kosure

Expropriate or bust!

It’s grim. Obviously twitter still holds sway over a lot of people. And spreading malinformed propaganda is bad.

But it really underlines that anyone with any conscience whatsoever needs to disengage from it. It’s not okay for governments to engage with it. And though I don’t suggest that capital cares has any sort of conscience, but engaging with it has been increasing in cost and decreasing in benefit. NPR recently left, for example, and saw nearly no impact whatsoever. So the cost of leaving is low.

Ideally people would deny it any money, advertising or otherwise, until it ceases functioning. I suspect Musk will continue to be a delusional asshole for years to come. But at least twitter will be dead and gone.

I feel like good government has a role in preventing this. Is access to the new Willow TV series of moral imperative? Perhaps not. But should Disney, or anyone else, be allowed to produce content for clicks with the express purpose of disintegrating it 8 weeks later? I think the audience, writers, cast, crew, and creative executives would all agree that’s a no. I think only the accountants would say yes to this question.

This is the same reason that copyright exists, and why Disney has fought so hard against it all these years. Works of significant cultural value cannot be entrusted to the hands of a profit seeking cadre. And civil society has an important role in preventing that from happening. Obviously the 150 year, or whatever it is, copyright expiration is not going to save us here. But this is a very analogous fight. I think legislation has got a role to play in it.

This is so unsettling. Its grimly intriguing, but I also wish I’d never heard of it too!

I think you’re right: a wiki is probably the best place/format for this type of information. I think this post is more interested in the preservation of information than it’s formating. In that regard I think the most simple way to get the most copies produced is probably the best.

This is terrible! I don’t know anyone who likes beer who doesn’t like Anchor Steam. I’m honestly shocked that none of the big boys have stepped up to buy the brand. Though, I guess maybe they’re waiting for bargain basement prices in liquidation. Gutted.

And mass migrations and political strife

Agreed, it’s all a bit wonky, and it still mostly works. Really I think it’s mostly down to a design problem in word-choice. “Boost” kinda makes sense in microblogging, but not in link-sharing (unless you know that your kbin also has a microblogging feature, which…) I think “repost” make a lot more sense but I think that horse is out of the barn, unfortunately.

That chin, though.

I think there is one main difference between xmpp and activitypub. A chat protocol gets better the more users it has. So the users were the killer app. xmpp arguably wasn’t much worse off after Google left than before it got there.

Mastodon is a bit like this, in that lots of users are probably looking for the same type of content from the same users as they got on Twitter.

kbin/lemmy are a lot less like that. I just need enough people to surface interesting content and have a meaningful conversation. And I’ve already (mostly) got that now. If meta brought all of their users to link sharing it would probably get worse with clout-chasing, organic marketing, and low effort crap.

From a product side, I think most meta users who are looking for microblogging are happy enough with Twitter. So I think it will be tough to get a lot of initial buy-in.

In regards to the embrace, extend, extinguish concerns: I can’t, off the top of my head, think of any feature adds that would outweigh fediverse peoples distaste for ads or corporate social media. I mean, are flashy ai filters enough to split the user base of a reddit-alike or twitter clones? Is anyone clamoring for vr group-chats to improve their link-sharing threaded convos.

I’m not saying there’s nothing to worry about, but I think the feature-poor nature of these types of services (that really aren’t significantly different than old bbses) insulates at least those corners of the fediverse to some extent.

Plus, feature-creep is something people usually hate, or are uninterested in with big social media before this all started to pop off? Remember Foursquare check-ins, deals, credits, crypto, live audio…

I’m a vegetarian. Largely for animal cruelty reasons. But increasingly, and perhaps predominately, now, for ecological ones. I don’t know how I feel about cultured meat. I’ve sat in a quiet room for the express purpose of thinking about this issue and I still don’t know what I think. As a lifelong holder of very strong opinions, that’s strange for me. Part of me thinks I should be asking vegetarians about this. But part of me thinks I should be asking people at large. Does anyone have a considered opinion about this?

I can see why people would hate it. But I actually love magazines. Though “bins” for kbin makes a lot of sense too.