What an everlasting tool history will remember you as, elon.

Biggest tool in the history of tools.

Only clearer by the day that this was all an exercise to intentionally kill Twitter to the benefit of billionaires, fascists and other extremists.

When I initially heard about Elon paying what he did for Twitter my first thought was he’s buying it to kill it, then I thought nobody in their right mind would spend that kind of money to carry out a personal vendetta. Now I think that’s absolutely what’s going on.

I believe he’s killing Twitter purely for personal reasons (he hates it because people gave him shit there). I don’t think there’s some kind of grand social agenda. It would require an assumption he cares about someone other than himself. Unlikely as the guy’s ego extends past Planet 9.

Actually after thinking about it, the stuff he’s doing to the company is just batshit insane. It has to be intentional. He’s on a campaign to kill the company for the tax write-off and because he has some kind of personal beef with it. If he were to just fire everyone and shut down the servers he wouldn’t be able to take the write-off. The company has to die a slow death for it to look legit.

In imperial units I get this for a single stack of 44B in $100 bills;

.0043 inches * 44B / (12 inches in a foot * 5280 feet in a mile) = 2986 miles

That would be approximately the distance from Los Angeles to New York. That’s a long stack of bills.

For sure, either he’s destroying it on purpose of he’s that stupid, either one is just way out there.

Stupid because it makes zero difference for any screen that uses a backlight, which is most of them. And then they could just set dark mode as the default if it actually mattered, which it doesn’t. You can be stupid, but to be really stupid takes a corpo like Nestle.

Buy a truck for truck things and a car for car things. When they try to do both like that, they do neither well. I keep a truck and a car. I wouldn’t buy a truck without a full size bed, otherwise it’s not a truck. I don’t know what that thing is, but it’s not a truck.

I use fastmail, great service.

What motivated me to do that is finding these megacorp providers do not keep your email private.

All I can say is Netflix at 12.99 was a tough sell. That was the rate hike that made me drop them. 15.49 forget it.

When Netflix was the ticket and my sub was 8.99 some years ago, I didn’t pirate anything because I didn’t need to. I’d have to pay a hundred a month due to the fracturing and inflation of streaming services now, and I still wouldn’t get everything. I didn’t wanna pirate, but the industry backed me into a corner.

Well I’m not wikipedia here, just going on things I’ve read in past. You can either believe it or not believe it, suit yourself.

In the pre-internet days it was a well known fact that major media outlets in the USA had federal officials on staff to put the kibosh on issues of national security. That criteria has since broadened. For anyone that still watches news media on TV they can see for themselves the stories that never get past the editorial desk.

I’ve read claims of the same federal scrutiny happening for large social media outlets. These are USA companies operating in the USA so they fall under jurisdiction. They’re certainly not going to advertise that’s the case. I don’t doubt this is happening for a second and in their own best interest they keep it on the downlow.

I’m not sure I understand the comment. You meant 99% of those complaining are posting hostile shit? If so, it’s the 1% that post intelligent and legitimate counter arguments we need to allow a voice. It’s not uncommon for legislation to push through under the guise of some public benefit that further erodes our civil liberty. As US citizens we need to be vigilant about that kind of thing or we’re just throwing our freedom away.

I could have made that a lot longer, but I just wanted make a few points without creating a wall of text.

Of course there’s garbage you don’t want to see in a community. But the difference is there’s an actual human being I entrust to the task of removing it (the moderator). If I don’t like how a community is moderated, I can go to another community. Mods make these calls for the sake of quality and topicality of their particular community, not because of some ulterior motive.

This is in comparison to an institution of some kind using keyword algorithms to mindlessly remove intelligent discussion only because it may be against some kind of predetermined policy. The US government does this. They have official agents placed within the staff of major social media outlets for this purpose.

The only thing I said about Musk is that it’s a positive he tried to reduce censorship. I never implied that he removed censorship altogether. Twitter is still guilty of curating content same as the others. However Threads has flat out stated a full tilt censorship agenda.

Threads is pretty blatant about censorship and sharing of user data. They use terms like “a friendly space” and “convenient” to sell it to users. So you’re actually losing something by jumping ship from Twitter. The one positive for Musk era Twitter was an attempt to reduce censorship, but the crazy things the company did otherwise far outweigh it.

One of the shitty things profit driven social media sites do is curate content to create a more advertiser friendly space. It even extends to special interests and government interests. I mean what do you call that when public information is curated by the government. I sure as hell don’t want my US government telling me what I can and can not discuss in a public venue.

In the USA there’s a little thing called the first amendment. Granted these are companies and don’t necessarily have to adhere to civil rights in the same way government agencies do, but in effect they’re doing the same thing. The US government should absolutely not be coercing these US companies into censoring content, which they are.

Yeah it’s semantics, but to me an algorithm includes some kind of code to do something I’m not aware of or have control over, like a section of code that does a job in the background. In this case I think of something that pre-selects which content to put on my front page based on some logic I have no control over.

Haha, you nailed it.

It’s not really an algorithm, you see posts based on the type and sort order you select. Sorting by “hot” counts votes, sorting by “active” counts posts. My default is Subscribed and New. When I get through all the new stuff I check Active and Hot.

In any case, yeah there’s stuff I hope not to see here. So far so good and hopefully it will stay that way for a while.

Haha man, as the wise philosopher Pauly Shore once said, “dude, you’re harshing my mellow.” So yeah we don’t want those guys doing that to us.

Reddit has almost twenty years of development under its belt. How much development has it done in that large amount of time. I would bet Lemmy developers will run circles around Reddit in terms of how fast they advance the platform.

I would say the traditional internet was before the time of corporate ruled media, so in that case I’d say corporate internet is killing itself and and media is going back to traditional, at least with respect to the Fediverse.

As far as my PCs, I use a subscription service for email (fastmail.com). I’m still using the Chrome browser, but at some point I may have to go to Firefox for the sake of my uBlock Origin extension which I rely on heavily. Functionality of that extension on Chrome may be reduced at some point by the forced migration to Google’s new extension platform (Manifest V3).

I have to have a Google account for my Android phone. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get away from that. I mean you have two choices with phones, Android or iOS. I’m not going anywhere near Apple so Android is it. I’ve audited all my privacy settings in my Google account to minimize personal data, whether they actually honor those settings or not, who knows.

I’ve never used Twitter, but on occasion been linked to something there. So if that’s intentional they’re killing off that kind of traffic on purpose. It seems all these corpo social media sites are monetizing themselves to death.

This is what could happen. Learn from XMPP and don’t let corpos into the Fediverse.

ActivityPup is an open and public protocol. Anyone can use it however they want, but as a community we do have some control over who we federate with, so excersize that control.