Twitter is not a utility. We really need to stop treating techbro services like utilities. If we feel they actually are utilities, the government can step in and make that claim and the appropriate changes.
You would be shocked to know how many people use TikTok as a search engine
I’m not on tiktok, but I’ll admit to using YouTube as a search engine a lot. Also googling something and immediately hitting the video tab before reading any of the results.
You video guys work different.
I must be a dinosaur because for most things I am looking up I want concise textual information. I’ll look for videos to explain larger complicated concepts
If it’s something like taking apart hardware, videos are great because there are a lot of little details that it’s hard to capture in even a picture.
Sure, video has it’s place. I was just wondering that some people get their info primarily from video. Guess it’s something with abstraction vs. imagination.
I only find videos useful if I’m trying to figure out something that’s procedural. Seeing the procedures and steps done in front of me helps me grasp the concept much faster than text.
For just information though, text is golden and video is a waste of time.
i hate it, but i just cant find decent written resulta anymore outside of reddit and such
Depends on field. Some
methmath and programming stuff exists only in PDF. Try find videos on Bounding Interval Hierarchy. At least there are decent videos on BSP treesPDFs break my brain. It’s 2024. Unless you truly intend for something to be primarily and only read in print why use PDF? And I know everybody is able to host HTML because usually everyone is grabbing these PDFs from a webpage.
Edit: down voters, convince me on valid uses of PDFs for things that aren’t meant to be printed. At least list some. I’m aware this is an extreme opinion. It’s one I’ve thought about a lot, but I just can’t think of any. For things that are meant to be printed then I agree they’re the best. Everything else I think HTML is better for because it can be resized arbitrarily and isn’t bound to a specific layout. Also copying text from PDFs is bonkers.
Unless you want to force readers into reading in browser, you should use PDF.
That’s how I use Bing. 😻
I liken using groogle for finding factual information to using the yellowpages for doing the same. YT isn’t much better but it suffers many of the conflicts of interest traditional media outlets also had, depending on the corporation. In this case the almighty algorithm is the conflict of interest, though there are clever content creators out there making some good stuff, they’ll always be beholden to the owners of the platform and the true customers - the advertisers. As an advertising platform which can direct punters to actual long form content directly supported by watchers via patreon or similar, I understand why it is used : the sheer numbers using it.
I just ask chatGPT…
Why? All it’s going to do is output some words that have a statistical correlation to your input words
Well, that is mostly what I need and it summarises the search results as well.
Of course, you have to apply your critical thinking skills, but you gotta do that always everywhere. Normal humans talk as much trash as LLMs do, in my experience.
If it’s a private company that con do what it wants, like blocking political opponents, it should not be under safe harbor protections.
That’s the point in yelling about this. If Elon wants a private forum for him and his mates, he should also be fully responsible when his mates posts child porn on his servers.
Which safe harbor protections?
Section 230 of the CDA
And the EFF has a primer on Section 230, and several opinion pieces about why nerfing 230 would be a terrible idea:
Wanna Make Big Tech Monopolies Even Worse? Kill Section 230 by Cory Doctorow
Holy Unholy, this is written by The Enshittification Guy!
Show a little repsect, “The Enshittification Guy” is Cory Doctorow a very well known author and activist.
I know, but he is most famous for his talk on enshittification.
The EU has declared Twitter and a few others to be gate-keepers and they will now be held to a higher standard. But I don’t think the EU is going to use this power to save US democracy.
I disagree. We should nationalize it.
Imagine trying winning chess when the board itself plays against you. Twitter/X must be dropped immediately, it’s a censorship-propaganda machine which is now only works for those who control it.
Wasn’t that the case when progressives controlled it? Either way, fk X and all other social media services.
Jack Dorsey was a progressive?
Anything left of “pretend minorities don’t exist” is progressive to certain people.
Dunno, but echoes of it were sounding like Tumblr 2.0
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: I ‘fully admit’ our bias is ‘more left-leaning’
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said on Saturday that he “fully admit[s]” Twitter employees share a largely left-leaning bias after facing accusations that conservatives are discriminated against on the social media platform.
In an interview that aired Saturday on CNN, Dorsey said his company has a responsibility to be open about its political viewpoints, but to operate without bias when applying content policies to users.
”We need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is … is more left-leaning,” Dorsey says.
Ah.
So you’re a “Libs of TikTok” guy. Conservatives call themselves Liberal and you believe them.
Jack Dorsey is Libertarian, which is Republican-leaning.
lol… Libertarians are classical liberals. They don’t align to a specific side.
Libertarians nominated a degenerate Democrat.
And why the FK are we talking about Jack anyway? I said Twitter was controlled by progressives… as in the majority of the org were leftists operating biasedly against their opposition.
Defending the Libs of TikTok isn’t the flex you think it is.
I’m only responding in the hopes you recognize this eventually and grow a bit of self-reflection over this situation. Good luck man.
I support anyone and everyone that exposes any and all facets of evil. So should you and any other sane human being.
Free speech and so on.
If only the federal government could implement some sort of server that would allow them to self-host social media for officials and prominent candidates. I wish there were some well-known and tested service that other governments were using and they could just implement in the USA.
Sounds impossible! Does this technology even exist???
If only there was some
SovietUnion with their own mastodonIf they build it, will anyone come? Or does private social media only work because the user base is already scrolling endlessly there?
@XeroxCool welcome to fediverse. I’m replying to you from mastodon.
I’m using motion controls!
I’m using the Power Glove!
It’s so bad.
Posted multiple times because replication was slow. Oops.
Also now I’m posting from lemm.ee
if they build it, the press will go there and report on what’s posted there
Yeah wouldn’t be bad. Could be an official source to cite.
This kind of event is precisely what drives things like social media adoption. If Harris and the DNC organized an actual messaging campaign and took advantage of this energy to promote Twitter alternatives, a lot of people would join.
Newsies will go there for the announcements. That’s the wedge that keeps growing.
Not all growth strategies are just having the bandwagon.
I mean, it wouldn’t stop them from continuing to post to Xitter. They can do both!
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
I don’t think legally the Federal Government is allowed to do that. Maybe if the service is available to everyone. Now that option would be pretty cool. I’m fine with nationalized federated social media hosts.
That sounds pretty shakey. Federal employees have their own email addresses, but you can’t just go ask for a .gov email address, you have to get a job with the government for one. The federal government has plenty of places that only some are allowed to post to. Now, if they were to say, only allow certain people to have accounts with no apperent rhyme or reason that would be grounds for a discrimination lawsuit, but they could simply say “any verified current or former federal elected official, federal department head, or state governor is allowed an account” and expand or shrink the scope as needed. The fediverse honestly makes that so much cleaner than something they host themselves with all of the nuances of what is and isn’t federated, the government could simply configure the federation to meet their legal and liability needs while users can stream in from any fediverse instance
If they’re using it for campaigning, I think it’d have to be written as “… or any party nominee” or “… or anyone running for elected office.”
But yeah, the fediverse would be perfect for it.
are you allowed to post on whitehouse.gov?
Not for campaign related activity.
Oh noooo…
Stop using fucking Twitter
Can’t believe Biden let the world know his decision first on Twitter, even before the White house Press office.
Had to let the Republicans know first, so they didn’t cry “fake news” for a week.
Sigh. Not surprised… given that Musk is a hypocrite on free speech completely. It’s getting wild. I use this place now because after years of no issues… suddenly I’m shadow banned on Reddit. Instead of getting mad I just left. Screw those who would stifle others but pretend to believe the opposite.
Welcome to Lemmy!
Thank you, much appreciated
Reddit is far-right garbage run by radicals. Some instances on Lemmy are far-left garbage run by radicals, but you can route around them.
You are definitely not alone. You are in good company here. Welcome aboard!
Yet another reason to ditch that platform.
do the entire world a favor and delete twitter already
What are these fucking people doing on Twitter anyway? Why they hanging out with the Nazis? You’re still on Twitter this point I have some healthy suspicions about your character.
People go where they think the people are. X is still the closest thing to Twitter since Elon came along. I deleted my account, but feel like I’m in the minority.
You know I once read this really amazing book called They Thought They Were Free. It was written by a journalist right after World War II who went to Germany and talked to normal Germans just German citizens. About how they allowed Nazis to take over how they lived in a Nazi Society how they were okay with it how they kind of joined in on it. A lot of the things they said being said in this thread. It’s all the same fucking logic.
If they choose to support Twitter, they must expect to take the consequences. It’s a known cess pit. Being active on a centralised network does harm. You can’t grizzle after drawing innocent people in to such a bad place.
They are on Twitter because nothing has displaced Twitter for what it is. That’s tricky because people follow the content, so the content generators, the heavy hitters, have to choose en masse to go somewhere else.
I think that’s what that Dulles brother said about why he kept doing business with the Nazis even into the 1940s. Even when the rest of the heads of his business said you should stop doing this we don’t need to be invested with the Nazis they just invaded Poland he said no money still there I want to hang out with Nazis.
Cuz here’s the thing if everyone who wasn’t one left that site it wouldn’t be a problem anymore, a different site would be used.
I’m on Twitter because all the OSINT people who track the invasion/war in Ukraine basically only use Twitter. I like following OSINT info to get a real perspective on what’s going on.
I’d like in on that perspective but I’m not going to twitter for anyone. Shit is toxic and stupid.
On Ukraine, got any non twitter suggestions for perspective? Also, not familiar with OSINT. Care to enlighten me? Open source intel tools?
Understandable, I don’t know of anyone off of Twitter but maybe some of the people I follow are on Mastodon. I’ll try and find out sometime and get back if they are.
And yea pretty much, just stands for open source intelligence, people just use publicly available data (mostly drone videos, and paid satellite imagery) to analyze progress from both parties in the conflict giving a real, semi live perspective on advances on the ground, what kind of equipment and quantity of that equipment that have been destroyed.
This site by oryx is the main one I know of that tracks destroyed Russian equipment that’s confirmed through imagery, so the numbers are likely fairly lower than reality, and the destruction numbers are still staggering.
Ops I see someone below already linked oryx and some other good sources!
On Ukraine, got any non twitter suggestions for perspective?
- Suchomimus does a good job covering OSINT in the Russo-Ukraine War; attacks, geolocation, battle damage assessment, etc.
- Oryx catalogues every pictured Russian loss. They are up to 3,200 tanks, 4,300 IFVs of Russian loses already. Every single one has a picture. Click on a few, scroll and scroll and scroll.
- Right here on Lemmy, the !ukraine@sopuli.xyz and !combatvideos@sh.itjust.works communities get quite a bit of Russo-Ukraine war coverage.
not familiar with OSINT
Exactly what you said! Open Source INTelegence. Basically people taking publicly available data and using it to confirm attacks. Things like NASA FIRMS data can be used to verify where fires are; and when combined with videos of a fire in the direction of an airfield, for example, can be used to confirm that yes, on this specific date, these parts of an airfield are on fire.
Maybe it would behoove you to remind those people that they’re on a website run by someone who has a material and vested interest in the destruction of Ukraine. That they should change to another website.
Unfortunately Twitter is the absolute best source for the most up to date breaking sports news and nothing that I’m aware of comes close.
Porn
If you can’t porn from Pornhub because of silly age verification laws. Twitter is the next best place, I guess?
Not all parts of twitter is chock full of Nazis. The parts I follow probably won’t ever move over to Mastodon, so I’m stuck with Twitter. The good thing is that part barely has any Nazis.
Good job on brushing everyone on Twitter with the same broad stroke, though. Really shows how progressive you can be.
Removed by mod
It’s a website that purposely and specifically endorses Nazis. Yes you are tainted by association.
And this is a site run by developers that purposely and specifically endorses Tankies, yet it’s still stupid to call everyone on this site a Tankie.
That’s what I think of anyone who hangs out with Nazis. Why you doing that? Why you hanging out with Nazis?
Because we don’t, we kick them out of the circle, that’s why there’s few of them amongst those I follow. The fact that you can’t comprehend such a simple concept is the problem.
And this is a site run by developers that purposely and specifically endorses Tankies, yet it’s still stupid to call everyone on this site a Tankie.
The software is partially written by Tankies, but most instances aren’t run by Tankies. Since it is free & open source software under the AGPLv3, anyone can freely use it. Lemmy also uses ActivityPub, an open standard, and is fully compatible with other Fediverse software like Kbin/Mbin and Piefed. Using lemmy.ml or other instances means that you’re associated with Tankies, but using Lemmy the FOSS software doesn’t. Since Twitter is proprietary, the only option is using twitter.com which is run by a Nazi and actively supports Nazis.
The main dev is a Tankie, so not just partially written. And you’re missing the point. Even on lemmy.ml there are plenty of non-Tankies. There are reasons for people to be there other than to support the Tankie devs. In the same vein, there are plenty of reason for people to be on Twitter other than to support the Nazis.
Being this pedantic in an effort to defend broad brushing groups of people together when they don’t have that much in common is, frankly, pathetic.
Removed by mod
Do…you not know how to read? Now that explains things.
Removed by mod
No, I meant that amongst the community that I follow, there are few Nazis. At the end of the day, you cannot be sure that there are 0 Nazis in any community that you follow, that’s just unrealistic.
You’re just being pedantic and making so much mental gymnastics in order to call me a Nazi. That shows just how fucked up your mindset is. You’re pretty much trying to demonize a group of people using broken logic to justify your hate. Why are you trying to emulate the Nazi thought process?
The good thing is that part barely has any Nazis.
What was that saying about letting a few nazis into your bar as long as they stay on the side and don’t cause trouble?
We don’t let them into our bar, that’s why the part has so few Nazis. The Nazis are running rampant in other parts of the site, but not on the part that I frequent, from my observation at least. That’s why it’s stupid to group everyone using Twitter as Nazi adjacent.
Maybe you’re just not identifying them as Nazis? What part do you hang out on where there aren’t insane propagandists and bots?
Does a Nazi infested group calls out whenever people is being racist or openly makes fun of Elon Musk?
I’m sure you can always just argue that they are being Nazis secretly or something, but to call out a group of people to be suspicious of being a Nazi, I would prefer if you have more proof than just conjecture.
Good. They should abandon twitter and all other racist, misogynist, transphobic, xenophobic, homophobic bigoted platforms. I hope they have a bad time there.
Political parties should host their own mastodon instances, and give their members accounts. Companies should do the same. It removes all the problems of imitation because the organisation stands as guarantor that the account is the official one.
That’s actually a pretty good idea
I’m not sure on the capabilities of Mastodon. But companies will never go for this if Mastodon doesn’t support saml or active directory (or other Auth systems). It needs to integrate with their enterprise tools.
But companies will never go for this if Mastodon doesn’t support saml or active directory (or other Auth systems). It needs to integrate with their enterprise tools.
I think you are confusing server-server protocol and client-server protocol.
I’m not sure how that applies here.
I am talking about enterprises being able to leverage their current infrastructure to manage their users in Mastodon from a central location, Like AD. Rather than have to manage local accounts.
I am not talking about activitypub in anyway.
I’m talking about that too. Mastodon should work just fine with SSO.
There are several mastodon servers that have different feature sets. What you’re saying is like “email must support AD”. Well some email server might do that and another wouldn’t.
I tend to feel the same but at the same time, the shadowy figures involved there would love it to see the ratio of extremist increase. An exodus of more sane members might play straight into their hands.
That said, I can’t understand why anyone without an official state role is still on that platform.
This reminds me that someone set up a donation link via actblue where donations via that link come with the message that she and her campaign should set up their own mastodon server.
They are up to $40,000 as I type this.
So if you were thinking of donating anyway, you can go through here to point that money to a “cause” you want her to consider. May not happen, but at least we might get it on their radar.
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/mastodon-for-harris
The originator of this started with this Masto post:
Share this on !fediverse, this is a very good idea
This has the opportunity to be a great battle.
Harris, backed by Mastodon users vs Trump, backed by Twitter bots.
Isn’t Truth Social essentially just out-of-the-box Mastodon?
Yeah he couldn’t come up with his own software so they just spun up a Mastodon instance and passed it off as their own product.
Nice, I did it through this portal. Thanks for sharing.
The VP having control over the platform they announce things?
What a novel idea /s
So dumb how much power twitter got for politics. Fediverse for life!
Why don’t they use mastodon also?
:(
(Note, Nov ‘23)
It pisses me off how twitter went to fuck. People cried that we need something not owned by some rich cunt. We told everyone to join mastodon so that wouldn’t happen again. What did people do? Wait for another rich cunt (mark suckerberg) to start a clone and the original creator of twitter to make another one and join that…
People are dumb as shit… I’m sick of it.
Yeah, I don’t get it.
Kind of unrelated, but a parallel I experienced recently.
Yesterday I was annoyed by SplitWise. We had a small trip over the weekend and were adding expenses to it, and it turns out that there’s now a limit to how many entries you can put in per day. Even with ads. So we decided to find another platform, and a friend suggested another closed product which is probably gonna get as shitty as SplitWise soon. Anyway, I was able to convince them to use Spliit instead. If the hosted service goes to shit, at least I can self host it and keep all the data.
Glad you were able to convince them :) I love self hosting stuff. I like having control.
What I’m saying is that on twitter they could promote the mastodon account
Musk started removing links and even references to Mastodon from Twitter.
If a high profile politician (particularly one Elon disagrees with) promoted Mastodon, they’d have an account ban lickety split.
…but these people just use it as a way of talking to the media. As long as people of power and influence shift, so will the press, and then so will everyone else.
Home many times do you hear “Trump, on his platform truth.social, said…”? They’ve gone there because he’s gone there.
Makes me curious if you get more attention on mastodon though. Like if I pitched something on Lemmy there’s a good chance I get the same number of eye balls compared to Reddit, not counting ads. (Although if Kamala posted about Linux and/or Star Trek that’s front page, no ad money needed! Lol)
in november of 23, i had a client that let me schedule mastodon posts. this was not made by someone who uses mastodon.
Nice graphic! But this data seems wildly out of date. For example, LinkedIn has over 1 billion users. Unless this is referring to weekly active users or something, but the row just says “users”.
deleted by creator
We’re not doing a research paper. We’re commenting on a internet post. Calm down.
But wikipedia has sources on the bottom of an article so you can verify things?
Yeah but because Wikipedia articles, to an extent, ephemeral it is good practise to use the sources at the bottom of the article as your source, rather than the Wikipedia article itself. It makes finding the origin of the information easier.
If it is something more permanent like a paper or a published article, then that doesn’t suffer from the same issues
Found my English teacher
You can argue the veracity of looking the user count of the platforms on wikipedia, but it is a source.
The EU has an instance
It’s not about the campaigns not using Mastodon, it is about the voters. They are on Twitter still so that is where the campaign wants to meet them.
Mastodon needs to be more widely known for that to be a realistic option.
I used to think “Elon Musk” was some type of fancy French perfume. I miss those days.
It still could be!
Viva la revolution?
Yeah, I have a problem too! No, wait. It’s because I don’t have an X/Twitter/whatever account.
Who would have guessed that a social media platform owned by an apartheid-loving fascist would trend conservative?
