Elon Musk’s latest changes for X are driving more users away – not exactly a surprise, granted – and many of them are flocking to rival social media outlet Bluesky. So many made the switch, in fact, it led to Bluesky briefly going down due to the volume of incoming new users.
The central move initiated by X that made the headlines for driving migration away from Musk’s platform is a change to the way the ‘Block’ button works. This was actually announced back in September, but is officially being implemented now (well, it’ll be in place ‘soon’ we’re told).
It means that going forward, X users who you have blocked will still be able to view your (public) posts – though they won’t be able to engage with them in any way (from replies to liking and so forth).
This is problematic for obvious reasons, in terms of enabling stalkers and trolls who will still be able to view the posts of an account that has blocked them, when previously this wasn’t the case. In the past, blocking meant that the blocked user couldn’t see any posts (or anything at all, save for a message telling them that they’ve been blocked), but soon, this will change.
Bluesky posted to say it had in excess of 100,000 new users inside 12 hours following the announcement by X, after the rival network highlighted the fact that its block function stops those who are blocked from viewing any posts.
In an update, Bluesky noted that it has now gained half a million new users in the past day.
There’s another reason that some folks are rapidly exiting from X stage left (and right, and indeed center, clambering over the audience, it would seem), and that’s a change to X’s privacy policy.
As TechCrunch reports, the new policy includes an update that allows third-party collaborators to use content on X to train their AI models – unless the user opts out. This is a notable extension of the reach of AI training on X, which has so far only been used to train Musk’s own Grok AI (unless users opt out, again).
Come on over to Mastodon, the water’s nice
I’ve stopped recommending it. The discovery and trending post mechanisms are either garbage or non-existent, and it’s really hard to get a feed that’s remotely entertaining. Devs also seem ideologically opposed to adding any features like that. It’ll just give normal people who aren’t willing to deal with all this crap a bad taste in their mouth when it comes to the fediverse. I do recommend lemmy to people tho.
While I agree that it makes Mastodon less entertaining I also think that it makes it a lot more fair, representative and trustworthy as a lens through which to observe & participate in social discourse and share information and opinions. That in itself will probably mean that it remains less popular but I think it’s also what makes it more valuable IMO. We need to calm down from the urgency of the digital dopamine cycle, for many reasons. If social media is a truly human media then it should be boring at times because that is a human reality that we are adapted to.
Yeah fair points. I will say this implosion of the social media I used to use has pushed me towards doing other things than scrolling on my phone lol, and that is a positive thing.
I feel like its the opposite.
Mastodon’s hashtag following is by far the best discovery method out there.
I’ve stopped using Bluesky because I can’t find any content and there’s just too much “screaming into the void” making it impossible to find anything of substance.
I’ve stopped using Threads because it’s just engagement bait.I disagree, I just think some kind of engagement algorithm would be better. I haven’t used bluesky or threads so I can’t speak to them. I’m just saying that back in the day on twitter, I had no problem finding a bunch of very funny and clever posts, and posts were catered to me well. Through both me following people and I assume through the engagement algorithm. I’ve tried adding a bunch of hashtags, but I’m not finding a bunch of hilarious stuff to send to my friends like I did back then on twitter.
Bunch of spam too, because bots use the hashtags, so I’m often scrolling through a bunch of auto-posted stuff. Idk. Maybe I’m using it wrong. I just feel like your average person isn’t going to go through all that crap so they’ll cling to twitter until it dies.
And I’ve tried switching instances around, which is just confusing honestly, and didn’t really help with finding lots of content that I want to see. I used mastodon more when I was able to mirror people I know are funny on twitter to my mastodon feed lol. I want to like it, I just find I’m never tempted to go on it. Can’t figure it out.
Is that you, Elon?
What do valid criticisms/grievances about Mastodon have to do with the poster being Elon?
They crave the algorithm
These mfs will use literally anything except for open source, decentralised social meda
The masses yearn for the corporate boot
Is bluesky not federated?
It is but from what I understand it doesn’t run on ActivityPub. Rather it runs on AT Protocol
What a garbage dataset to train off. The majority of everything there is all bots and AI anyway lol
bots training bots. maybe this will (hopefully) corrupt the AI’s data. its kind of like copying off a copy again and again.
Sound like human
50und 11k3 hum4n
50()|V[) 11X3 |-|()|/|4|V
$[]|||||) |!|<[- #|_|///-||
Don’t forget to yell into the data PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS!!!
Grok Habsburg
This is in fact precisely what happens. LLM output becomes increasingly incoherent with each subsequent generation trained off of previously AI generated data.
The AI version of mad cow disease.
It’s also about the art posted on it. I use bsky for that purpose and all the “migrants” didn’t want their work to be fed to an AI.
Just helpful to remember, as all this horseshit persists, Bluesky is Jack Dorsey. Dorsey is former head of Twitter and musk’s good buddy.
It’s all a losing proposition, whatever direction you move - except if you move… Away.
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They should
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Because we are extremely simple and self obsessed animals on the whole. At the intersection of those two things, we regularly conflate base familiarity with earned trust. A bit of a narcissistic drive to tell ourselves that… if WE know about something, it MUST be good, otherwise we wouldn’t have taken the time to first learn about it!
It’s why your town is currently infested with candidate signs in every public space. It’s also why incumbents have such large advantages in elections and why dead/convicted politicians (or Last-name sharing family members of those politicians) are often elected after the fact.
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Opt out is such a shitty practice. Especially for AI generation
Social media like Twitter preys on people’s fear of missing out.
Manufactured Problem - not being up to date on internet bullshit. Marketed solution - be on twitter. Supply and demand died a long time ago. Now it’s all about manufactured problems, and conveniently marketed solutions.
This sort of psychological manipulation in marketing works. It’s why it’s so hard to get people to leave websites like Twitter, reddit, fb ect. They’ve made their brands synonymous with media trends.
It took long enough, but I’m genuinely happy to see folks wising up and realizing they don’t “need” Twitter. It’s like watching a bunch of people break up with a toxic ex all at the same time.
Not just Twitter. FOMO was what kept me on Reddit far longer than I should have been there.
Wonderful. Negative press for Musk makes me smile.
Dude, that’s gonna be one hell of a racist AI just based on the dataset it’s gonna receive
So let’s say on Twitter, someone blocks me and I can’t read their post. Can’t I just log out and read their post that way? I don’t have a Twitter account, so I’ve never seen a blocked link before.
Yup, that’s exactly right. On Lemmy you don’t even have to log out, blocking someone simply means you can’t see their posts. If you don’t want a harasser or stalker to see something, and you post it publicly, you’re an idiot.
And this is the way it should be… You shouldn’t be able to silence someone from responding to stuff you say publicly by blocking them.
X is authwalled
I can see this random tweet from Taylor Swift just fine in incognito mode. I can’t look at replies but I can see her posts.
https://x.com/taylorswift13/status/1781171613058097619
People on Lemmy link to tweets all the time and I can navigate and read them. Not sure what you mean then that it’s authwalled. It’s an annoying experience and it bugs me every time I visit to make an account or log in, but I can see them.
You can see a tweet, but not list of her tweets, iirc.
You can view some profiles (authwall for others) and some show all content (tried it out with bbc and forbes), others drop relatively recent content while some others only show ancient content from a year or more ago.
The latter two were when I tried opening the twitter pages for some smaller podcasts I follow.
Maybe it just authwalls shared IPs like Google does (eg YouTube)
Wait this whole article just baselessly assumes that 1 new bluesky account = 1 person leaving twitter. That is so obviously unrealistic. Sure some people were probably curious and wanted to check out something new but that doesn’t mean they will immediately switch platforms.
You can’t just make fun of Those Guys for endlessly believing fake bullshit while unquestionably parroting this garbage.
Getting a 100000 new users when Twitter loses roughly the same amount is a pretty significant correlation.
Twitter is for narcissists, and when they say Mastodon is not as good as twitter they really mean that there’s not as many people watching them as on Twitter. So Bluesky gaining 500,000 new accounts could help in making it “better”.
Bluesky is pretty great once you learn how to use it. I plan to slowly back off twitter.
Bluesky is vc backed by investors, it is a false promise that I am sure a lot of people working on the project believe, but it is a false promise all the same.
Bluesky is in the part of its lifecycle where investors tolerate no return on their investment in favor of drawing more people in. That is the relevant difference between Bluesky and other social media.
There are cool parts to Bluesky but it is absolutely a false promise of a future the fediverse already provides (however imperfectly). It is also full of “liberal” sheep who tell themselves they think differently but are so locked into the mindset of the way things are that they NEED their social network to be owned and operated for a profit by people orders of magnitude more wealthy than them.
Bluesky will end up essentially the same as all investor backed for-profit social networks, it will grow into a toxic, centralized (or in this case pseudo-centralized because of the moderation system), shithole where only popular accounts get any engagement with their posts. Mark my words.
Bluesky is the promise of Mastodon with none of the failsafes of Mastodon.
How do we know this bluesky isn’t just the same shit run by different assholes?
We know that it is run by the same assholes. Bluesky is VC backed and Twitter was also. There is no way that Bluesky won’t go the same route as every other VC backed social network. Sometime in the future they will start to meddle with your feed to push ads and sell your data to everyone.
This makes me wonder so hard why people don’t switch to Mastodon instead. Like… You have literally seen this before! Why are you doing it again?
We don’t. It probably is. Mastodon is the way, but they need to fix a few things themselves.
How do we know mastadon isn’t just owned by Musk too?
Because it’s federated and FOSS.
It can’t be.
We can’t, but at least there is a chance it is not.
With Xitter, we know for certain.
I just go where the japanese artists go, and they are going to either blue sky or misskey, mostly blue sky since it has a bigger reach, misskey closed account creation for outsiders, and the way mastodon works I bet it’s defederated from a lot of the popular instances like baraag.
Misskey is like mastodon so you can just go to another misskey instance.
But if you’re talking about the misskey.io instance, it’s not that defederated from my experience (the 3 instances I’m on aren’t defederated from it).
The instance simply follows Japanese law so whatever Japan allows they allow and whatever Japan forbids they forbid (which is why censoring genitals is also mandatory in that instance lol). It’s not like it’s some nazi cesspool or anything like that.
While anything that gets people off Twitter is good, I’m sorely unimpressed by those artists who “had to” to patronize the racist transphobic neo-Nazi hellhole “because my audience is there”… until Musk’s policies happened to offend their own personal interests, by requiring training for their AI. Countless models trained on all public images already exist, jumping ship won’t prevent their work from being scraped elsewhere, and frankly, any one image or even portfolio will contribute virtually nothing to the result, so quitting in protest is largely symbolic. But so many peoples drew the line at that, and not at Musk making “cis” a slur, or protecting child pornographers, or boosting white supremacist supremacy theories. It’s really disappointing to see.
That’s how blocking and banning on the internet has always worked. When you block someone they just can’t reply to you. The way it was until now is just weird. Why would blocking an account prevent them from viewing your public posts!? “Stalkers” can always just make another account. I am glad they are actually fixing blocking on Twitter. g
I’m wondering the same thing. I never really used Twitter, couldn’t people just stalk without being logged in? Or was this to weed out the least motivated stalkers?
