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Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

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Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#141

Post by tjpnz »

vidarh wrote: post #136
tjpnz wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just downloaded the app for a second time and tried to create an account. I failed. I thought I'd try mastodon.social but couldn't find it on any of the lists so chose the search option. Found it but it wouldn't let me register an account. Go go site, there's a register button but rather than taking me to a signup form I just get a big wall of text about how I can't be a sexist or a transphobe. Fine, I won't. But w…

So you pre-decided to sign up for a specific instance which was closed to signups and is then surprised you can't sign up. Go to joinmastodon.org or instances.social, not directly to a specific instance.

>So you pre-decided to sign up for a specific instance which was closed to signups and is then surprised you can't sign up.

I saw that elonjet had found a new home there so assumed I wouldn't have any trouble signing up. The "Create Account" button on mastodon.social seemed promising too.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#142

Post by weinzierl »

drexlspivey wrote: post #107
whitepaint wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can export your data and move it to another server. If you're banned on Twitter, you're done. Also, complete failures like banning important stories, banning presidents, banning journalists etc. cannot happen on Mastodon the same way that it has happened countless of times on Twitter and will continue happening. Mastodon is obviously superior when it comes to the freedom of speech. Elon is afraid, because he know…

What if your server that is run by a hobbyist suddenly shuts down without any notice? If they had an accident for example or they got hacked or whatever

If you have exported you data from the instance you should be able to set up your own instance with that data.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#143

Post by sandworm101 »

weinzierl wrote: post #117
matwood wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. And the fact they are blocking mastodon shows it must be impacting Twitter user numbers.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you but when they start fighting you, you know you've won.

It has to first get a little more extreem. They have to not just fight but start killing. Look at Napster. Napster was attacked and eventually died. But napster also won. CD sales are dead and we all download/stream music online. Mastadon will soon be attacked directly. It will also probably die as napster: a first cassualty of a revolution. What matters are the long-term changes that survive.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#144

Post by willcipriano »

clort wrote: post #91
sandworm101 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He can simple hire/fly in someone else's plane. This isnt a tracker on him. It is a tracker on his own vanity.

Presumably for a whole lot less than he paid for Twitter, he could have purchased 100 jets and flown them around the country continually for years, hopping on and off as he chose and nobody would have any idea where he was. He is still, afaik, 'worth' 100s of billions of dollars even though his wealth has plummeted.

You'd prefer the global warming impact of that over the alternative?

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#145

Post by nonethewiser »

lukeschlather wrote: post #50
codeflo wrote: post #39

I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power. But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic, but worse, fragments the community and creates…

> you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar I have some friends operating a Mastodon server, with a team of volunteer operators, and I'm pretty sure I've met all of them in person. I've only used Twitter a handful of times and don't really like the medium, but it's really not that hard to run a server. And I don't think there…

> I have some friends operating a Mastodon server, with a team of volunteer operators, and I'm pretty sure I've met all of them in person.

But this will never describe a significant portion of Twitter users. It might work for some, but it wont replace Twitter.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#146

Post by sandworm101 »

koonsolo wrote: post #139
sandworm101 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. Kneecapping competitors is what billionaires do. You dont win capitalism by following all the rules.

How many users will stay on Twitter because of this? And how many will leave because of it? My guess: it's an extra indication that Twitter is not a reliable platform to build an audience. Billionaires are billionaires because they build a product that everybody wants.

Twitter and "reliable"? Was that ever really a thing?

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#147

Post by codeflo »

vidarh wrote: post #138
drexlspivey wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if your server that is run by a hobbyist suddenly shuts down without any notice? If they had an accident for example or they got hacked or whatever

If you're concerned about that, back up regularly, or pick an instance not run by a hobbyist, or run your own, or pay one of the commercial hosters to do it for you.

I love the moving of goalposts that's happening here. "Just pick a server", "you can always migrate" moves to "you can always migrate if you happened to have picked a server not run by a hobbyist". Which, BTW, isn't even a filter criterion on the often linked instances.social.

Also, you can't back up your followers.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#148

Post by weinzierl »

codeflo wrote: post #118
weinzierl wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I understood you correctly, but I don't think this is true. I have not tried it but as long as you have your data you can always setup your own instance with it. Ideally you have a server backup but if not there is a script that can convert the ordinary Mastodon export (the one you can do as a regular user in the UI of any instance) into a form suitable to import into the database of your instance.

You can't migrate your followers that way, can you? Which is (arguably) for many people more important than the content of their posts.

I haven't thought this through thoroughly yet, but I could not come up with a migration scenario where you could keep your followers. Your handle will change and as long as the old instance is banned I guess a redirect from there to the new handle does not work. So, fair point! I'd be curious what others think, maybe there is a way?

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#149

Post by rgbrenner »

SilverBirch wrote: post #116
paulgb wrote: post #10

The pivot from “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law”[1] to “I get to use censorship to kneecap a competitor because it’s my site now” was almost comically quick. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376

I actually think this is quite a long way away from funny. We've been able to watch Elon Musk get radicalized in real time. That's quite worrying when you consider the amount of resources he has available to him. During the Trump years there was a lot of talk about how Trump is bad, but fundamentally incompetent. Well now we're going to see what extremism looks like when a far more competent person is orchestrating i…

Are we watching musk "get" radicalized? Or has he always been that way?

Because I remember way back, when journalists would write poor reviews of Tesla, he would go after them... typically accusing them of being compromised in some way, or not really being a journalist.

Then there's the swatting of a tesla wistleblower.

Or when a customer was "rude", he canceled their tesla pre-order.

Or when that tesla employee posted a self driving video of his own car--he fired him.

Or when there was an anonymous blogger that posted negative tesla investment advice, musk tracked him down, and called his employer trying to get him fired.

Im not going to keep going.. there are so many of these dating back a decade. I think the truth is he said what he thought people wanted to hear ("free speech absolutism"), and then once he obtained twitter, who he really is--exceptionally thin skinned--wont let him run it in a principled way.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#150

Post by soheil »

Glad to see Twitter is doing this.

The reason Musk bought Twitter was to rid it of the type of behavior you frequently see on m6n. It's a direct competitor to Twitter. Twitter is a commercial product and needs to maintain its users and revenue. It'd be foolish for it to amplify a coordinated attacked on its existence by the very people who very publicly advocate for the destruction of Twitter.

I'm sure many people will do their best to minimize the influence of these cult-like echo chambers with negative contribution to society.

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