231–240 of 356 posts
He has every right to be mad but this post comes off as petulant and juvenile.
Well yeah, his life's work was destroyed at someone's whim with the flick of a switch. How many people would be gracious? Why should anyone be?
I've been thinking about social media a lot lately and how it has changed my life. I'm only in my early 30's, but I think many others my age grew up online and when the internet felt smaller, but in a different way. I made life long friends through these means. But something I've noticed is that as everyone has come online, I have made fewer friends. What I personally miss is the small niche communities. These don't…
I've been thinking about this problem a lot and I don't think there is an easy answer or solution to this. I think that world is gone. -- To recreate the feeling of a small group of people chatting like it was commonplace two decades ago, I created a Discord server for strangers to just hang out and chat whenever one feels like. No pressure, no overbearing rules, just a small island in the modern lonely internet. Its…
That said I think we forget that barriers to using the internet were the gates that kept it a cozy medium-sized community. I knew older programmers than me who were content learning languages and frameworks by buying books or renting books from the library, but only socialized with colleagues, friends, and family in purely offline venues. Only a certain type of person put up with the jank of the internet and the early Web and that's the kind of person who was writ large on it.
Just how in real life we don't invite the world into our homes or grab lunch with anyone off the street, likewise our internet presences are now becoming circumscribed to specific groups. The trick is to make the barrier to entry just high enough as to select for compatible people but not so high that the group becomes a clique.
Well-written and touching post. To switch off this API used by so many long-time users on the same day "For You" appears as the default option on Twitter triggers me. The "For You" timeline is only for Elon: it will drive engagement, extremism, and all the things social networks have been accused of driving for years now in order to make more $. Some folks here have been comparing the crypto/Web3 and ActivityPub craz…
Dealbreaker for Mastodon (that I've seen multiple people mention) is that instance admins can view personal DMs. Yes, employees from major social media companies can view your private messages, but it's more likely there's an audit trail in those cases while Mastodon instances have minimal oversight.
Well-written and touching post. To switch off this API used by so many long-time users on the same day "For You" appears as the default option on Twitter triggers me. The "For You" timeline is only for Elon: it will drive engagement, extremism, and all the things social networks have been accused of driving for years now in order to make more $. Some folks here have been comparing the crypto/Web3 and ActivityPub craz…
> Well-written Really? So if you go on a rampage of profanities and spew never ending hate and be as ugly and rude as possible that's praiseworthy? > "For You" appears as the default option No, it had been the default for several years now and every time you disabled it, it would mysteriously re-enable itself after a while. > The "For You" timeline is only for Elon No, he even complained about this feature, shadow-ba…
Pretty clear where your values are here. Personally I quite like a system that's explicitly not being designed to drive revenue, and would like to interact with other people that also want to be in a place with a higher value then the dollar bill. Im perfectly happy to let people with your values stay on twitter away from me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just curious, what is unreliable for you? My setup is as reliable as Twitter ever was for me (I run my own server). Some things are annoying of course, but I’m a little surprised techy people would find those rough edges so bad they wouldn’t use it.
I’m not on the same server as all my Twitter friends and I cannot get my timeline to reliably update with everyone’s Toots and Goots. It works if I catch up the next morning. But there is no reliable ability for real-time Toot Blooting. In all fairness I took two weeks off. Maybe it’s better. Or maybe I need to try another server (three tries so far.) Figuring out what server to pick was ridiculous. I eventually deci…
In my opinion, you can only push it so far. You rely on some of the “power” users to run a platform. In HN, think of it of people that post, comment and visit the most. The rest of the users are mostly “followers”. These “power” people make and set the trends.
This is the last nail in the coffin. These people will find new territories and hopefully they’ll learn this time that they need to own the platform, and not just their contributions. If successful, this will make it hard for any future centralized platform to see the light again.
If success, this will probably take Facebook and other social media networks too. This will make it even harder (or easier?) for governments to control narrative or even understand what’s going on.
I’m optimistic today for the future. Thank you Elon Musk!
I never relied on Twitter's API, since building stuff with it is akin to building your castle on other people's land. You're always going to be a tenant, and the API gatekeepers play landlord and can rugpull you without notice. But I'm looking into Nostr[0] as an alternative, aswell as ActivityPub which seems to be working well these days. Dorsey's Bluesky Social[1] looks promising too, but it's a very late move sinc…
Can we return to dumb protocol designs? No?
Oh well, I guess we did not suffer enough yet then.
edit: All this twitter drama may actually result in useful changes to to the net.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well yeah, his life's work was destroyed at someone's whim with the flick of a switch. How many people would be gracious? Why should anyone be?
Pro Tip: Don't build "your life's work" around a third-party API over which you have no definitive control. Moving forward, the author would do well to keep that "top of mind."
On what basis do you give advice? Please outline your own career and accomplishments over the past 16 years.
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