It was definitely a good move.
Maybe we need regional microblogging services so people would be incentivized to use them, maybe China was right all along
I hate these socials. While some posts here and there are interesting, I'll still have to read people's thoughts on politics, what they ate for lunch or how was their vacation in Vietnam. I wish you could only read the authors you follow on the topics you care, but the algorithms don't work like that, and they post about anything.
On the other hand, more in-topic focused boards like HN and Reddit, value short-term visibility over depth. Sure, at least you're only discussing one topic at a time, but how much insights or reflections can you have when discussions die in 24 hours?
Say what you want, but good old vBulletin-like forums are peak internet discussions.
Like how in the world can you compete for insightful-deep topic discussions with something like a plain old forum?
Where in the world can you find so much information, e.g. about the Mercedes W211 E class?
https://mbworld.org/forums/e-class-w211-20/
I with there were places to discuss, e.g., a specific technology (sometimes github issues are a surrogate), or software design philosophy in general (the mail group of Jon Ousterhout is again, just a surrogate).
But these places just don't exist.
Even more at work, companies would benefit from having long term discussions and threads about product, technologies, etc. Instead we spreading (and forgetting) the same information over and over with teams, slack, jira, issues, conflunce, sync-calls. ugh
Also stopped using Twitter/X. Immediate mental health++. I was afraid I was losing access to the "pulse" of ML/AI, but the opposite actually happened when I replaced a Twitter feed of shallow AI takes with Huggingface's Daily Papers email list [1].
More papers read, less shallow takes
Nonetheless, insofar as people who post content I want to read on Twitter, or the ActivityPub ecosystem, or the AT protocol ecosystem, I'll do my best to read it where it's posted. The ActivityPub ecosystem has serious flaws and so does AT proto, but they're at least free software projects that people can hack on to try to make them better (although of course in any kind of distributed system, the hard part isn't making your changes it's getting a critical mass of other nodes to agree to them)
I think the bar analogy lacks some important nuance. Not participating on the platform is one thing but drawing a distinction between being informed and support for the platform needs a little more thought here.
To continue the analogy, I need not go to a Nazi bar to read the headlines of the local newspaper to see what the latest propaganda is.
95% of it is garbage, but as a member of a targeted class of people I like to see what angles they are coming for us from way ahead of time.
I quit my Twitter account pretty much around the time Musk took it over (he became a more of a looney around the time he had contact with Putin in end of 2022), haven't looked back. I added the ASNs to my firewall, this was before they went with Cloudflare. There are some proxies which allow you to quote from there, but a lot of people are now dual stack (e.g. Twitter + BlueSky or Twitter + Mastodon). So for example following the latest concerning Ukraine is still very much possible without Twitter.
From what I heard, it is pretty much 4chan level nowadays.
I still use RSS and Mastodon.
I follow a few game development companies, quite a few language developers (go, rescript, etc), a few news reporters (left and right), an account that posts old maps, Dionne Warwick (no idea why). That's it. What's with all the drama???
There's also this: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/xcancelcom-redirect...
outside2344•1w ago