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honestly surprised that AOC and pres. Biden are on the list.
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Yep, it’s equality for all on Twitter. No special treatment for anyone. Unless they pay $8. Or $1000. Or are on a secret list. Or support a cause Elon personally approves or disapproves of, or are particularly fawning or critical towards him, or are a whistleblower, or…
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I saw the reference and laughed!!! I got like 8 “free” record albums and it took forever to buy the ones required cause I was a kid who only got allowance and some babysitting money. And my parents were like “well you signed up for it so deal with it.” gah
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I’m excited for when we get to the ‘reading his obituary’ stage.
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…Would it be too much to hope that in so doing, he is also just like Trump?
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That’s the one I’m most eager to read.
Statistically speaking, it’s gotta happen…
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I read the first few names and thought “That makes sense for Musk.” AOC and Biden caught me by surprise too… until I realised they draw a lot of conservative ire, and therefore drive engagement. Some of the people on that list are undoubtedly people Musky favours, but I’d say most of them are there because they pull a lot of subscribers and ad views.
Which means The Shat is probably becoming irrelevant to both sides of the aisle, at least on Blue Bird Bigotry Blog. Not enough pull from fans or haters.
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OHHHHhhhh – when you put it that way. yep, i bet you’re right.
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Musk fools himself into believing he’s a centrist
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I’m entirely convinced at this point that his stated vendetta over “bots” on Twitter is based on a deep seated belief that the people who criticize him must either be bad people or fake people.
So he doesn’t actually care about bots.
He cares about criticism but legit believes it’s mostly coming from bots.
Take his comments after being booed at the Dave Chappelle show as an example. He made a surprise appearance in the bay immediately after laying off most Twitter employees not to mention all the years of awful hot take tweets. And when he’s met with the opposite of the riotous applause he was expecting his off the cuff comment is to mumble something about how things like this prove to him that reality must be a simulation.
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Well, given that he evidently believes that the universe revolves around him, that would necessarily make him the center, wouldn’t it?
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… he thinks people who boo him IRL are bots 
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Not exactly related to this story but why hasn’t anyone built and deployed a viable competitor to twitter. Same core functionality but not Mastadon?
I cannot think of any real legal reason so long as they do not put forward the illusion of trademark infringement and are careful of Patent issues.
Build a competing platform that has the same standards as pre Elon twitter and drive twitter onto the ground.
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Building and deploying a competitor is easy. Attracting the people and traffic to a critical mass, which is the real value, is hard. (And moderating just right to keep it on the rails is very hard.)
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Lots of people have done this. There are dozens of Twitter clones at this point. They’re nothing without the people. Mastodon is gaining critical mass of users so that’s why it’s becoming the Twitter replacement.
Success of a platform has nothing to do with what kinds of servers it runs on or what the software stack looks like. It’s who get the users that matters.
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@RickMycroft Too
I understand all that and it really is about getting folks to play. But I have yet to see a viable replacement jsut from the functionality point of view. Mastodon does appear to be the leader but it is confusing to setup and that could be a killer to ongoing adotation.
What do you find personally confusing? Finding a server is often a roadblock for some people. The joinmastodon page recently did some updates to smooth the process somewhat.
Remember, you had to “pick” an email server, too, so it’ll end up being a very similar decision process. Long-term, I expect a lot of people will get their mastodon accounts through work, school, or whatever. Mozilla is planning to run one, Vivaldi is already running one.
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The centrists did enable Nazis in the past, so why not now?
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Part of the problem is that building out and scaling such a platform (if you can attract the users away from Twitter) is a billion-dollar investment in development, infrastructure, internationalization, and staff. It costs a lot of money.
Mastodon solves the problem by federating it: everyone can run a server. Anyone can write software that speaks ActivityPub (the protocol underlying the Fediverse). The more resources you have, the bigger a server you can run. With a hundred thousand servers, and thousands of developers building software for it, you make the problem much more manageable.
Plus: if I’m going to move to a new social media site, I don’t want the thing that happened to the last one happen to the new one. I don’t want it to be controlled by a single billionaire turning it into his personal one-way media soapbox. I want some assurance that a platform is not only in the public sphere, but fuckin’ NAILED into the public sphere. It should be impossible or nearly-impossible to make it into an oligarch’s plaything.
Mastodon offers that possibility. Maybe it’s harder to use, maybe it won’t succeed, but ffs, we’re going to try. And if it doesn’t work, we’ll try again.
