You must log in or register to comment.
it’s unavoidable to center Elon here but can we just take a step back and appreciate how stupid, bad, and completely antithetical to a usable website this idea is? blocking has been a feature on like everything since phpBB forums because it literally just works. it’s an easy way to curate your experience without escalating and it’s a logical imitation of being able to simply avoid a person in real life. the idea of removing this in favor of nothing but mutes is just goofy as fuck (and if you make muting the new “block”, what’s even the difference between them? people will just use them basically the same way!).
Muting means other people can still comment on your stuff, and everyone else but you can see it.
Its so transphobes and homophobes can continue commenting on LGBT people’s content.
Elon Musk really fucking hates his trans daughter. Dad of the century, right here.
I wasn’t aware he had more children than the one with the weird-ass name. The private life section on wikipedia is a ride…
He ascribes to Longtermism and like his associate Jeffery Epstein, he thinks his genes are magically special, and so he wants as many offspring as humanly possible: while not actually giving one shit about the quality of life for any of them.
It’s really interesting, because he fucking hates his own father (Errol is also a creep who fathered a child with his step-daughter, who he raised from childhood), but can’t put together that he is exactly the fuck the same as his creep ass father.
Longtermism doesn’t have to do with one’s own personal genetics or lineage, though, and it certainly doesn’t belong to Elon.
Longtermism is a notion coming out of population ethics, that since there will be more people in the future than there are today, that we should take the well-being of all those future people into account when making decisions today.
This can be taken in lots of different directions — ranging from humanist environmentalism, to space migration, to concern about exotic existential risks.
But a fixation on one’s own personal DNA is not really related to it at all. That’s more of a misunderstanding of evolutionary biology.
Lemmy’s “block” is essentially a “mute” function, too. It makes it so that you don’t see any more content from a user, but they can still make comments on your stuff.
I hope it stays this way. It would suck being excluded from unrelated content on Lemmy just because I had a disagreement with someone at some point in the past (depending on how block happy people are of course).
lemmy, at least, would have the excuse of being constantly a work in progress and i guess that not having such a large community that hard blocking is necessary. but twitter would be appallingly bad without blocks–it already is with them!
Also, Lemmy has the bonus of federation allowing instances to defederate entirely from abuse and spam-happy instances. The smaller instances can have more tight-knit communities and defederating from instances full of jerks might be as worthwhile as a “block.”
IIRC from reading about Bluesky, its strategy for dealing with spam, trolls, hate speech, etc., was to have various servers in the Federation tag posts, users & servers with a “Spam” tag or “Hate speech” tag, and server admins can set their servers to not display posts so tagged, and to not pass them on to other servers.
Concerning
It’s interesting to me that they made the argument that blocking is increasing server costs.
- How is that even possible, on a technical level?
- If true, how is changing to a “stronger mute” going to reduce said costs?
I mean, it’s plainly clear that Musk has no idea what is going on at any of his companies and the narrative of him being a genius of some kind was simply that: a narrative.
I expect it’s accurate to say; their architecture is not like a database where you can add an index on a blocked state and then join against it. You have to get a list of potential posts that the user might want to see and then eliminate any in the block list. There will be a few edge case users who have thousands of block entries and a multithreading strategy is likely required to swiftly filter it in a reasonable timeframe.
However, an architecture I’ve seen that works around this is to build this timeline in the background and present it to the user from a cache, I don’t know if this is what Twitter does as I never worked on that. However, if you want to not have a block feature but have some kind of mute feature anyway I don’t see how there is a meaningful difference.
Yeah, sounds like that’s the case. Funny how flaws in system architecture gets exposed to the public through vapid excuses these days.
My guess is muting would likely result in a decrease of overall visibility. Every account gets a mute score.
In a way, I could imagine it increasing server costs by like 0.001%, if even that, because if the algorithm finds a post to recommend but then realises it’s from a blocked account, it would have to search again (ofc it’s probably optimised so that it realises that at an earlier stage).
But we’re talking about such small details it literally doesn’t matter and is outweighed by the functionality lost one hundredfold.
logical
Stop right there. This is Elon Musk we are talking about
Haha, that’s a throwback to the days when I helped to manage a phpBB board and there were a few members that would just continuously get into arguments so I edited the database so both of them had each other on their block list. It was very telling when I discovered they unblocked each other a few weeks later and got back to arguing and derailing thread topics.
You took away their hobby.
A worrying trend in recent social software platforms is that you can’t block people. Slack, Teams, Discord (not really, it still shows you that people you block say things, which defeats the point), so many of these garbage social platforms (… all Electron-based) don’t let you block people. Even Discourse doesn’t have a block feature. They all just assume that everyone gets along.
Maybe nows the time to advertise Mastodon some more. What’s he gonna do, block us?
So what you’re saying is, if I have a Twitter account and I start blocking many MANY people it costs Elon money? Interesting.
I’m extremely doubtful that there is any truth to that.
True, and even if there were it would be a massive pain and probably the best thing to do is not engage with twitter at all.
Alternatively, Elon just found out how many people are blocking him.
I think this is what really happened. Hurt his ego.
Fun fact: a block feature is required to be accepted by the Apple AppStore review process. So Twitter will disappear from Apple devices with this change.
Hmm. Hate to be a downer, but that sounds like there needs to be a way for the service itself to block (ban) users and material, not for users to be able to block other users. So I wouldn’t be too optimistic about Apple’s response…
Apple’s review process is inconsistent at best. I used to work for an iOS app and it took several years before they blocked our release for not having a report feature on products. Never had the ability to block users, despite the ability to DM people.
Plus, for an app the size of Twitter, Apple will likely ignore most rules that doesn’t lose them money.
Huh why ? This doesn’t make sense
There’s been a big effort to block anybody with a blue checkmark since any major story or viral post will have them automatically bumped up to the top of the replies. So, when the whiners started complaining, he started openly considering this.
He will end up “compromising”.
You can block people, but only people without blue check marks.
Wanna harass someone, wanna be a troll, subscribe to Twitter blue and you can’t be blocked…
Aren’t there different twitter tiers, too? Like, blue and gold? I wonder if you’ll only be allowed to block people in your tier and below, so that unpaid accounts can’t block anybody
IIRC the gold checkmarks are reserved for big corporate accounts that want it, and Twitter demands $1000/mo for that. Incredible.
Yeah, imagine how much value he’d be adding to the gold checkmark by restricting who could block them
Honestly, I don’t think that’s a problem. Twitter always got its money from people paying to show you stuff you didn’t want to see. So what if the ads are now tweets?
After he got boosted up to a level where anyone was only getting Elon in their feeds despite of the topic, a lot of people blocked his ass. So he is now getting rid of the block feature because everybody should be reading Elon’s all bangers, all the time.
there’s no way he doesn’t retain a true block feature for himself, of course
Surely there’d be a way for him to get someone to manually unblock his account if his ego’sbeen hit that much.
Though that being said that’d require staff to do so…
Sure, but then the person blocking wouldn’t necessarily know. I’m sure, for someone like him, there’s a joy in letting someone know they have no ability to get rid of him.
The article is a bit misleading. He wants to get rid of block for stronger mute as you can get around block by logging out.
The counter argument is that block is still useful because I block someone I want zero interaction with that person and people are too lazy to log out anyway so it kinda works in practice.
I’m not sure why is he stirring shit up. The block feature is on point with free speech philosophy he trying to push. If anything he should be making blocking etc. More powerful.
It’s never been really about free speech. It’s about elevating his speech. He believes he has a right to be listened to.
The further it goes the more it feels like this. It’s almost like conservatives don’t have a consistent philosophy about anything.
They do, though. It’s called Führerprinzip, or “the leader principle”.
The ideology of the Führerprinzip sees each organization as a hierarchy of leaders, where every leader (Führer, in German) has absolute responsibility in his own area, demands absolute obedience from those below him, and answers only to his superiors.
In this view, absolutely everything in society must be made authoritarian. Cooperative and democratic forms of social organization are considered corrosive to social order, and therefore are not allowed. Disrespecting your Führer — any of your Führers, at any level — must be punished, with penalties up to & including death.
If there is a social organization at any level — a family, a church, a workplace, a school, a local government — it must have a Führer to take responsibility for it, and everyone else involved must obey that Führer unquestioningly. Anything else is social chaos and probably Communism.
Children and wives obey the man of the house, who is wholly responsible for them. If the man of the house fails to enforce order (that is, compliance with his own Führers), then his own Führers must remove him from that responsibility. For instance, if a child deviates from the state governor’s dictates on gender, that child must be removed from his father’s home and placed into a more obedient home.
Workers obey bosses and business owners. Worker-owned enterprises are not allowed as they are obviously Communism. Unions are wrong, as they exist to second-guess the will of the business’s Führer for his workers. Moreover, it is the job of each business leader to bring his business into line with the dictates of higher Führers. Businesses that fail to obey the economic and cultural dictates of the Führer must be punished; see e.g. Disney.
Students obey teachers, who obey principals, who obey the state governor. If a teacher fails to demand that children fall in line with the directives passed down from the state governor, it is the duty of the principal to not only fire that teacher, but report them for prosecution.
Actually he wants to get rid of “blocking public posts”
deleted by creator
95% of the people or groups I would want to follow are not on Mastodon.
And frankly, the Fediverse isn’t as user-friendly. It is a but tougher when you have to choose an instance, as well as learn how to follow from other instances.
And frankly, the Fediverse isn’t as user-friendly
One component of a system being “user-friendly” is that it must not sabotage or undermine the user on behalf of the system’s proprietor.
Unfortunately, this means that proprietary systems rarely remain user-friendly forever, as most proprietors eventually want to sabotage the user in some way or another, and can rarely resist the temptation forever.
Mastodon has a long way to go in the onboarding experience. Most non-technical Twitter users simply will not engage with Mastodon in its current form.
Mastodon right now reminds me of email before web-based services. It’s not friendly enough to pull in the “normies”. It needs a Gmail.
@legion @TendieMaster69 Are you onboarding using the browser or using the official #Mastodon app? Onboarding online is a lot more understandable than onboarding in the app IIRC
deleted by creator
I think people are intimidated by step 3. Don’t ask me why, but for a certain type of web user, it’s an absolute deal breaker for some reason.
Yeah, having to actually choose a place to go was the main impediment for meto create a mastodon account in the first place. I kept stalling and putting it off, once I did it iwas easy enough. I think a lot of people don’t realise at first you can make other fedaration accounts with the same email and how easy it is.
Except I’m I was not a big twitter user in the first place, so I probably should have started with one of the niche feds first, like star trek or the art one, those would prompt me to interact more.
Tbh it’s capitalism. It teaches people to be afraid of choices, and to just take what the corporation is handing them. It’s… disconcerting how pervasive this kind of convenience culture has become and what kind of effect it’s having on people’s lives
Fedi doesn’t have an onboarding problem, people have a capitalism problem
that is an interesting point. when people are confronted with the choice of where to store their data, they just nope out
I don’t think it’s explicitly an issue with capitalism itself (although capitalism does use it to it’s advantage). Decision Paralysis is well-known, and i don’t see why abolishing capitalism would make it universally easier to make uninformed decisions
deleted by creator
The onboarding for Masterson is the best of all the fediverse sites but I still think the average internet user would get confused.
In the browser. It’s not confusing to me, but I’m a software developer. Millions of Twitter users aren’t going to make it past the server selection step. And many that do are going to be confused when they click to Follow someone and get a weird popup (because that someone is on a different Mastodon instance) instead of instantly following the person.
It’s nowhere close to a smooth enough experience for the lion’s share of Twitter users to transition over. I think people that are used to even slightly technical things vastly overestimate what the average end user is capable of handling. These are the people that ask for help to plug in an HDMI cable.
When people say getting onto mastodon is hard I assume they must mean setting up an instance because even if soapbox and rebased are easier to use, it’s still just signing up for a website.
I feel like the hurdles are kind of features. If your elderly parents can’t figure out then they can’t well flood it with trash. Reddit was the same way at first, oh so long ago. People weren’t used to the format and users without any tech savvy were dissuaded from entry. That turned into a libertarian foundation. This time around the generations that are tech savvy aren’t libertarians, they’re progressives. So we’re seeing a progressive foundation in the federation become established, and that’s going to narrate the future culture here, just like libertarians narrated the culture of reddit for so long.
Pick an instance and sign up. I don’t understand this take. Its literally the same as email and we all managed to figure that out when we were 9-11 years old.
Tell me you’ve never worked in tech support without telling me you’ve never worked in tech support.
People dont change habbits easily
The Mastodon culture just isn’t there yet. And it’s a bit of work to actually use. Plus “toots” sounds even more stupid than “tweets” and I’m not sure it will ever really take off.
Toots is no longer the official term, which has been replaced by “Posts”. Toots was always mostly a joke anyway
This is major news. I really hated that word.
To be honest, there was years of backlash to the “tweeting” and “googling” but both made it into the lexicon. However it’s smart of Mastodon to just move to a normal terminology
A normal terminology also helps when explaining the concept of federating with other platforms, imagine saying: “When you join a pod, you can then send toots that can be seen by people in different magazines, even if they’re on different platforms!”
I mixed the terminology of some 3 or 4 federated platforms to give an egregious example, but it helps drive the point. If we have a standard (the ActivePub) we can very well have a standard nomenclature for each feature.
This reminds me of the recent Behind the Bastards episodes where Robert reads the court filings of fired Twitter employees who continuously refer to themselves as Tweeps. At Mastadon they’d probably call themselves Tooters.
On one hand, Twitter lost 5% of its user base. It’s not a ton. On the other, it’s 15 million people give or take. That 5% is probably the sort I want to hang out with the most. Likewise for Reddit. 5% of Redditors are awesome and likely now Lemmy/KBin users. Those are the people I care about. It also allows for more quality connections when you have fewer people in your circle. Close connections are more valuable than more connections.
undefined> Close connections are more valuable than more connections.
It depends. Close connections of subject matter experts when discussing technical topics? Sure. When doing general research or looking for alternate solutions for something, you need mass. The difficulty of onboarding users into a federated environment hinders this.
I meant from social connections not technical experts. Frankly social media isn’t the place to get technical answers. It’s typically not great and most of the time is a hive mind mentality. Even on Reddit or stack exchange. I’ve seen decades of questions in my field and the answers with the most points are the ones that match the general hive mind not actual facts. It’s typically not worth it to get answers from social media.
Your experience may vary, but I found Reddit to have extremely helpful advice on a whole host of topics. Investing, home automation, and car repair/restoration just to name a few that I frequent.
It’s the ability to lose a question where thousands or hundreds of thousands of people will see and interact with your post. The answers aren’t always perfect, but you’re likely to get a wide swath of responses to review and glean info from.
I don’t need a doomscroller to keep me occupied. I want communities where people are engaged and connected. For that you need both close and a large “pool” of users.
deleted by creator
5% of the mdau. So it’s not a soft hit.
Yeah, all i want is it to be active enough. Having less users is a selling point to me. Using the internet way back in the day was the same way. You had to put effort in, and the people that are willing to put the effort in are less likely to trash the place.
I’ve built up a community of folk on there, not all of whom have moved to Mastodon. They’re the only people keeping me on there to be honest. I crosspost between the two for the time being
So he’s run out of engineers that know how to maintain the block feature?
QA: “I’m clicking the block button but it isn’t doing anything anymore!”
Twitter mgmt: “That’s ok, instead of fixing it we’ll just remove the button.”
Time to promote the hell out of Mastodon
Elon trying not to make the worst decisions possible challenge (Impossible)
Watching major social media websites actively kill themselves has been nothing if not an experience
🍿
Removed by mod
Whats going on with social media CEOs making dumb decisions these days…
Money. Tech was hot and trendy, so VCs were willing to continue pouring cash into a bottomless pit of unprofitable tech platforms, and now they’re not so everyone has to figure out how to make money off of the community. In a surprise to absolutely no one that’s been paying attention, companies filled with people that have never had to be profitable before are really bad at turning their company profitable and instead only manage to light large sections of it on fire. 🤷
At the top levels, they are rich and well-connected enough that they don’t have to worry about failing like regular people.
They can burn millions, billions of dollars and still get out with a fat paycheck, a pat on the back, and another CEO/exec job lined up by one of their many wealthy friends. Either that, or they are “forced” into retirement where they live large for their remaining lives.
I wish somebody would force me into a wealthy retirement…
Conservative money thinks that they can keep there opposition off balance by smashing social networks . Musk did not launch desatitis campaign out of nowhere.
Elon went early and often. He’s a trend setter.
Elon Musk is a gaping, farting anus. I pay as much attention to the sounds from a gaping, farting anus, as I do from him.
I really hope platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon take off. Just the idea of no single person with control over how we all communicate and share ideas gives me hope for the future.
sadly, Mastodon currently still is pretty centralised around a few very big instances. I hope the Fediverse gets more decentralised…
I think if one of them goes sour it’ll be easier for people migrate to another mastodon instance, and for that instance to grow. When Twitter goes bad, there’s not just a convenient alternative exactly-Twitter-but-run-by-different-people around the corner. But those small Mastodon instances could grow if they had an influx (to a point, and probably better so if the influx was gradual).
Edit: especially because federation means that the people who move to the new instance can still see and interact with everyone on the old instance, so they can’t be held to the old instance merely by the presence of their friends on that instance. Unless the old instance blocks federation with wherever people start moving to, but still.
What does it take to facilitate this? Do individuals have the ability to help it along, or does it take more resources? I’m new to this but would like to learn.
You just have to (encourage others to) register on an instance with less than, say, 1000 active users. I think that’s already taking care of most of the issue.
You just have to (encourage others to) register on an instance with less than, say, 2000 active users. I think that’s already taking care of most of the issue.
Yes and another thing that also doesn’t help is that Mastodon currently does not (yet) support migrating over previously posted content. So if you migrate from one server to another, your old profile does show “user migrated to X”, but I think people are a bit afraid to leave their old posts behind.
I mean, Mastodon had over 2.1 million monthly active users last time I checked, so does that count as having taken off?
2.1 million users is great, but Twitter is still far more popular.
In the process of taking off at best. That’s nothing compared to Twitter right now.
Elongated Muskrat has discovered just how many accounts are blocking him. His ego can’t take that. His FrEeSpEeCh must be heard
My account isn’t blocking him.
At least, not since I deleted it. And stopped visiting Twitter.
Oh no please, not the nicknames. Can we leave them?
Nothing makes me cringe harder than the childish nicknames everybody keeps coming up with. Elongated Muskrat isn’t funny or offensive.
Calling his sycophants Muskrats is appropriate though.
I’m skeptical of this, maybe it’s because he’s worried his fascist followers are slowly falling into an echo chamber cause anyone with more than a few braincells blocks them
