Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[FunkMonk]

For real? 

Relax. Soon afterward he announced he's raising the limit to 800.

I'm not joking.

[OttoVonBismarck]

It seems like at least some of the problem is related to Musk deciding to not honor the $1bn cloud hosting contract Twitter signed with Google. There was apparently a deadline of 6/30 to get all their cloud stuff off of Google Cloud--the reporting is not entirely clear if that is a Google imposed deadline (I doubt that), or just Musk's internal deadline because he wants to get off that platform since the status of the contract is disputed.

They apparently have some technology they use to automoderate some "bad stuff" (including child porn) that was one of the things they were running on Google Cloud, and some observers are saying that it is clearly no longer functioning correctly.

I don't know what else they were running on Google cloud, but the order by Musk to migrate everything off of it was not even a month ago, and that seems like a really big undertaking if they had a lot of stuff on there. Since the contract Musk is refusing to honor was $1bn, that's a pretty big cloud contract so my assumption is they have a ton of core Twitter systems running on it.

[garbon]

Yeah.

My understanding is that the IP position is really unclear until, as you say, someone litigates or legislates. The AI companies in the US think they're in a far stronger position based on "fair use" but I've no idea how strong that is.

Also from a media perspective, I'm not sure that you'd want to keep embedding tweets in articles/liveblogs now if it's actually just presenting readers with a sign up page.

I saw on buzzfeed embedded tweets still load, it is just that you can't actually go to Twitter to see the tweet. So if it was a quote tweet of a video, you can't watch the video it quoted.

[Legbiter]

It's the thing that annoys me about all of this. I joined Twitter because of the Arab Spring - and obviously you need to curate who you follow - but it is still one of the best ways to access information about news as it's happening (especially as many journalists are tweet first rather than just posting links to their articles). It is, I think, still a very valuable information space.

Yeah I follow some really great genetics, history and Ukraine accounts on there. I notice I'm seeing the media headlines 3 to 7 days in advance.

I religiously block loud, annoying shit accounts. Also blocking certain words is a really effective timeline sanitizer.

[OttoVonBismarck]

So I dunno, but I think for me Mastodon is much better than Twitter. First off the bat--I have never been someone who uses Twitter for the communication aspect. My grand total number of Tweets is zero, as are my Tweet replies.

I essentially used it as a quasi-replacement for my old RSS feed readers and exclusively followed information sources I was interested in.

When things started to get shitty on Twitter, I rolled an account on the Vivaldi instance of Mastodon, and started following news accounts. Pretty quickly I had around one hundred. I also found a lot of "individuals" I followed for certain news were also either on there directly, or on there via "proxy." While I don't know all the details, prominent people on other social networks it appears individuals are "mirroring" them onto Mastodon. It looks like this is through a service calling itself a "Twitter to ActivityPub" bridge.

It essentially just reads Tweets of people and reposts them, it has a certain list of people it mirrors, but seems to have all of the high follower accounts.

The developer of that project was well aware Twitter was never going to keep their API open and free, so it was never built using that--he apparently has a cloud of various Twitter accounts that are all used to actually login to the page and read the actually Tweets (obviously using code and screen scraping, no one is manually doing this), and even during this weekend's general Twitter problem he has been able to keep it running since he is using actual logged in, verified accounts.

The nice thing about Mastodon is it basically has no algorithm at all. My feed is the people I have chosen to follow and nothing else. No one is trying to make me see new stuff, no one is trying to sell me anything etc. No one who pays Eon Musk $8/mo gets priority in my feed or anything like that.

Now, where Mastodon is pretty awful is it is a little unintuitive to get an account going, which is going to block 95% of users. It also doesn't have a good "social graph" if you're a "creator."

The people who are going to hate Mastodon are the people who Tweet a lot, reply a lot, and get dopamine hits off of getting likes and ReTweets, and people who currently have tons of Twitter followers and value "engagement" with their followers.

But for someone just looking to passively consume information, I haven't missed Twitter one bit.

[Josquius]

No algorithm sounds nice.
The whole bunch of seperate networks thing less so.

[DGuller]

When I briefly looked into Mastodon and saw that there were a whole bunch of different networks, I rolled my eyes and stopped looking further.  How can you build a network without understanding the network effect?

[mongers]

So one of life's consolations is Trump will die within a few years and we're get to live the rest of our lives without his inane utterances distrubing the peace.

Onthe other hand, given Musk's age and the age profile here, he'll outlive a lot of Languishites, so perhaps half of use will have to put up with his bullshit for the rest of our lives.

[Josquius]

I looked at mastodon. Seems nice enough. But dead.

[Grey Fox]

What Mastodon needs is a giant company to make a server. Like an ISP or maybe something like ESPN/Sky Sports.

[Sheilbh]

Instagram launching Threads which seem to be their Twitter replacement app (and also accidentally triggering a generation of middle-aged Brits ).

[FunkMonk]

Threads seems the most likely one-to-one replacement. I'm hopeful. I'm done with Twitter.

[Syt]

Instagram launching Threads which seem to be their Twitter replacement app (and also accidentally triggering a generation of middle-aged Brits ).

[Richard Hakluyt]

Time for an 80s style joke :

Person 1 : They nuked Sheffield.

Person 2 : Really? How could they tell?


Northern cities were at their nadir round about 1984; I remember passing through Manchester then (a city I didn't know back then) and it really resembled a disused car park.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah I think that's very deliberate. Nuclear devastation destroying our cities and society: we're already there.

I mean the writer wrote Kes and was a long time collaborator with Loach. Although my favourite Threads trivia is that the director would later go on to direct The Bodyguard

Separately and just on the AI angle Google have just updated their public terms that basically says if you publish anything on the internet that's open, they will use it to train their AI models. They've amended the section that referred to using it for the language models and Google Translate to also include their AI models, Bard and Cloud AI.

There's a technical side and an IP side (and a wider rights side in relation to individuals putting data on social media) - not sure Musk's "solution" will work, but I'm not sure there's not a real issue there.