Workers in the UK and Ireland were told not to come to their offices today and the buildings were locked. There have been layoffs here which appear to be in direct violation of UK law.
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Seems to be layoffs in all the parts of the company that kept people safe(ish):
Can’t work out why advertisers might not want to be associated with the company right now…
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I’ve considered trying to find a replacement Twitter – but from what I can tell, all of the social media platforms suck, either because they’re aggressively user-unfriendly, they’re run by NFT bros, or they’re likely havens for Nazis or scamsters. I may pick one, but I’ll probably wait 'til Facebook inevitably kicks me out for making an algorithm sad.
I’m absolutely going to miss following a number of writers and artists on Twitter. It was a fantastic way for independent creators to promote their work. I’m not sure any other platform will ever be able to match it.
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Honestly. My favorite is instagram (which I know is owned by zuck). It’s all me just following creative people and businesses I like. Comments are mostly positive. People do post memes and political commentary in their stories still.
If what you want is a place to argue with people maybe it’s best just to let it go in general. I’ve never used Twitter and I don’t feel I’m missing out. I get news from the guardian live feed. If anything super newsworthy/important on Twitter gets posted they share it there.
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I’m enjoying Mastodon. It’s federated, so there’s different servers to choose from, which are all loosely connected. That keeps an information silo from forming since no one group or company controls all servers. There’s a base policy required to be part of the federated group (pro-diversity, anti-racism, etc), and then each server can do it’s own additional things for policies and moderation. And it’s the easiest to use, the most twitter like experience. Growth is going to be a problem (not sure how they’ll fund their expansion).
I’ve also tried countersocial, which is a Mastodon fork that is aggressively counter intuitive to use and I don’t really like. Cohost is okay, but seems light in features and I’m not sold on it yet. After that, it’s more live journal/tumbler style sites, and I have a blog, so not really interested in those (never used them in the past so no idea what they’d really be good for).
It’ll take time. I think Mastodon, with its plethora of different servers catering to different needs but the ability to follow and talk to folks on other servers, is probably the best replacement and the one I’m rooting most for.
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Yep. Seems at first sight not to have obeyed Irish labour law. I guess the holding company will go bankrupt before the workers see their legally obliged payment. Could get very messy. My understanding, just from conversations with workers, is there’s a lot of moderators here (though most social media moderators are outsourced as far as I can see) so a lot of layoffs I expect the holding company won’t have the government stanning for them after the layoffs. That could have serious outcomes.
Then again our government are Tory boy scum so who knows. Next Taoiseach is undoubtedly dying to meet “paedo guy”.
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Also enjoying Mastodon for the reasons you mentioned and for similar reasons to this EFF talk by Cory Doctorow.
Mastodon servers can set up very clear rules. The one I’m on requires you to be a furry, requires you to be anti-racist, pro-lgbtq, and a bunch of other things.
We choose not to federate with servers that have alt-right/far-right / awful views. And so, it means a bit more work has to be done to get things working, but it ultimately DOES work out. It’s absolutely what I wanted.
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Twitter has now flagged Musk’s posting.
I hope this was someone’s final ‘fuck you!’ before leaving for the last time.
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It’s been removed.
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Instagram has had problems with comment moderation – women and girls who use the site have reported abusive comments that mostly get ignored by moderators.
It’s still my favorite platform, because I like taking photos.
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At least on instagram you can delete abusive comments. I haven’t had that much of it but occasionally there will be some troll who will make a rude comment about my art. I’ll just delete it and block them. But I know I’m not the type of person typically targeted so i don’t see very much of that sort of abuse…
But yeah i know thats a very different sort of platform. Its not so much about news, journalism, opinion, and written humor which is what i guess is what people enjoy about twitter… I guess I just go to actual news and opinion sites for that sort of thing, like the guardian or slate… even though thats very filtered and not as immediate…
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That doesn’t mean having to constantly see abusive comments isn’t a problem. Even when you can delete them, you still have to read them, which means you end internalizing it, and for teens, that’s deeply problematic, and can lead to serious mental health problems. Let’s not just dismiss people who have to constantly deal with this kind of shit because you don’t find it a problem in your own life. Believe people who tell you that anyone who isn’t a white man gets a hell of a lot more shit online and that is has an impact on our lives, because it’s the fucking truth.
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Just imagine travelling to Mars in a ship run by these guys…
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Going by what Musk has actually pitched it was already a ship where you are crowded with a hundred other people, all expected to spend nine months in a little seat watching onboard entertainment, before you land and desperately get to work trying to unpack what you hope is a functional farming colony before the food and water and air run out.
I can imagine a future where people live on Mars and those first Musk landings have become a truly legendary site, though mostly just for ghost stories since even archaeologists interested in the what happened are really creeped out to actually go in.
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Sorry didn’t mean to dismiss anyone’s experience. (Which is why I qualified the comment in the next sentence.) I totally agree with you. I just meant I personally see less hate and vitriol on instagram than Twitter (even before the recent events)
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I figure the story will be about the colony ship that arrived into orbit with a crew dead from radiation poisoning.
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… most of the crew and passengers dead from radiation poisoning, except for a very small few who were definitely going to die, and alternated between begging to live and begging for death, and either way nobody could help them, just listen to them on the radio, until the voices stopped, but the carrier signal didn’t: broadcasting to the universe the sounds of a ship full of corpses until the solar panels were covered in dust and the batteries ran out.
That radio frequency was abandoned by humanity forever more, and children whispered amongst each other that if you overrode the blocks and force-tuned the receivers to it, you could still hear the echos of the last crewmembers weakly sobbing as they waited in agony to die.
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