Musk owns the platform and used it for a republican political advertisement. Fox at least pretends to do some sort of journalism, at least enough to stay on the right side of the law.
18 Likes
Emphasis mine.
Those who fail to uphold their oath of office must be removed from office; those who have said they have no intentions of doing so if elected must be prevented from holding office.
They have proven their unwortiness by their words and actions.
It also helps if those systems aren’t being undermined from within.
What is unimaginable to a lot of people is the fact that the coup is an ongoing process, and the measures it will take to stop it.
For some, the cure would be regarded as bad as the affliction.
Some of those norms have been corrupted for a long time & need to be done away with.
Part of the 13th Amendment, for example, still allows slavery.
Yep, those need to go, as well. Tyranny of the minority is an idea that needs to die.
Maybe not, but it is a Clear and Present Danger to democracy, as are all the El Rushbo wannabes on the airwaves & the Interwebs.
11 Likes
I just deactivated my personal and company twitter accounts. Like Spotify, no plan on going back.
19 Likes
I’d be angrier if I thought this would move a single net vote into a single Republican’s totals.
2 Likes
Hello my name is Leon Skum and I’ve been trying to reach you about you car’s extended warranty. I need about $8.
15 Likes
17 Likes
I joined mastodon.lol. Servers were so overwhelmed I couldn’t “toot”. Tried again today and everything was running fine.
Edit:
Looks like I joined a good server.
https://mastodon.lol/about/more
This instance is friendly towards anti-fascists, members of the LGBTQ+ community, activist movements, hackers, and anyone who doesn’t think “free speech” is the only important human right. Anyone is welcome so long as they abide by the rules. This is not a free speech zone, Nazis fuck off.
We do not federate with fascist instances.
21 Likes
something that seems like a negative for mastodon is that seems easy for notable people – say a stephen king or someone – to be impersonated. so if i were to see a mastodon quote from somebody, i’d have less trust that it is actually that person. ( i’d have to know what server the person uses, and remember that. )
oto, because the twitter checkmark has now lost its meaning: twitter’s also missing that feature.
10 Likes
Mastodon has a form of verification – a link from a site you own (in a specific format) will allow mastodon to mark you as “verified” to that site specifically on your profile page. The obvious drawback is that you have to go look at the profile page to see it.
Martin Fowler explains it:
9 Likes
this must have been when the french were really into savate
That really doesn’t do anything except for very large players since you still need to connect the website to the person. Google searches can be gamed and ads purchased, so unless you already know their site, there’s still no verification.
The guy that purchased and put parody sites up for various politicians would have a field day. Fowler? That link I trust, I’ve followed him for years.
2 Likes
i tried setting up a mastadon account. its confusing as heck and i cant find anyone on there (celebrities or friends). (when i signed up for facebook years ago it suggested dozens of people i knew and was working almost against my will super easy) I see no way that something so complicated could be a viable alternative to something as simple as twitter and am really confused why it’s being suggested as such…
4 Likes
32 Likes
And let’s face it, it’s usually a ‘he’.
4 Likes
Yep. The burden is on the user to do the due diligence. That’s a side-effect of a decentralized platform. A particular instance could enact a more stringent verification, but it would only be valid for users of that instance.
I’m pretty sure FB was able to do that because it looked into your email contacts. I wouldn’t expect a platform built with privacy in mind would do the same.
6 Likes
At some point someone is going to start spinning up verification instances for folks like Stephen King. I also saw someone recommend news agencies like Washington Post spin up their own instances and post their stories from those accounts, which would absolutely verify it’s that news company and not a fake posting.
8 Likes
It’s not really that complicated. You’re just used to twitter and facebook, which were designed to part you from your data and server it up to big advertisers and/or anyone else who wanted it. Once you’ve used the site for more than half an hour you quickly start to get used to it. Finding people has been a little more challenging, mostly because there’s only about 1/300th the number of individuals on Mastodon so far, and I pretty much suspect most celebrities haven’t jumped ship quite yet. But once you find a few, look at THEIR follower lists, and you’ll get more, and after a while it all snowballs.
EDIT: I’ve been really using it now fully for three days and I’m up to a whopping 40 followers and following about 60 folks (I don’t generally follow celebrities though… they rarely say much I need to hear about). But it took me like two years to get that far on Twitter, so… that’s a snowball, sure.
Feel free to add me if you like: https://mastodon.social/@trollbreath42
EDIT EDIT: I think the reason it feels so hard at first is Mastodon won’t spoon feed you data using algorithms, or by searching other parts of your life like your email contacts. It’ll only give you what you say you want explicitly. Which is great… and which definitely means we have to do a little more leg work, but I heavily curated my twitter feed, so to me it feels a bit more natural to do it this way. Hope I didn’t come off early as sounding dismissive of your concerns.
10 Likes
I’m not technologically illiterate and I couldn’t figure it out. My point isn’t that no one can figure it out. Just that it’s not at all a replacement for Twitter or Facebook or Instagram which became popular because they were easy. Because everyone’s grandparents and childhood friends hopped on because it was intuitive. Which mastodon is not at all. I dunno maybe there will be some app to make it easier or something. But right now it feels like trying to understand a tax form. And the celebrity thing- well isn’t that the point of Twitter? I mean anytime you ask someone why they don’t want to quit it’s because of some famous journalists, comedians, writers etc are on there.
1 Like
I’m trying again. Found one person I like. (Apparently Stephen fry deleted his Twitter account) Seems like I’m not alone in my frustrations. LOL
8 Likes
You know, I think not knowing if a person is a celebrity or not was part of the charm of the old web. It divorced the message from the appeal to authority, and so you judged the post on its contents. Eventually, on the history of that handle, but you never knew who that person was outside of the bulletin board. I don’t need to know what Stephen King wrote, and if I do, he can write it on his blog.
You know, I just realized it’s why I spend hours daily reading the Boing Boing BBS and about ten minutes a week on Twitter and Facebook. Combined. If some celebrity is posting here, I am not aware and don’t care, I like the writings of the regular commenters.
22 Likes
