Would love to redirect more often to shitter instances with https://xxcancel.com.
But there seems to be a bug loading images (e.g. profile pictures or attached pictures to tweets) in Firefox.
I generally agree but I'm still frequently linked to X and I'm either unable to view the content because I don't have an account or I don't click because I don't want to visit the site. These services allow me to access the user content without having to go through X, itself. I wish hackers/the tech industry moved off of X like most users but here we are.
Those services are available, however, people would not stop using Twitter and will continue to do so until we stop consuming their content, then maybe they will finally get off Twitter...
It's companies. Corporate PR accounts never migrate off to Mastodon/Bluesky/Threads. Many neglects update of updates pages, announcing everything on Twitter.
Some of them would move to Instagram if it makes sense to do so, but Twitter apparently makes the best ad ROI figures among Twitter-like services.
I mean, lots of local and/or small services announce disruptions on Twitter only. Many of those have separate news/service status pages on WWW, and yet neglects updates of those. Possibly because users without access to Twitter aren't worth informing.
IOW, Twitter still is a social data infrastructure, like road or tap water. Something that the society depends on, that also ain't nobody paying for it, something that only makes sense at-cost max or at a loss.
I think that was always a fundamental problem with Twitter as a for-profit company. Surely it handles a large amounts of important communications, that are also not so exploitable or monetizable, ethically or not, just fundamentally.
I question your definition of 'need', mainly because my only interactions are interest-related, not work/life related, and whenever I capitulate and follow the link, it's not as interesting/useful as it was purported to be.
As such, I find it easier and easier to just not visit. This is, however, entirely my own anecdotal.
It's not the fault of the users when there's no viable alternative
Bluesky is founded by the same founders of Twitter and is not open and has ridiculous policies, Mastodon is the same, even less popular and even more tyrannical
So the choice for most users, including myself, is tightly moderated spaces run by awful people, or a website run by a literal Nazi, but that at least doesn't ban me on sight
The Musk twitter acquisition (and the sieg heil at the inauguration) were pivotal moments where a good alternative could've surfaced but instead we got twitter 2.0 (and moving from Twitter to Twitter 2 seems entirely pointless even if it wasn't badly moderated on top of that)
Mastodon devs have said many times that the mainstream fediverse, the original community that federates among itself, has a distinct culture and values that they wish to maintain in perpetuity. That is "policies". Yes, the tech allows parallel ecosystems of servers that don't federate with that original community, but when people talk about "Mastodon" like the OP did, they aren't talking about offshoot ecosystems.
They can say whatever they want but they have no control over it. That's the benefit of a truly decentralised network and free open source software.
It's like Microsoft saying they want a distinct culture among the users of their software. They can want it but it's not gonna happen. Within the mastodon community there's also a lot of servers that won't federate, for example the Germans always have very strict rules that they try to impose on everyone else. So most of the world does not federate with them anymore. *)
I mean there's even stuff like gab and truth social that run on fediverse tech. Not sure if it's mastodon itself or another implementation but that doesn't really matter. They certainly don't meet those culture and values.
And there is no 'mainstream fediverse'. Nothing about fediverse is mainstream to begin with. Unfortunately.
*) Don't get me wrong, I'm very progessive myself but the way the German fediverse community goes about it is wrong. "Follow exactly our rules otherwise you are defederated". That doesn't fly even if I agree with most of those rules.
App distribution platforms threatened Mastodon client apps with a universal Mastodon ban unless the app publicly condemn and denounce Gab(proto Truth Social) with hardcoded connection refusal and every single servers would implement effective moderation.
Gargron also decided that laws in his home country considers even linking to certain images illegal and various forms of labelings and voluntary policing from abroad tangential to legality and useless.
They packaged those standards and decisions as something along necessary measures to curb terrorism or whatever, and took the measures to effectively cut off said 2/3 plus some off of the "main Mastodon network", so to speak. Those measures lasted for years, until I think less than a year ago(you'll know what I'm talking about from my immediate comment history).
I don't think you're supposed to have a Mastodon app, it's a web app. The gatekeepers don't allow apps that connect to arbitrary servers just like they don't allow new browsers, you could use them to bypass the 30% tax.
You could have a kolektiva app but they obviously don't want to.
Sound logic doesn't matter to App Store review policies. The browser argument was made, and ignored. They were told to do what they were told or have the entire Mastodon compatible apps internally blacklisted.
Gab/Truth was easy and not that controversial, but content moderation was a lot more problematic, so they introduced a published instance blocklist system and had operators join the condemnation while also throwing wrenches at instance chooser interfaces online and/or hardcoded, because otherwise the "main" part will become a permanent minority.
I think any modern LLMs would see/know what I mean. Ask your agent if you need more information along this lore.
This is the first time I've ever read a commentator tell me to just ask an LLM to write their comment for them. But for "just send me the prompt" to work, I still have to know the prompt you planned to use?
There's several apps for the fediverse though? I always use Voyager for Lemmy (I don't really like the short-form Twitter style socials so I use Lemmy not Mastodon).
It's fucking annoying however to stay in touch with people. It used to be that everyone was on Twitter and that's it. Now it's AT LEAST Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, Instagram, Mastodon and a ton of other stuff and everyone is somewhere else and no one interoperates with each other.
Well in many cases this is justified. You can't expect them to federate with something like gab (for obvious reasons), or with threads from meta. That would just aid their obvious Embrace, Extend Extinguish play here.
And there are some groups like the German fediverse that stipulate a really long and very specific list of rules and block any instance that doesn't take these over 100% verbatim, no discussion allowed. Also a good reason most of them are blocked. We've had this issue before at the progressive instance I was on.
But besides that most of them get along well. Mastodon is strong on bubble forming anyway but I personally like that. I hate seeing a post from a trans friend on e.g. instagram and then see hundreds of Americans falling over themselves to spew trans hate. Even though the post had nothing to do with that. I think bubbles are necessary in today's online world because many people are just not worth talking to anymore.
> And there are some groups like the German fediverse that stipulate a really long and very specific list of rules and block any instance that doesn't take these over 100% verbatim, no discussion allowed.
Yeah guess what, I'm German LOL that's why I wrote this post
> Also a good reason most of them are blocked.
Well the problem is, it's still annoying from a user perspective - I don't care about the problems other instance admins have with the admins of my instance. And no, I don't want to maintain a dozen accounts just to make sure I can interact with everyone I want to.
> I hate seeing a post from a trans friend on e.g. instagram and then see hundreds of Americans falling over themselves to spew trans hate.
yeah the commercial social networks are just another level of shittiness, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of these "Americans" are just Russians in disguise.
They're just scared of getting fastroped and tear gassed and shot on the spot in their workplace to be then posthumously humiliated on TV as a hostile religious radicalist sympathizer engaging in trafficking of encrypted blasphemous drawings.
So they constantly engage in those ostentatious acts as almost a cultish rituals of its own to distance themselves from whatever it is.
Which is, frankly understandable. Behaviors of some of European counterterrorist units and NGOs/NPOs are rather unhinged. I would do the same if I were them. I'd even put up some religious symbols or donation receipts in the login page just to avoid giving them wrong ideas.
That is emphatically the weakness as well. I too loved the idea of "they all have their own policies," until it came to be that those policies ended up being utterly childish "I'm taking my ball and going home the second anyone says any little thing I don't like."
IMO the reason why BS just ended up being Twitter 2.0, or 1.2 even, or why Twitter went down its path in the first place, is that the US and EU are no longer producing enough content to justify ownership or continuous iterations of such a system.
Otherwise it wouldn't have been forced upon who begrudgingly got funding secured. Any of then-GAFA could have bought it and none wanted to touch it.
The bad moderation on those platforms, I think, is a desperate attempt to align platform cultures to the moderating entities' standards that are no longer comprehensible to users, if known at all, like a kid on a push car moving away from the park trying to steer it back.
It seemed fine until 2015 or so, streaming hundreds of novel tweets per second per user, many with novel images. Then things went downhill. Musk can't be the sole villain in it.
grimgrin 1 day ago
many working instances right now: https://codeberg.org/shitter/shitter/wiki/Instances
zImPatrick 1 day ago
DavideNL 1 day ago
> "A web extension that redirects YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok and other websites to alternative privacy-friendly frontends."
DavCreator 1 day ago
Example: https://shitter.thepixora.com/search?f=tweets&q=elon+musk
Wont show any pictures in Firefox for me. Works in Chrome. Can this be fixed? Thank you!
ibejoeb 1 day ago
wolvoleo 1 day ago
DavCreator 18 hours ago
moopie 1 day ago
smith7018 1 day ago
moomin 1 day ago
queenkjuul 23 hours ago
CamperBob2 1 day ago
If only someone would "just" fucking build a viable replacement for Twitter. It's a weekend's work with the tools now available. C'mon. (pokes stick)
deaf_coder 1 day ago
Those services are available, however, people would not stop using Twitter and will continue to do so until we stop consuming their content, then maybe they will finally get off Twitter...
numpad0 1 day ago
Some of them would move to Instagram if it makes sense to do so, but Twitter apparently makes the best ad ROI figures among Twitter-like services.
DroneBetter 1 day ago
BLKNSLVR 1 day ago
Keep all the bullshit in one far corner, over there, in the distance, behind the big wall, topped with razor wire.
numpad0 1 day ago
IOW, Twitter still is a social data infrastructure, like road or tap water. Something that the society depends on, that also ain't nobody paying for it, something that only makes sense at-cost max or at a loss.
I think that was always a fundamental problem with Twitter as a for-profit company. Surely it handles a large amounts of important communications, that are also not so exploitable or monetizable, ethically or not, just fundamentally.
BLKNSLVR 1 day ago
As such, I find it easier and easier to just not visit. This is, however, entirely my own anecdotal.
sureMan6 1 day ago
Bluesky is founded by the same founders of Twitter and is not open and has ridiculous policies, Mastodon is the same, even less popular and even more tyrannical
So the choice for most users, including myself, is tightly moderated spaces run by awful people, or a website run by a literal Nazi, but that at least doesn't ban me on sight
The Musk twitter acquisition (and the sieg heil at the inauguration) were pivotal moments where a good alternative could've surfaced but instead we got twitter 2.0 (and moving from Twitter to Twitter 2 seems entirely pointless even if it wasn't badly moderated on top of that)
wolvoleo 1 day ago
TFNA 1 day ago
wolvoleo 1 day ago
It's like Microsoft saying they want a distinct culture among the users of their software. They can want it but it's not gonna happen. Within the mastodon community there's also a lot of servers that won't federate, for example the Germans always have very strict rules that they try to impose on everyone else. So most of the world does not federate with them anymore. *)
I mean there's even stuff like gab and truth social that run on fediverse tech. Not sure if it's mastodon itself or another implementation but that doesn't really matter. They certainly don't meet those culture and values.
And there is no 'mainstream fediverse'. Nothing about fediverse is mainstream to begin with. Unfortunately.
*) Don't get me wrong, I'm very progessive myself but the way the German fediverse community goes about it is wrong. "Follow exactly our rules otherwise you are defederated". That doesn't fly even if I agree with most of those rules.
numpad0 1 day ago
Vaushite 1 day ago
numpad0 1 day ago
Gargron also decided that laws in his home country considers even linking to certain images illegal and various forms of labelings and voluntary policing from abroad tangential to legality and useless.
They packaged those standards and decisions as something along necessary measures to curb terrorism or whatever, and took the measures to effectively cut off said 2/3 plus some off of the "main Mastodon network", so to speak. Those measures lasted for years, until I think less than a year ago(you'll know what I'm talking about from my immediate comment history).
Vaushite 1 day ago
You could have a kolektiva app but they obviously don't want to.
What's the ""main Mastodon network""?
numpad0 1 day ago
Gab/Truth was easy and not that controversial, but content moderation was a lot more problematic, so they introduced a published instance blocklist system and had operators join the condemnation while also throwing wrenches at instance chooser interfaces online and/or hardcoded, because otherwise the "main" part will become a permanent minority.
I think any modern LLMs would see/know what I mean. Ask your agent if you need more information along this lore.
Vaushite 1 day ago
numpad0 1 day ago
wolvoleo 1 day ago
This is in the google play store too: https://github.com/aeharding/voyager Though I get it from F-Droid obviously.
I don't know about Apple, its ecosystem is way too closed for me. But Google offers fediverse apps.
mschuster91 1 day ago
And its biggest weakness because instance admins keep bitchfighting with each other, holding their users hostage.
Vaushite 1 day ago
mschuster91 1 day ago
Vaushite 1 day ago
mschuster91 1 day ago
Times used to be better, before the stonerhead took over...
wolvoleo 1 day ago
And there are some groups like the German fediverse that stipulate a really long and very specific list of rules and block any instance that doesn't take these over 100% verbatim, no discussion allowed. Also a good reason most of them are blocked. We've had this issue before at the progressive instance I was on.
But besides that most of them get along well. Mastodon is strong on bubble forming anyway but I personally like that. I hate seeing a post from a trans friend on e.g. instagram and then see hundreds of Americans falling over themselves to spew trans hate. Even though the post had nothing to do with that. I think bubbles are necessary in today's online world because many people are just not worth talking to anymore.
mschuster91 1 day ago
Yeah guess what, I'm German LOL that's why I wrote this post
> Also a good reason most of them are blocked.
Well the problem is, it's still annoying from a user perspective - I don't care about the problems other instance admins have with the admins of my instance. And no, I don't want to maintain a dozen accounts just to make sure I can interact with everyone I want to.
> I hate seeing a post from a trans friend on e.g. instagram and then see hundreds of Americans falling over themselves to spew trans hate.
yeah the commercial social networks are just another level of shittiness, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of these "Americans" are just Russians in disguise.
numpad0 1 day ago
So they constantly engage in those ostentatious acts as almost a cultish rituals of its own to distance themselves from whatever it is.
Which is, frankly understandable. Behaviors of some of European counterterrorist units and NGOs/NPOs are rather unhinged. I would do the same if I were them. I'd even put up some religious symbols or donation receipts in the login page just to avoid giving them wrong ideas.
jrm4 1 day ago
numpad0 1 day ago
Otherwise it wouldn't have been forced upon who begrudgingly got funding secured. Any of then-GAFA could have bought it and none wanted to touch it.
The bad moderation on those platforms, I think, is a desperate attempt to align platform cultures to the moderating entities' standards that are no longer comprehensible to users, if known at all, like a kid on a push car moving away from the park trying to steer it back.
It seemed fine until 2015 or so, streaming hundreds of novel tweets per second per user, many with novel images. Then things went downhill. Musk can't be the sole villain in it.