Science/Techno Babble Random, Random

[Suliso]

If you don't want to drive a car, don't buy a car. See how easy that is?

I wish it was so easy. In many places driving is a must whether you want it or not. That includes 80%+ of USA.

[Owendonovan]

If you don't want to drive a car, don't buy a car. See how easy that is?

I wish it was so easy. In many places driving is a must whether you want it or not. That includes 80%+ of USA.

Understood, It's more a reference to the self driving cars.

[ti-amie]

I was going to say that for New Yorkers not driving is an easy option but it's not true for some urban areas like Los Angeles. I can't imagine trying to use a self driving car in New York City or LA.

[ti-amie]

Chris Trottier
@atomicpoet@mastodon.social
As @JosephMenn reports, Russian propagandists are eager buyers of Twitter Blue.

This is because Twitter Blue privileges their posts in Twitter's relevancy algorithm, ensuring their propaganda achieves more reach.

It also gives them a fancy blue badge.

Russian propagandists aren't the only bad hombres buying Twitter Blue. A few months ago, I discovered that the Taliban are also paying for the service.

Twitter Blue: loved by Putin and the Taliban!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/

https://mastodon.social/@atomicpoet/109909853847359109

[JazzNU]

I was going to say that for New Yorkers not driving is an easy option but it's not true for some urban areas like Los Angeles. I can't imagine trying to use a self driving car in New York City or LA.

Indeed. Even in cities with what is considered good public transportation, the grid is not what NYC has set up, not as wide ranging, not as many connections that cut down on time getting around a city, let alone not nearly the same frequency.

Self driving in LA I can imagine, in NYC, not nearly as much. It's why I was interested in seeing how it handled in NJ, because that's another no go area for self driving to me as are most urban areas of the Northeast. Tighter roads with aggressive drivers are what make me think absolutely not where self driving is concerned. And that basically describes all of NYC.

[Deuce]

This is relevant to the self-driving car discussion...

Making things more complicated like this doesn't have a good track record...

Traffic Lights Could Have a 4th Color in The Future. Here's Why...

.

[ti-amie]

New cracks emerge in Elon Musk's Twitter
Jira went down, Slack's gone, and site performance is degraded. What's next?

Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer

Today, let’s check in on Elon Musk’s Twitter, where sudden software outages and another dubious transparency effort have left the company’s remaining workers more beleaguered than usual.

On Wednesday, Twitter employees had the tech equivalent of a snow day: the company’s Slack instance was down for “routine maintenance,” they were told, and the company was implementing a deployment freeze as a result.

That same day, Jira – a tool Twitter uses to track everything from progress on feature updates to regulatory compliance – also stopped working. With no way to chat and no code to ship, most engineers took the day off.

Jira access was restored on Thursday. But Platformer can now confirm that Slack wasn’t down for “routine maintenance.” “There is no such thing as routine maintenance. That’s (expletive),” a current Slack employee told us.

In this as in so many other things, Twitter hasn’t paid its Slack bill. But that’s not why Slack went down: someone at Twitter manually shut off access, we’re told. Platformer was not able to learn the reason prior to publication, though the move suggests Musk may have turned against the communication app — or at least wants to see if Twitter can run without Slack and the expenses associated with it. (Musk’s Tesla uses a Slack competitor called Mattermost for in-house collaboration, and Microsoft Outlook and Teams for email and meetings.)

On Blind, the anonymous workplace chat app, the disappearance of such critical tools was met with a mixture of disbelief, frustration, and (to a lesser extent) glee.

“We didn't pay our Slack bill,” one employee wrote. “Now everyone is barely working. Penny wise, pound foolish.”

Another worker called the disappearance of Slack the “proverbial final straw.”

“Oddly enough, it's the Slack deactivation that has pushed me to finally start applying to get out,” they wrote.

For Twitter employees, Slack is more than a way to message colleagues: it’s also a store of institutional memory, preserved in documents that workers have had to rely on more and more since Musk purged thousands of employees since taking over.

“After everyone was gone, I had no one to ask questions when stuck,” an employee who stayed on past the first round of layoffs wrote in Blind. “I used to search for the error [messages] on Slack and got help 99 percent of the time.”

Slack remained down at the company on Thursday. While some employees communicated over email, others essentially took a second day off.

There’s never a good time for a company to lose its primary communication infrastructure. But the loss of Slack is likely to be particularly stressful for employees working on Musk’s latest big idea: open-sourcing the algorithm that ranks tweets in the timeline.

On Monday, Musk announced (by replying to a random account, naturally) that Twitter plans to open source its algorithm next week. “Prepare to be disappointed at first when our algorithm is made open source next week, but it will improve rapidly!” he wrote.

It’s unclear whether Twitter will actually hit that deadline — Musk seems to announce a new thing coming “next week” all the time, and often those deadlines pass and whatever feature was allegedly coming is never heard of again. (Remember the feature that would tell you if you’re shadowbanned? Or improvements to the search function? Or the content moderation council? Or letting creators charge for video?)

Still, we’re told that some engineers have been tasked with cleaning up the recommendation algorithm in preparation for making it open source. But among employees, many doubt that Musk plans to release the actual code that is currently in production — raising the question of what, if anything, he actually plans to show.

Another of Musk’s ongoing projects is to improve Twitter’s performance. At the end of last year, he claimed progress. “Significant backend server architecture changes rolled out,” he tweeted on December 28. “Twitter should feel faster.”

In fact, publicly available data indicates that Twitter has been slowly degrading since that month, when it shut down its Sacramento data center. The information comes from Singlepane, a startup whose tool measures latency issues using external signals; the company has been actively monitoring what it describes as a degradation in Twitter’s quality of service.

According to the company’s data, Twitter has seen increased latency — the time between taking an action like refreshing the timeline and seeing new tweets populate in your feed — during times when more people are using the service. Singlepane showed latency spikes during the halftime show of the Super Bowl, for example, and in the aftermath of the recent earthquake in Turkey.

We ran the data by current Twitter engineers, who say it tracks with what they’re seeing internally.

But it’s not only big external events that can cause the platform to become slower or less stable. When a user takes their account private, Twitter’s systems have to go through every single tweet in the account’s history and mark them as private, before making those tweets visible to the private account’s followers.

That can be a data-intensive request for a large account a big lift – like, say, Elon Musk’s. Singlepane’s data show that Twitter experienced significant latency issues when Musk took his account private in early February, as part of his effort to understand why fewer people have been liking his tweets lately. (He figured out a separate fix for that problem just a few days later.)

On top of all the other news, parts of Asia experienced a roughly 20 minute Twitter outage today, we’re told.


https://www.platformer.news/p/new-crack ... ks-twitter

[ponchi101]

This is sort of puzzling. Now, when the USA wants to transition to renewables, there are other problems too:
The U.S. Has Billions for Wind and Solar Projects. Good Luck Plugging Them In.

The gist (extract):
More than 8,100 energy projects — the vast majority of them wind, solar and batteries — were waiting for permission to connect to electric grids at the end of 2021, up from 5,600 the year before, jamming the system known as interconnection.

That’s the process by which electricity generated by wind turbines or solar arrays is added to the grid — the network of power lines and transformers that moves electricity from the spot where it is created to cities and factories. There is no single grid; the United States has dozens of electric networks, each overseen by a different authority.

End quote.

So, it is not just the generation, it is the plugging them in.
If the USA has this problem, what is left to smaller, even more antiquated grids in less developed countries?

[Suliso]

Sometimes smaller is easier...

[ponchi101]

Perhaps. In our countries in S. America, we usually have one single, national supplier, but the grids are broken up. I wonder how that would translate into the connectivity of wind and solar, taking in consideration they are so intermittent.

[skatingfan]

So, it is not just the generation, it is the plugging them in.
If the USA has this problem, what is left to smaller, even more antiquated grids in less developed countries?

As I understand it, a lot of these issues are not technical they are political. Traditional electric companies have legal monopolies in each state, and have control, and sometimes veto power over new production coming online.

[ti-amie]

From earlier this afternoon:

So if u click on a link to an article this is what you get on the bird site:

{"errors":[{"message":"Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint, please see https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api for more information","code":467}]}

Twitter’s links and pictures were broken, but now they’re not
/ Clicking a link on Twitter got you no further than an error message, and many images across our timelines were failing to load.
By MITCHELL CLARK and RICHARD LAWLER

Updated Mar 6, 2023, 1:02 PM EST|

Twitter had some problems Monday morning — starting just before noon ET, clicking links within tweets didn’t work, and for many people, images wouldn’t load throughout their timelines. It took a little less than an hour for most parts of the site to start working again.

During the partial outage, trying to click a link showed only an error message that said “your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint.” People also seemed to get the error when visiting the site in Incognito mode or if they weren’t logged in.

The Twitter Support account said that “an internal change that had some unintended consequences” was to blame. While the issues were happening, some Verge staffers’ Twitter access remained unaffected, while others weren’t even able to load the site.

Musk responded to Monday’s outage by saying that the site “is so brittle (sigh).”

Despite the company’s shrinking workforce, Musk has continued to push for new features, including promising changes that haven’t yet appeared, like last month’s call for ad revenue sharing with creators who post on the platform or a plan to introduce a new paid tier for its API.

This latest outage occurred only about a week after Elon Musk laid off much of the company’s remaining product team, including manager Esther Crawford, in the latest round of cuts since he took ownership of Twitter last fall. Twitter also had a similar outage nearly a month ago, which Platformer reported occurred because “an employee had inadvertently deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter.”

Update March 6th, 1:02PM ET: Updated to reflect that the outage appears to be resolved.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/6/23627 ... essage-api

Already in November, engineers who left Twitter described for The Associated Press why they expect considerable unpleasantness for Twitter’s more than 230 million users now that well over two-thirds of the San Francisco-based company’s pre-Musk core services engineers are apparently gone.
While they don’t anticipate near-term collapse, the engineers said Twitter could get very rough at the edges — especially if Musk makes major changes without much off-platform testing.
— with files from The Associated Press, Reuters

[ti-amie]

Meanwhile:

Fedi.Tips
@feditips@mstdn.social
The mastodon.social server is currently under a heavy DDOS attack and may not work properly.

The 12,164 other servers on the network are unaffected.

This is part of the reason why federated networks are a good idea: if one server goes down, the others work fine.

The more spread out we are on small and medium sized servers, the harder it is for anyone to take down the network because there's no obvious target.

There are also many other reasons why federation is good: https://fedi.tips/why-is-the-fediverse- ... te-servers


Why is the Fediverse on so many separate servers? | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse
fedi.tips

1+



https://mstdn.social/@feditips/109977865457686560

[ti-amie]

Meanwhile Teri Kanefield has written an easy to understand comparison between the different platforms currently available. It's a bit long but the article is written in terms the average person can understand.

Twitter V. Mastodon V. Post V. Other Possibilities

1. Twitter
Twitter has done a lot of good. It allowed communities to form. It allowed marginalized voices to be heard. It allowed crucial information to be disseminated. It even saved lives.

Like Facebook and other platforms that rely on algorithms to stimulate engagement, Twitter has also done a lot of harm. The Pew Research Center says this:

Nearly all the content people see on social media is chosen not by human editors but rather by computer programs using massive quantities of data about each user to deliver content that he or she might find relevant or engaging. This has led to widespread concerns that these sites are promoting content that is attention-grabbing but ultimately harmful to users – such as misinformation, sensationalism or “hate clicks.”

The Facebook whistleblower Francis Haugen explained that Facebook algorithms incentivize “angry, polarizing, divisive content.” In her testimony before Congress she said:

Facebook repeatedly encountered conflicts between its own profits and our safety. Facebook consistently resolved those conflicts in favor of its own profits. The result has been a system that amplifies division, extremism, and polarization — and undermines societies around the world. In some cases, this dangerous online talk has led to actual violence that harms and even kills people. In other cases, their profit-optimizing machine is generating self-harm and self-hate — especially for vulnerable groups, like teenage girls. These problems have been confirmed repeatedly by Facebook’s own internal research.

In a 60 Minutes interview, she explained that content that gets engaged with – such as reactions, comments, and shares – gets wider distribution. Facebook’s own research found that “angry content” is more likely to receive engagement. She said that content producers and political parties are aware of this.

Elon Musk has reinstated banned accounts known for spewing racist, dangerous lies like Andrew Tate, Donald Trump, and Babylon Bee. Most recently, he reinstated the Twitter account of Lin Wood, who was suspended after January 6, 2001, when he tweeted that former vice-president Mike Pence should face “execution by firing squad.”

Also this week, The Washington Post reported that extremist influencers are generating millions for Twitter. (If you click here, you can get past the paywall. My subscription allows me to offer a few articles each month as a gift.)

In other words, Musk is allowing rage-inducing accounts back on Twitter so he can get more fighters fighting to increase engagement because more engagement means more revenue from advertising.

“But I want to stay on Twitter to speak truth to power.”

Musk’s only “power” is the power we give him. He is not the president of the United States. He isn’t a world leader or elected official. He controls the Twitter code. That’s his power.

Some Twitter users believe that Musk will crash and Twitter will outlive him and something different will replace the Twitter of today. This seems unlikely to me, but I suppose it’s possible.

I also suspect a lot of people are keeping their Twitter accounts active while simultaneously building a home elsewhere as they watch what develops. (I’ve heard that it’s best not to delete a Twitter account, particularly if you are verified: Someone else can reactivate your account within 30 days or use your name. If you want to leave entirely, the best option is to make your account inactive while retaining control.)

2: The Network Effect
As a number of new platforms vie to become the next Twitter, it’s helpful to look at what made Twitter different from, say, a message board where you could talk to your friends and maybe say hello to a few celebrities who pop in.

The network effect occurs when a product increases in value as more people come to use it. The telephone is an example. If only 1,000 people own a phone, your phone has limited use. But if everyone has a phone, a phone becomes essential. Another example is the Internet. Initially, the Internet had limited use, but as more people came to use the Internet and features were added, Internet access now feels essential.

Twitter now has more than 350 million users. Over the years, Senators, governors, agencies, celebrities, experts in various fields, and journalists who write for major publications found their way to Twitter. I often found my Tweets quoted in major publications. Twitter has thus achieved a network effect.

3. Post.news
Post.news bills itself as the best “Twitter alternative.” They don’t put up with trolls and they banish Nazis and other extremists. The site tilts to the left.

This is from a Nieman Lab piece:

Post was founded by former Waze CEO Noam Bardin. It counts Kara Swisher as an advisor and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz as one of its two investors. The other investor is Scott Galloway, an NYU professor and cohost of the Pivot podcast with Swisher. “I’ve never seen anyone, except maybe at a few strip bars, throw more money at someone than they’re throwing at Noam Bardin right now,” Galloway said on an episode of the Pivot podcast last week, in which he and Swisher interviewed Bardin. (Bardin wrote that, beyond funds from Andreessen Horowitz and from Galloway, “the only other money invested is mine.”)

I have two issues with Post: (1) Post uses reputational algorithms and (2) the uncertainty of whether Post’s plan to monetize will work.

(1) Reputational Algorithms.

Kurt Fliegel (@FLGLchicago@mas.to) pointed out to me that Noam Bardin, founder and CEO of Post.news explained how back-end reputational algorithms will control behavior on the platform:

“From a vision perspective, what we want is a situation where, if you are a verified user…and there’s no verification not being under your real name…you’re going to get into our recommendation engine, and we’re going to try to distribute your content. If your score, your reputation score goes down because people are complaining about it, we’re going to take you out of the reputation {sic} and suddenly your content will only go to your explicit followers, and, if you continue to misbehave, then your followers will not be able to re-share that content on the network, until the point where we throw you off. (For the source for this, see this post.)”

News reporting obviously should not be a popularity contest. Kurt includes this video to illustrate the results.

If you are a content producer, Post is offering you the opportunity to monetize your content. But you have to live in fear of complaints. Not everything true is popular, and sometimes the truth can make people angry.

(2) The uncertainty with Post is that its plan for how to monetize may not work

Post intends to fund the site through micropayments: Major publishers and news outlets will offer their content for micropayments. Instead of subscribing to a bunch of magazines or newspapers, you can just pay for the articles you want.

Kurt Fliegel adds this: Post is largely trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. With a couple of baseline publication subscriptions, an aggregated news service, and an RSS reader (making comebacks), news consumers can get access to more news they could possibly consume for well less than a dollar a day.

One problem for Post.news is the limited scope: News and current events. Not everyone on Twitter is there for the breaking news and political commentary.

Given that Post.news wants to be the source for news, the question is whether the news industry will go for it. The Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard describes itself as “trying to figure out the future of news.” As you can see from these two pieces, Nieman Lab prefers Mastodon:

Can Mastodon be a reasonable Twitter substitute for journalists?

Post, the latest Twitter alternative, is betting big on micropayments for news.

If the micropayment idea doesn’t attract enough major publications, Post.news could become a substack+ social media platform, a place where writers can monetize and readers can more easily boost content.

My final concern with Post is that it is privately owned, which means that as a user, I am a guest in someone else’s business. Mastodon offers an alternative.

3. Mastodon

You’re about to get an explanation of the fediverse from a nontechnical person.

Mastodon launched in 2016 when German software developer Eugen Rochko (working for a nonprofit) didn’t like Twitter so he wrote the Mastodon code and made it public. Yup, he gave it away. Anyone can use it. Anyone can improve it.

But the code by itself doesn’t do you any good. (It also looks like gibberish.) But when you run the code on a thing called a server, and the server is connected to the Internet, it acts sort of like Twitter: Users can sign up and open accounts. They can post things and comment on other people’s posts. Mastodon has “like” and “retweet” options but they’re called “favorite” and “boost”.

Mozilla (Firefox) has a similar history: The code was released to the public (open source) and has been used and improved by a community of users. There is no “owner”.

“The Fediverse”: Thousands of Mastodon servers that interact with each other.

Each server is privately owned and operated. If the server is on this list, anyone can join. Mastodon does not rely on ads or algorithms. Some organizations and institutions operate their own servers, allowing members of their company or community to set up accounts (the way you can get a company email from your employer).

Here’s an interesting take on why your organization should have its own server.

This is key: If you open an account on one server, you can move to a different server and take your followers (but not your posts) with you. So if you set up an account on your employer’s server and leave the company, you can transfer your followers to an account on a server not owned by your company.

“Walled Garden“: The term for a platform cut off from the rest of the Internet.

Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Post, and Counter Social, are all examples of walled gardens. In its early history, email servers were walled gardens: You could only send email to other email accounts in the same server. But now, it doesn’t matter which email server you use: you can exchange email with users from other systems.

But what about the bad guys? What keeps them from setting up their own Mastodon server?

Nothing. But your server simply has to block their server and there is an impenetrable wall.

In fact, this is just what happened. A bunch of Nazis and white supremacists opened their own server called Gab. Every single server on this list has Gab blocked, and any new server is advised to immediately block Gab. So the Gab Nazis are completely isolated. You will never see anything they post and they will never see anything you post. The only way a Nazi can see your stuff is if they join a normal server and hide the fact that they are Nazis, but once their Nazi-ness shows, zap. The owner of your server, who doesn’t tolerate Nazis (that’s why you are there) blocks them and you don’t have to listen to them.

In fact, did you know that Trump’s Truth Social uses Mastodon code? Trump, being Trump, tried to pretend that he created it, but opensource doesn’t mean you can take credit. The creators of Mastodon let everyone know that Trump basically used their opensource code. In other words, Trump is not a tech genius. By using Mastodon’s code but putting it forward as his own, he was doing the tech world equivalent of plagiarizing.

The Future of the Fediverse

There is a thing called Activity Pub which allows any site, including regular WordPress websites, to join the fediverse.

Medium recently announced that it will be operating a Mastodon server for the writers who publish on Medium. The reason seems clear to me: This gives Medium writers a way for their work to have wider exposure.

MIT set up a Mastodon server for the MIT community. A Stanford University professor recently asked Standford to set one up for the Stanford community.

If universities begin setting up Mastodon servers, the fediverse will develop an enormous base of experts all conversing while the rest of us can listen in.

One developer is talking about an app that will allow cell phones to operate like a Mastodon server. In other words, if you have a cell phone, you can create your own server/account.

Thus Mastodon has the same potential for growth as the Internet itself.

Post recently announced plans to federate:



This, depending on how it works out, could be a game-changer. The question is: To what extent will Post remain a privately owned walled garden, and to what extend will the users be free to interact with Mastodon servers.

The latest: Mozilla will be setting up a Mastodon instance to allow people easy access to the fediverse. This will make entry easier.

Given all of this, I suspect a decentralized system like Mastodon has the most potential and is the most likely to achieve a network effect.

I therefore asked my technical support staff (my husband) to set up a private Mastodon server for me. I had two reasons for wanting my own server. (1) I saw it as an experiment to find out how difficult (and expensive) it is, and (2) like others, I felt burned after putting so much time into Twitter only to have it change owners and fall into the hands of a right-wing madman.

If you want to know how to set up your own Mastodon server, the basic requirements are here. I’ll warn you though: It’s harder than it looks. Unless you’re an IT professional with server experience, you will not be able to follow these directions and succeed. My in-house technical support staff (my husband) spends a few hours each week maintaining my stuff. The cost of maintaining my Mastodon server is about the same as maintaining my website.

A shortcut to following those directions (and a less expensive alternative) is to use a dedicated Mastodon hosting provider. You can see the costs here. For about $40 per month, you can host 500 Mastodon users. (It isn’t much money because the software is freely available and there is so much demand for new Mastodon servers, that capitalism is doing its thing: Suppliers are meeting the demand.)

Although very large communities are uncommon, a Mastodon server can accommodate hundreds of thousands of users. In fact, I don’t believe there is a limit.

With my own server, I never have to worry about being shut out of my account on the whim of the platform owner or having the rules suddenly change on me.

This brings me to Counter Social.

4. Counter Social

Counter Social, like Truth Social, uses the Mastodon software but has elected not to be part of the fediverse. In other words, Counter Social is a Mastodon server (with tweaks) disconnected so that you can only communicate with others who have joined Counter Social.

In other words, it has become a walled garden.

Counter Social promises “unique protections: No trolls. No Abuse. No Ads. No Fake News. No Foreign Influence Ops.”

Basically, Counter Social offers a “safe” place.

In early November after Musk purchased Twitter while we were all exploring options, a number of people urged me to try Counter Social, so I opened a Counter Social account. Once weekly, I posted a link to my blog and occasionally I reposted something I’d done elsewhere. I had no strong feelings about Counter Social.

Then one day I had an unfortunate encounter with Jester, the anonymous owner of Counter Social. What happened was this: One of my followers, asked, “What about Counter Social?” Emma, who has since left Twitter altogether, said, “I don’t trust the owner of Counter Social.”

She did not tag Counter Social or Jester, but he found her tweet. Either he was searching for mentions of Counter Social or someone alerted him.

He directed two Tweets toward Emma. In the first Tweet, he demanded evidence for her assertion. In the second, he went on the attack. He used the phrase, “if you are so stupid.” Three or four of Jester’s followers piled on and said unkind things to Emma.

This was all on my feed, so I stepped in and said, “Is this how you all behave on Counter Social?” and I asked them to stop the pile on. Then, Jester’s supporters turned on me. One Jester supporter told me that I deserved what I got because I “attacked” Jester. Another said, “four people is not a pile on,” and another said, “That was the gentlest pile-on I’ve ever seen.” To counter that, I showed a screenshot that one of them used the “f” word in attacking Emma. Two of them then mocked for being sensitive about the “f” word. One said, “So you never go to r-rated movies?”

As this was going on, I tried to log on to Counter Social to delete my account. I intended to scrub it of my personal information but I found I was locked out. I asked people to check, and they told me my account had been deleted.

Evidently Jester deleted my account and locked me out. He then deleted his tweets to Emma. On his feed, tweeted the lyrics to “Shake it off.” (His response to the incident.) He also blocked me.

I emailed Counter Social’s help account and asked for my account to be reinstated long enough for me to scrub it so that my picture and other information were no longer there. The person lied and told me that I had deleted it myself. (I hadn’t.) The person responding to me said he wasn’t Jester, but the snide tone was the same.

I had a similar experience about 10 years ago. I created an account on a forum for writers. It was loads of fun. I met other writers. We exchanged ideas and talked about writing, literary agents, publishing (traditional v. self-publishing), and everything else of interest to writers. Then the platform was purchased by someone who was combative and argued with people who disagreed with her.

Initially, she agreed with my views and all was good. But then I formed an opinion about literary agents that she thought was wrongheaded. I stated my opinions anyway. She didn’t want me to spread my views on her site. It was her platform so she had the power to control the content. I deleted my account.

These two stories illustrate why I am unwilling to invest too much time in a centrally-owned site where the owners can decide they don’t approve of my content or they just don’t like me. It’s happened twice now. It could happen again.

Even people on the same side of the political spectrum—and even members of the same political party—can have furious disagreements. Just look back at some of the more contentious primaries. Just because you and the owner both dislike right-wing extremists doesn’t mean the day won’t come when one thinks the other is spreading misinformation.

In other words, banning Nazis does not assure harmony.

5. Spoutible
I started drafting a section on Spoutible. I ended up digging into the Courtney Milan / Christopher Bouzy drama, and I concluded that the entire drama illustrated exactly why I am afraid to invest too much time into another centrally-owned platform.

With any centrally owned platform, there is always a risk of not getting along with the owner (or owners) and having to move to a different platform. This is fine if your objective is to chat with people and make friends. But for what we might call content producers (a fancy word for “writer”) there is always the risk of investing time, building up a network, and then finding that you have to leave and lose it all.

6. How is the site moderated for content?
The hardest part of operating a social media platform is moderating the content.

On Mastodon, each server does its own moderation. This can be chaotic, but a user is free to move to a different server if the user doesn’t like the rules.

Counter Social is moderated by Jester. This works well if you get along with Jester.

Twitter used to be moderated by a team (which cost money) and is now moderated at the whim of Elon Musk. This is bad for anyone who is not a right-wing nutcase.

Post.news, which is being funded by millions in VC funds, can afford a team to handle the moderation. This keeps the decisions from becoming personal.

Wait, Teri! You forgot about “ease of usage.” Mastodon is too hard to use! It’s too confusing! I want something easier!

I didn’t forget. I suspect people are forgetting how hard it was to learn to use Twitter. I am about the most non-technical person around, and once I learned where the buttons were on Mastodon, I was fine.

A privately owned company like Post.news that anticipates making a lot of money, has people working full time to make the interface appealing and easy to use. You are the customer. Without you, the site will not make money, so of course the door will be opened for you.

Also, I suspect that the Next Big Thing will not look like the last Big Thing. When the Next Big Thing comes along (whatever that may be) I expect we will all be forced to learn something new. New technology is like that.

My Strategy
I like microblogging to record my thoughts and impressions throughout the week. (Twitter and Mastodon are microblogging platforms, meaning that each post has a limited word count. Post, Substack, and Medium are blogging platforms. The post has no word limit.)

I like the feedback I get from microblogging. The wonderful thing about microblogging on social media is that if I make a mistake, someone will be kind enough to tell me.

Then once weekly, I look back over what I’ve microblogged, decide on a topic (or a few topics), and put together my weekly blog post.

Building a following and presence on a platform takes time and effort and most of us have limited time and simply can’t be active on multiple sites.

I am currently using Mastodon as my primary social media platform.

Each week, I post a link to my blog post on Post.news and Facebook. (Yes, I know Facebook is horrible, but I have friends and family members who never left)

Occasionally during the week, if time permits, I will also cross-post from Mastodon to Twitter, Facebook, or Post.news.

As new sites open up, I may open accounts to cross-post links to my weekly blog post.

For my readers who are not on Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon, or Post, I have a free once-weekly blog post. (You can sign up here.) If readers want to see what I’m microblogging during the week, they can cut and paste my Mastodon URL into their browser (or click here).

This strategy allows me to keep my Twitter account active, stay in touch with my Twitter peeps who are still there.

I will watch what unfolds and change my strategy as necessary.

It is likely to be a few years before we know which platform will achieve the network effect and become the next Twitter.

https://terikanefield.com/socialmedia/

[ti-amie]

This puff piece appeared in the WaPo

Eric Blair
@protecttruth@mastodon.online
Every link on Twitter is broken right now.

Two weeks ago: “How Elon Musk fired Twitter staff and broke nothing.”
Megan McArdle. WaPo.

Someone call McArdle, the perennially wrong rightwing columnist at The Washington Post—or better, her boss the Opinion editor.

(What is really going on there: McArdle is serving the billionaire class, who wants to believe tech workers are expendable. But not sure why WaPo continues to pay her.)
#Twitter #media #News #McArdle
https://www.engadget.com/every-link-on-twi




https://mastodon.online/@protecttruth/1 ... 5322451908