Elon Musk’s latest changes for X are driving more users away – not exactly a surprise, granted – and many of them are flocking to rival social media outlet Bluesky. So many made the switch, in fact, it led to Bluesky briefly going down due to the volume of incoming new users.
The central move initiated by X that made the headlines for driving migration away from Musk’s platform is a change to the way the ‘Block’ button works. This was actually announced back in September, but is officially being implemented now (well, it’ll be in place ‘soon’ we’re told).
It means that going forward, X users who you have blocked will still be able to view your (public) posts – though they won’t be able to engage with them in any way (from replies to liking and so forth).
This is problematic for obvious reasons, in terms of enabling stalkers and trolls who will still be able to view the posts of an account that has blocked them, when previously this wasn’t the case. In the past, blocking meant that the blocked user couldn’t see any posts (or anything at all, save for a message telling them that they’ve been blocked), but soon, this will change.
Bluesky posted to say it had in excess of 100,000 new users inside 12 hours following the announcement by X, after the rival network highlighted the fact that its block function stops those who are blocked from viewing any posts.
In an update, Bluesky noted that it has now gained half a million new users in the past day.
There’s another reason that some folks are rapidly exiting from X stage left (and right, and indeed center, clambering over the audience, it would seem), and that’s a change to X’s privacy policy.
As TechCrunch reports, the new policy includes an update that allows third-party collaborators to use content on X to train their AI models – unless the user opts out. This is a notable extension of the reach of AI training on X, which has so far only been used to train Musk’s own Grok AI (unless users opt out, again).
So let’s say on Twitter, someone blocks me and I can’t read their post. Can’t I just log out and read their post that way? I don’t have a Twitter account, so I’ve never seen a blocked link before.
X is authwalled
I can see this random tweet from Taylor Swift just fine in incognito mode. I can’t look at replies but I can see her posts.
https://x.com/taylorswift13/status/1781171613058097619
People on Lemmy link to tweets all the time and I can navigate and read them. Not sure what you mean then that it’s authwalled. It’s an annoying experience and it bugs me every time I visit to make an account or log in, but I can see them.
You can see a tweet, but not list of her tweets, iirc.
You can view some profiles (authwall for others) and some show all content (tried it out with bbc and forbes), others drop relatively recent content while some others only show ancient content from a year or more ago.
The latter two were when I tried opening the twitter pages for some smaller podcasts I follow.
Maybe it just authwalls shared IPs like Google does (eg YouTube)
Someone could just open another account with a new mail address. Blocking doesn’t help much against stalkers as long as your posts are public.
Yup, that’s exactly right. On Lemmy you don’t even have to log out, blocking someone simply means you can’t see their posts. If you don’t want a harasser or stalker to see something, and you post it publicly, you’re an idiot.
And this is the way it should be… You shouldn’t be able to silence someone from responding to stuff you say publicly by blocking them.
How do we know this bluesky isn’t just the same shit run by different assholes?
We can’t, but at least there is a chance it is not.
With Xitter, we know for certain.
I’ve been on the platform for about a year, it’s more community driven than other sites.
we already know bluesky is run by former twitter assholes. but it’s the same with everything. people disappointed in new facebook policies move to band…
there are better alternatives, guaranteed not to turn into a heap of shit because of designed safeguards - but people don’t like those things; they always opt for the devil they already know.
Although it also helps that places like BlueSky have less of a barrier to entry.
Alternatives like Mastodon are a bit more confusing, compared to a centralised site, where everything is linked in through the one interface.
We know that it is run by the same assholes. Bluesky is VC backed and Twitter was also. There is no way that Bluesky won’t go the same route as every other VC backed social network. Sometime in the future they will start to meddle with your feed to push ads and sell your data to everyone.
This makes me wonder so hard why people don’t switch to Mastodon instead. Like… You have literally seen this before! Why are you doing it again?
We don’t. It probably is. Mastodon is the way, but they need to fix a few things themselves.
How do we know mastadon isn’t just owned by Musk too?
It can’t be.
Because it’s federated and FOSS.
Dude, that’s gonna be one hell of a racist AI just based on the dataset it’s gonna receive
This is why when we give vacuum robots AI powers, they run around your house shouting racist pejoratives
Welcome to the future
It’s gonna train the little robot dog, which they’re gonna put a gun on. And drones. It’s gonna train drones, he’ll sell it to anyone who’ll buy the data.
he’ll sell it to anyone who’ll buy the data.
And if they will not buy it musk will sue them until they buy it.
I just go where the japanese artists go, and they are going to either blue sky or misskey, mostly blue sky since it has a bigger reach, misskey closed account creation for outsiders, and the way mastodon works I bet it’s defederated from a lot of the popular instances like baraag.
Misskey is like mastodon so you can just go to another misskey instance.
But if you’re talking about the misskey.io instance, it’s not that defederated from my experience (the 3 instances I’m on aren’t defederated from it).
The instance simply follows Japanese law so whatever Japan allows they allow and whatever Japan forbids they forbid (which is why censoring genitals is also mandatory in that instance lol). It’s not like it’s some nazi cesspool or anything like that.
I don’t know how to see how much an instance is defederated, I just concluded it must be in the same rate of baraag because both misskey.io and it allows loli art. I know that baraag is on some default block list for administrators for example.
Baraag is way more permissive than misskey.io and it gained a pretty bad reputation in the past because of that, plus it essentially advertises itself as a safe haven for lolicon art and primarily focuses on that, so that’s why it’s on many block lists.
misskey.io is just a generalist Japanese instance (which is why many Japanese artists easily hop on it). It’s also the biggest misskey instance and is run by the main developer, so it’s usually not blocked by default because most people use it.
Defederating from misskey.io would be like defederating from mastodon.social. Some will do it but it’s not the default stance afaik.
Japan is weird as fuck. I just saw a Japanese disc store collaborate with an incest sleep rape game.
Wait this whole article just baselessly assumes that 1 new bluesky account = 1 person leaving twitter. That is so obviously unrealistic. Sure some people were probably curious and wanted to check out something new but that doesn’t mean they will immediately switch platforms.
You can’t just make fun of Those Guys for endlessly believing fake bullshit while unquestionably parroting this garbage.
Getting a 100000 new users when Twitter loses roughly the same amount is a pretty significant correlation.
Twitter is for narcissists, and when they say Mastodon is not as good as twitter they really mean that there’s not as many people watching them as on Twitter. So Bluesky gaining 500,000 new accounts could help in making it “better”.
Mastodon is still pretty rough around the edges. Especially for the regular Twitter Instagram crowd.
What’s rough about it? I’ve never been a twitter guy so can’t really compare, but I have a Mastodon account that I pop into periodically, and it works fine.
The headline directly says half a million users left twatter. As far as I can tell that is literally a lie.
ive been enjoying bluesky more than twitter. i just wish more bug accounts would migrate. i post on both platforms with a script that i wrote and my engagement/followers ratio is far higher
Bug accounts, or big? Bug as in programming?
no like giant bugs
I tried Bluesky but just couldn’t get into it. Same with Mastodon. I like Lemmy because long-form posts/comments are more interesting to me. I’m liking Threads, too.
I like the long form posts and I also find those sort of sites way too fast-moving to keep up with.
Maybe it’s because I’m an old man who grew up on BBSes, but forums are much more my speed.
What would you say makes threads better than the other mikroblogging services?
I think one of the main reasons is that a lot of tech people on Twitter ended up on there. Mastodon originally filled that spot for me, but I found that a bunch of people that moved from Twitter to Mastodon ended up abandoning their accounts (or very rarely posting) a few months later.
It’s also probably the largest Fediverse instance, as users can opt in to sharing their posts to the Fediverse.
I still don’t use it often, though. I don’t spend a lot of time on any social networks (or similar services) any more.
Mastodon has shitty clients, the servers are slow and the communication across them is buggy. some things are still just broken.
typically I’ll open the android client and stare for 15 seconds at a spinning “wait” symbol, and then I’ll close it and not look at it for the rest of the day.
maybe it’s the instance that I’m on? or maybe it’s something else.
Yes, that might be your instance? I never had that problem. And I also think there are now some very good clients
Can you suggest a few.
Just helpful to remember, as all this horseshit persists, Bluesky is Jack Dorsey. Dorsey is former head of Twitter and musk’s good buddy.
It’s all a losing proposition, whatever direction you move - except if you move… Away.
im not sure people wont consider mastodon tbh.
They should
i know. but its our responsability to understand why the corporate shitty options are always preferred by the layman public.
Because we are extremely simple and self obsessed animals in the whole. At the intersection of those two things, we regularly conflate base familiarity with earned trust. A bit of a narcissistic drive to tell ourselves that… if WE know about something, it MUST be good, otherwise we wouldn’t have taken the time to first learn about it!
It’s why your town is currently infested with hands-free signs in every public space. It’s also why incumbents have such large advantages in elections and why dead/convicted politicians (or Last-name sharing family members of those politicians) are often elected after the fact.
what
He left in May.
He left the board. As a “public benefit organization” it’s still a for-profit company and he still owns stock.
But he’s left seemingly under a cloud, so unless the leadership changes I doubt he’s influencing decision making.
Let’s be honest these social media platforms will be a rinse and repeat. Just enjoy it whilst it lasts. Move on when the ownership go full Elon.
Jack Dorky got literally laughed off the platform.
So he’s completely removed from anything to do with that company and isn’t inherently woven into the DNA as it’s very recent founder?
Mike Masnick is also been added to the bluesky board which gives me some faith Bluesky will less of a Elon / Dorsey vibe
I dunno. I’d say it’s more important to see what exactly he’s doing and what Bluesky is.
Right now Bluesky is really good. So until it turns bad I’m sticking to it.
I hate Twitter, but I’m getting to the point where I want it to get better because if bluesky gets many more members we’re just gonna have Twitter again.
One thing I liked about the Muskification of Twitter was the scattering.
Idiots users just recreating conditions that created their misery in the first place. Freedom doesn’t happen from the grace of some cult leader and their slightly less immediately hostile app
What sets it apart is that on Bluesky you can create your own algorithm. You can also share this algorithm, if you want, so others can subscribe to it. This means you see only what you want to see, and not what some corporate algorithm wants to see to maximise some kind of engagement.
Moreover, Bluesky is also its own federation. There aren’t many who choose to do so, but you can connect to Bluesky using your own domain, which you have complet control over.
Ok, thanks ! Looks like I was wrong then, I see it is open source under MIT license Frankly I assumed it was another tech bro blitzscale project since it was from Rasputin himself There even is a 3rd party client so possibly it won’t be a open source but problematic, like Signal
Neoliberal guano website is better than Nazi guano website
How does this blocking thing make sense?
Either the profile is public, which means you can still open it on another account, or it’s private, which means no one can see it anyways if they’re not an accepted follower.
I don’t see how anything changes from Musk’s change…
Is 500,000 actually a lot? Honest question, my sense of scale with these things is shaky.
For Twitter? No
For Bsky? Yes
While anything that gets people off Twitter is good, I’m sorely unimpressed by those artists who “had to” to patronize the racist transphobic neo-Nazi hellhole “because my audience is there”… until Musk’s policies happened to offend their own personal interests, by requiring training for their AI. Countless models trained on all public images already exist, jumping ship won’t prevent their work from being scraped elsewhere, and frankly, any one image or even portfolio will contribute virtually nothing to the result, so quitting in protest is largely symbolic. But so many peoples drew the line at that, and not at Musk making “cis” a slur, or protecting child pornographers, or boosting white supremacist supremacy theories. It’s really disappointing to see.
This is a lesson in humanity. Artists can be pieces of shit too and to be an artist, so committed to oneself and one’s thoughts is to be to some extent - narcissistic, and in the end they look out for self interest first, and it’s only that the AI portion of this threatens their self-interest do they become concerned. #NotAll, ofc.
Like I said before, solidarity of the scorpion with the turtle.
Yeah this is pretty much how I feel.
I loathe musk, and despise twitter, and I’m happy about anything they will be unhappy about.
That said, I don’t have a lot of respect for anyone who is still there. Journalists, politicians, anyone who has to be there for their job… I still just don’t have a lot of respect for them.
That’s how blocking and banning on the internet has always worked. When you block someone they just can’t reply to you. The way it was until now is just weird. Why would blocking an account prevent them from viewing your public posts!? “Stalkers” can always just make another account. I am glad they are actually fixing blocking on Twitter. g
I’m wondering the same thing. I never really used Twitter, couldn’t people just stalk without being logged in? Or was this to weed out the least motivated stalkers?
You used to. Not anymore. Musk made it so that if you try to view somebody’s profile, and you aren’t logged in, you don’t see anything except for a big box asking you to log in.
Also, it’s not so much about stalking per se, but being able to reshare posts (and thus bully) their targets. The way X is right now, they’d have to have a direct link to the post in question and then screenshot it.
couldn’t people just stalk without being logged in?
Yes, you can. That’s why it was even dumber. It’s super weird to me that anyone could be mad about this.
No one on Lemmy is upset about this. It only provides them an opportunity to increase their hate boner for Musk.
I created a filter to block all posts with “Elon Musk” in the title. It appears I have some updates to make.
There a lot of reasons to hate Elon. He’s making new reasons every day lately.
A lot of people hate him for completely bs reasons like this though and then come off as hating anything he does just for the sake of hating him.
Do they drift back though. Bigger accounts seems to struggle to kick the Twitter high .
lol
Just like a real girlfriend, but better. Apart from you having absolutely no sex life and apart from the fact that it has absolutely no emotional attachment or attraction to you whatsoever. And it will also never do anything like buy you dinner or a birthday present. Enjoy throwing money at your robot that you can’t even fuck like a fleshlight.
No, they can sync with toys like fleshlights now.
Fair enough, but I wouldn’t call that having a sex life unless you’re really into fucking tubes and aren’t just using it as a vagina substitute.
Lol, that’s probably 30% of real people still using it
