with a major billing fuckup (got resolved after a month), and a backpack company that sold me a shoddy good (probably won't be resolved). I'm not going to delete the account because I use my real name there, and wouldn't want a bot to squat on it, but pretty soon when I type "t" in the address bar it'll point to "theatlantic.com". And I'll figure out how to deal with the corporate malfeasance and incompetence that affects me personally some other way.

But I don't get it -- I've been onto Trump since reading about him in Spy magazine and saying, yes, that squares with everything else I know about him. Musk the same. Are so many people so anti-Bayesian that they can't objectively take in new information and recalibrate their beliefs?
posted by morspin at 9:08 PM on November 12 [3 favorites]

Social media (Facebook and especially Twitter) are low fidelity mediums, and getting lower with every quarter (or whenever they tweak the algorithm). The signal to noise ratio is getting noisier and noisier.
posted by Relay at 9:58 PM on November 12 [2 favorites]

> it occurs to me that it may just be a brilliant maneuver for everybody who's not on the Trump-Musk-whatever train to just pull out of Twitter/X with little fanfare.

The opportunity to do that has come and gone. Everyone who's still on twitter is unlikely to leave at this point. I had to leave a discord community because I can't be around people who constantly link to twitter as their main form of conversation-starter. The excuses they give for why they can't give it up are insufferable. The lock-in is unbreakable at this point.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 10:30 PM on November 12 [4 favorites]

I like that mastodon is not a platform, it’s a protocol. Each server is its own platform, but they talk to each other rather than silo you away. The idea of those students mentioned above, who wanted to create a social media platform that consists only of people who know each other in real life is a great idea. So great in fact that there are plenty of mastodon servers that work that way, including the one I’m on. The metafilter server also provides some of this benefit — there’s social pressure not to misbehave in a space with people you either know in real life or who you respect.

One way the small server paradigm is better is that you don’t have to hire people to get PTSD moderating horrible content when you know who’s posting from your server. I think it’s something a lot of people don’t think about, but it bothers me a lot since I once saw something that I can never unsee on Facebook, and I’m sure it’s pretty destructive to people who have to see that sort of thing every day for their job.

Regarding governments being on mastodon, you don’t have to have an account or client to view content on mastodon, unlike Facebook, Xitter, etc. And yes, here in the Netherlands the government is using it. The government has its own server which they control, and there’s no algorithm or login requirements to prevent your citizens from seeing their posts. (Emergencies are reported through the SMS system.)

- The Dutch weather service
- Tax authority
- Dept of water management
- Dept of the interior
- Amsterdam municipal gov

Other local governments and also universities have servers and accounts as well.
posted by antinomia at 5:23 AM on November 13 [10 favorites]

I think I'm totally back to group texts by now, Facebook for work. Our government stuff is over SMS. Local TV news is on youtube.

Metafilter may be amused to know that my right wing family have also left social media for text messages.
posted by eustatic at 5:26 AM on November 13 [1 favorite]

In re twitter versus bluesky: I stayed nominally "on" twitter (I really don't tweet, just read) because few of the people I follow had gone anywhere. Mastodon seemed confusing PLUS only a handful of people had gone over there AND I was not hearing encouraging stories about their experiences. Further, most of the local activist projects I am adjacent to were still on twitter.

That has changed in past weeks and I'm migrating everything over to Bluesky - a little lazily, true, because I'm really just adding people on Bluesky when I think about it - but it's clear that in a couple of weeks I'll pretty much be done with twitter. There was a coordinated migration among my local projects in the past couple of weeks, so almost all of them are Bluesky now too.

I can see my twitter feed slowing and getting same-y because so many people have left, and of the ones who haven't actually "left", they're mostly also on Bluesky.

Soon enough, I think at least some local agencies/government will have Bluesky presence or at least use something to post there as well as to twitter.

I've had a Bluesky account for a while now - I applied and got a code back when you had to do that. It was pretty slow at the time.

In short, I think that quite a lot of people who hadn't left twitter are or will be leaving twitter, because there's a critical mass of movement.
posted by Frowner at 5:34 AM on November 13 [6 favorites]

Also, the thing I regret about twitter is precisely that I was able to set it up so that it was relatively unsiloed. I wasn't, like, following right wing loons, but I did follow a number of center and liberal people whose thinking I found useful even though I didn't like their politics, I've got a libertarian on my feed and a couple of really committed tankies, etc. Academics, some policy people. It was great to get information and experiences from all these people.

Honestly, I think that Bluesky might conceivably be early twitter again, but I'm not sure that it's going to replace the diversity of twitter's later period, and I think that's a real shame. It was a terrific, low-cost way to encounter things I would have difficulty even seeking out on the open internet, now that blogs are kaput.
posted by Frowner at 5:43 AM on November 13 [2 favorites]

I've been on Bluesky for a while and there's been a recent Twitter influx that I think has made the place noticably worse; there are now a number of unpleasant (to me) Resist!-style users (Mueller, She Wrote; that Angry White House staffer account) with people fawning over them and I'm noticing a lot of randos with relatively new accounts saying transphobic stuff or haranguing trans people. There was a lot of Discourse previously and things were extremely far from perfect but I liked it a lot better a month ago.
posted by an octopus IRL at 6:04 AM on November 13 [4 favorites]

Musk kicked Stephen King off Twitter last night. After the announcement that Musk was going to head the Department of Government Efficiency, whatever the fuck that is, King congratulated him as the new First Lady, and Musk banned him. All hail Stephen King.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 6:12 AM on November 13 [12 favorites]

So this just calls into question how people are using Bluesky - I can only see the people I follow and while I can see what they repost, that still seems to be spotty. I've seen a few reposts of things that don't appeal to me politically, but in general it's just the usual suspects posting away.

Is this something else like with twitter, where it's different if you use it on your phone? I only looked at twitter on my laptop, but I was told that you had much less control over your feed on the phone.
posted by Frowner at 6:13 AM on November 13 [1 favorite]

I use a lot of lists, which probably cuts down on the random chatter I see. Anyone want to make a MefFi list?
posted by Karmakaze at 6:18 AM on November 13

@StephenKing on Twitter:

I see there's a rumor going around that I called the Musk-man Trump's new first lady. I didn't, but only because I didn't think of it. There's also a rumor going around that Muskie kicked me off Twitter. Yet here I am.
posted by Roommate at 6:22 AM on November 13 [17 favorites]

Roommate beat me to it. The Stephen King / Musk story is fake, created by a satire account
posted by Zumbador at 6:25 AM on November 13 [3 favorites]

Whether it's from Stephen King or not I don't get the First Lady joke. Is it funny because it's calling Elon Musk a woman or because it's calling him gay? Neither option is great but perhaps I'm missing something.
posted by an octopus IRL at 6:42 AM on November 13 [7 favorites]

There was a lot of Discourse previously and things were extremely far from perfect but I liked it a lot better a month ago.

Yeah, it's felt a bit Endless September there in the past week or two. I don't really have reason to complain, as I've barely posted anything there in the year since I abandoned X for Bluesky myself, but as a daily reader I enjoyed being able to reach the end of my feed in a reasonable amount of time... now it's five times as long just from the accounts I follow reposting "hello world" posts from all their old Twitter pals. Ah well.

On the upside, its sudden growth might head off the attempt in some quarters to make LinkedIn the social network of choice for academics.

I don't get the First Lady joke. Is it funny because it's calling Elon Musk a woman or because it's calling him gay? Neither option is great but perhaps I'm missing something.

I read it as calling him Trump's bitch. Pretty peurile. A bit disappointed to hear that King said he would have made the joke if he'd thought of it.

It takes the shine off every online meme I've enjoyed, knowing that Musk is squirming with delight that he gets to be the face of "DOGE". You can be sure he suggested the backronym for that to Trump.
posted by rory at 7:02 AM on November 13 [3 favorites]

Anyone want to make a MefFi list?

I believe one already exists on Blue Sky?
posted by Kitteh at 7:08 AM on November 13

John Scalzi shared this yesterday, which looks handy for we Old Skool types with our own domains: How to set your domain as your Bluesky handle.
posted by rory at 7:14 AM on November 13 [6 favorites]

John Scalzi shared this yesterday, which looks handy for we Old Skool types with our own domains: How to set your domain as your Bluesky handle.

...Old Skool types who've gotten round to moving their domains onto https, that is. Le sigh.
posted by rory at 7:28 AM on November 13

I don't think you need HTTPS if you can add a TXT record to the DNS? That should work even if you don't have any web server running at all.
posted by BungaDunga at 7:31 AM on November 13

The CPanel Domain Zone Editor at my host isn't letting me add TXT records, only MX ones, so no joy there. I'll get there eventually...
posted by rory at 7:48 AM on November 13

Aw, dang, I got fooled. Sorry. But The Guardian really is stopping using Twitter. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/nov/13/the-guardian-no-longer-post-on-x-twitter-elon-musk
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 7:56 AM on November 13 [7 favorites]

I thought this NYT interview with a bunch of gen z undecided voters was worth a read. Pretty aggravating, of course, but useful information.
posted by ropeladder at 8:43 AM on November 13 [2 favorites]

McLane, 25, D.C., white, legal field, wrote in Romney in 2020
I shocked myself and voted for Trump. No one tell my family. I was so impressed by JD Vance, the way he carried himself and how normal he appeared. I think I became radicalized on the men and women’s sports issue. The ad that said, “Kamala represents they/them. Trump represents you,” that was so compelling. While Trump is deranged, he represented normalcy somehow to me.

Nothing has ever made this guy more angry than being called weird.
posted by Reyturner at 9:17 AM on November 13 [12 favorites]

we all know which normalcy Trump represents to people: it's patriarchy

I am averse to all-encompassing theories of political and cultural life (blaming capitalism for everything bad, etc) but it is literally just patriarchy
posted by BungaDunga at 9:21 AM on November 13 [12 favorites]

You're right about the "normal" he wants, but there isn't a secret good version of capitalism that we're just not letting women do.
posted by Reyturner at 9:27 AM on November 13 [5 favorites]

like the guy is so close to getting it. "Yeah, Trump is a deranged lunatic, but somehow I feel more safe with him, dunno why. Weird. Oh well, guess I'm voting Trump"- that's the thing! You're doing the thing!!

there isn't a secret good version of capitalism that we're just not letting women do.

oh sure I'm more of a both/and with capitalism. capitalism is bad and also some bad things are caused by Not Capitalism
posted by BungaDunga at 9:29 AM on November 13 [6 favorites]

While Trump is deranged, he represented normalcy somehow to me.

and thus we have it (some of it anyway).

I mean, if you're effectively calling yourself out for consciously voting for derangement, I think a little (no actually, A LOT) of self reflection is required.
posted by philip-random at 9:52 AM on November 13 [4 favorites]

I think there's a very good chance McLane, 25, D.C., white, legal field is literally a /pol/ Nazi, trolling the NYT (and that's me being maximally charitable to the NYT).

I refuse to believe anyone goes out of their way to describe JD Vance specifically as "normal" for anything other than a bit.
posted by Reyturner at 9:59 AM on November 13 [11 favorites]

I juts found the mute button on Bluesky -- using the Moderation tools. https://bsky.app/moderation
So, if, for example, one has overdosed hearing about a certain person or thing, one can mute a term forever, a month, a week, or a day, either any mention of a word or only if it's a hashtag. That's handy for giving the Eternal September a little while to fade.
posted by Karmakaze at 10:36 AM on November 13 [5 favorites]

I left Twitter but kept my account sitting there about um a year ago? Two years? A while back now, anyway. I don't drink at Nazi bars. I missed it horribly for a long time and sometimes I still do. Someone, probably here, said to just leave your account sitting dormant so it wouldn't get squatted or something. I have forgotten. I downloaded my twitter archive onto my old computer and never once even glanced at it, so, like tears in the rain or something else equally trite. Gone, gone, and who cares?

I like Mastodon. It's smaller, calmer, less US centric. Bluesky has gone from being too quiet to being too loud. I was thinking this morning that I go to Bluesky to listen and to Mastodon to speak. That works for me. My town is small enough where SMS mostly works. Everything is on facebook though, and I hate that, but I keep my facebook account so I can look stuff up. And stalk old boyfriends in the dead of night with a glass of wine, let's be real. And check to see who has died - I am moving into that demographic.
posted by mygothlaundry at 12:58 PM on November 13 [6 favorites]

Katullus made a Metafilter Blue Sky starter pack!
posted by Kitteh at 1:11 PM on November 13 [5 favorites]

Bluesky is fun but please note that it is run by ratcultists and funded by cryptobros. (That thread is a good précis but please note that it badly misuses the label 'anarchist' for the ratcultists and adjacent TESCREAL people, who are emphatically not actually anarchists.) Enjoy it while it lasts, but be aware that its founders and maintainers belong to a deeply anti-human ideology.
posted by adrienneleigh at 8:44 PM on November 13 [4 favorites]

Another reason I like mastodon. It’s not run by one person or company, so it’s not going anywhere.
posted by antinomia at 11:26 PM on November 13 [2 favorites]

I don't know what a ratcultist is?
posted by mittens at 5:04 AM on November 14 [1 favorite]

Bluesky is fun but please note that it is run by ratcultists and funded by cryptobros. (That thread is a good précis but please note that it badly misuses the label 'anarchist' for the ratcultists and adjacent TESCREAL people, who are emphatically not actually anarchists.) Enjoy it while it lasts, but be aware that its founders and maintainers belong to a deeply anti-human ideology.

Absolutely. But you know what it is compared to Mastodon? Accessible to everyone. There is no learning curve and if you're someone who is low tech for either cost reasons/time reasons, Blue Sky doesn't require an fiddly set-up. Like if marginalized groups who don't know how or can't set up Masto servers for their activism (and they are out there) or other reasons, they are gonna use something plug and play. It's just a pity that these options aren't exactly funded by goodwill.

I will be delighted if Masto proponents offer their time to help set it up for folks who need it. That, to me, is a good use of levelling the playing field.
posted by Kitteh at 5:06 AM on November 14 [2 favorites]

Kitteh, you're comparing the work of building a Twitter alternative (how you describe mastodon) with signing up for a Twitter alternative (how you describe bluesky). They're fundamentally different prospects, and it's impossible for a self hosted piece of software (Mastodon) to be as easy to use as signing up for something someone has already built (Bluesky, Twitter).

It seems like you're completely ignoring the fact that there are many different mastodon hosts that already exist, any of which can be signed up for in the same way as Twitter or Bluesky. There's no reason for each organization to run their own Mastodon server, anymore that there was for every nonprofit to create their own version of Twitter.
posted by sagc at 5:47 AM on November 14 [5 favorites]

Ie, something like https://mastodon.ngo/about, much less just using whatever the most popular instance at the moment is.
posted by sagc at 5:51 AM on November 14 [2 favorites]

my concern about Bluesky is that they're not trying to get users to pay for the service. At this point, with millions of users, they could absolutely make a big dent in bills by asking for a buck a month and up, just giving people a "$" symbol indicating who's ponying up and who's freeloading. That they're not doing this is the direst sign that they'll going to target the dark side, reselling user data and pushing ads, sooner or later.

I'm getting some good engagement from my art, and it's nice to see familiar faces, but the floor feels unsteady, while toot.cat and mastodon.art feels friendly and stable, because i pay for them and know they cover their bills.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:21 AM on November 14 [8 favorites]

seanmpuckett, I believe there is a plan for paying subscriptions for Bluesky, that involve higher-quality video and a few other perks. If I weren't so technically useless today, I would try to provide a link about it.
posted by mittens at 7:26 AM on November 14

That's here: Recent blog post talking about the funding round, includes words about developing an (optional) subscription model while keeping the site free to use.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:32 AM on November 14 [1 favorite]

The fact that we've allowed that role to be shifted from television or radio onto social media companies is not a good sign. I'm not sure how we get from here back to there - but until we do, we're lacking something fundamental as a nation.

Who has TV or radio anymore?
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:27 AM on November 14 [1 favorite]

(And I don't mean that in the "I don't even OWN a tv" way, I own three TVs. But none of them show standard broadcast television.)
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:27 AM on November 14 [2 favorites]

Bsky's biggest problem right now, aside from the load issues, is the lack of a feature to hide reposts from specific users. My primary interest in social media isn't to inhale a firehose of gestalt, it's to sip delicately from the shared lives of people I care about. It's on the roadmap, but it's been on the roadmap for a year, and following people used to twitter's retweet culture is becoming untenable at this point.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:34 AM on November 14 [2 favorites]

I don't know what a ratcultist is?

Derogatory term for people who consider themselves "rationalists" in the LessWrong/Yudkowsky sense. The ratcult is one of the broader TESCREAL bundle of related ideologies.
posted by adrienneleigh at 2:06 PM on November 14 [2 favorites]

Now that Dorsey has bailed, Bluesky’s DNA is basically TPOT people but without a funding source. Who is going to win in that scenario? I don’t know, but I’m not putting money on the users. (What the hell is this "tpot" thing?)
posted by jeffburdges at 4:40 PM on November 14 [1 favorite]

The aforementioned thread from Dave Troy on Mastodon, so that you don't have to log onto X/Twitter to read it all.
posted by skoosh at 2:49 PM on December 1 [1 favorite]