171–180 of 386 posts
For a free service, there’s a lot of strong opinions here. While I’m no Elon fan, he’s entitled to do what he wants with what he owns. And he paid a bunch of money to have that right.
As has been said already many times, the debate is not whether he has the legal authority to do this, the debate is over his hypocrisy of claiming free speech absolutism.
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…
That server is swamped with registrations and had to pause them. Pick another.
Go with the one everyone talks about? Closed to new signups. Pick some other one, run the risk that it closes (the owner gets bored, it becomes too much work, they find keeping it up and stable too hard). Or else that it gets “defederated”, and hence you get effectively banned, because someone else disagrees with moderation decisions of the owner which are nothing to do with you personally. And even if none of that happens, and the server you pick turns out to be a good one - then your friend asks you how to join Mastodon, you direct them to the server you use, but it is closed to sign-ups due to popularity, so they have the same issue.
I can’t be bothered. I’m sure I’m hardly the only one.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Mastodon will not die in the same way Napster did; it’s decentralized and there’s no way it can be completely shut down since anyone can run an instance.
For a free service, there’s a lot of strong opinions here. While I’m no Elon fan, he’s entitled to do what he wants with what he owns. And he paid a bunch of money to have that right.
I think people mostly take issue with the hypocrisy of claiming to be a paragon of free speech while censoring all kinds of things because Musk personally dislikes them.
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.
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…
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
That said; many of us also thought Kanye shouldn’t have been banned. Few on hacker news agreed lol
You either have absolute freedom of speech or none, in many ways.
That said, I appreciate that at least people are being told why they are banned. The prior set of billionaires who owned Twitter often wouldn’t say why.
Blocking links to competitors, blocking real-time tracking of people, and a guy telling the world how great hitler is are fairly mundane / reasonable things to block imo.
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
What about the pivot from "This is a private company. Free speech doesn't apply" to "This is censorship of free speech"?
There’s layers of irony here. All the “libs” who were supposedly pro censorship ran off to the actual free speech zone. The Fediverse is almost uncensorable since you can hop instances or just run your own.
There is a difference though. It has no algorithm that boosts “engaging” content like craziness, hate, and trolling. I’ve always thought that what the far right was so mad about was loss of a free propaganda ploy that involved baiting the algorithm. You can always have free speech in a million places but a free promotion machine isn’t easily replaceable.
Of course the worst excesses of “cancel culture” were also driven by the algorithm. Moral outrage mobs increase engagement just like racism and wacko conspiracy theories do.
I personally hope centralized all encompassing social media burns. It’s driven all the craziest excesses everywhere.