Concerns over the enablement of stalkers and trolls abound
Elon Musk’s latest changes for X are driving more users away – not exactly a surprise, granted – and many of them are flocking to rival social media outlet Bluesky. So many made the switch, in fact, it led to Bluesky briefly going down due to the volume of incoming new users.
The central move initiated by X that made the headlines for driving migration away from Musk’s platform is a change to the way the ‘Block’ button works. This was actually announced back in September, but is officially being implemented now (well, it’ll be in place ‘soon’ we’re told).
It means that going forward, X users who you have blocked will still be able to view your (public) posts – though they won’t be able to engage with them in any way (from replies to liking and so forth).
This is problematic for obvious reasons, in terms of enabling stalkers and trolls who will still be able to view the posts of an account that has blocked them, when previously this wasn’t the case. In the past, blocking meant that the blocked user couldn’t see any posts (or anything at all, save for a message telling them that they’ve been blocked), but soon, this will change.
Bluesky posted to say it had in excess of 100,000 new users inside 12 hours following the announcement by X, after the rival network highlighted the fact that its block function stops those who are blocked from viewing any posts.
In an update, Bluesky noted that it has now gained half a million new users in the past day.
There’s another reason that some folks are rapidly exiting from X stage left (and right, and indeed center, clambering over the audience, it would seem), and that’s a change to X’s privacy policy.
As TechCrunch reports, the new policy includes an update that allows third-party collaborators to use content on X to train their AI models – unless the user opts out. This is a notable extension of the reach of AI training on X, which has so far only been used to train Musk’s own Grok AI (unless users opt out, again).
I just go where the japanese artists go, and they are going to either blue sky or misskey, mostly blue sky since it has a bigger reach, misskey closed account creation for outsiders, and the way mastodon works I bet it’s defederated from a lot of the popular instances like baraag.
Because we are extremely simple and self obsessed animals on the whole. At the intersection of those two things, we regularly conflate base familiarity with earned trust. A bit of a narcissistic drive to tell ourselves that… if WE know about something, it MUST be good, otherwise we wouldn’t have taken the time to first learn about it!
It’s why your town is currently infested with candidate signs in every public space. It’s also why incumbents have such large advantages in elections and why dead/convicted politicians (or Last-name sharing family members of those politicians) are often elected after the fact.
we already know bluesky is run by former twitter assholes. but it’s the same with everything. people disappointed in new facebook policies move to band…
there are better alternatives, guaranteed not to turn into a heap of shit because of designed safeguards - but people don’t like those things; they always opt for the devil they already know.
i disagree. the only barrier of entry is when people are pushing the fediverse concept as a whole. for the vast majority of people; all they need to know is to go to mastodon.social and sign up, done. they’ll get the wider picture on their own terms and at their own pace if left alone.
Just like a real girlfriend, but better. Apart from you having absolutely no sex life and apart from the fact that it has absolutely no emotional attachment or attraction to you whatsoever. And it will also never do anything like buy you dinner or a birthday present. Enjoy throwing money at your robot that you can’t even fuck like a fleshlight.
Bluesky is vc backed by investors, it is a false promise that I am sure a lot of people working on the project believe, but it is a false promise all the same.
Bluesky is in the part of its lifecycle where investors tolerate no return on their investment in favor of drawing more people in. That is the relevant difference between Bluesky and other social media.
There are cool parts to Bluesky but it is absolutely a false promise of a future the fediverse already provides (however imperfectly). It is also full of “liberal” sheep who tell themselves they think differently but are so locked into the mindset of the way things are that they NEED their social network to be owned and operated for a profit by people orders of magnitude more wealthy than them.
Bluesky will end up essentially the same as all investor backed for-profit social networks, it will grow into a toxic, centralized (or in this case pseudo-centralized because of the moderation system), shithole where only popular accounts get any engagement with their posts. Mark my words.
But is it filled with the people that many want to follow and interact with? Twitter was popular for this reason, and people will tolerate being advertised to and sold on if it recreates that experience.
I had brief conversations on Twitter with Ice-T and John Carmack. Twitter’s nature enabled that remarkable connection. Could it happen on Mastodon? Absolutely, but those celebrities and geniuses need to embrace it. If it’s Bluesky, it’s better than X if only for a time.
So let’s say on Twitter, someone blocks me and I can’t read their post. Can’t I just log out and read their post that way? I don’t have a Twitter account, so I’ve never seen a blocked link before.
ive been enjoying bluesky more than twitter. i just wish more bug accounts would migrate. i post on both platforms with a script that i wrote and my engagement/followers ratio is far higher
While anything that gets people off Twitter is good, I’m sorely unimpressed by those artists who “had to” to patronize the racist transphobic neo-Nazi hellhole “because my audience is there”… until Musk’s policies happened to offend their own personal interests, by requiring training for their AI. Countless models trained on all public images already exist, jumping ship won’t prevent their work from being scraped elsewhere, and frankly, any one image or even portfolio will contribute virtually nothing to the result, so quitting in protest is largely symbolic. But so many peoples drew the line at that, and not at Musk making “cis” a slur, or protecting child pornographers, or boosting white supremacist supremacy theories. It’s really disappointing to see.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I just go where the japanese artists go, and they are going to either blue sky or misskey, mostly blue sky since it has a bigger reach, misskey closed account creation for outsiders, and the way mastodon works I bet it’s defederated from a lot of the popular instances like baraag.
Opt out is such a shitty practice. Especially for AI generation
Just helpful to remember, as all this horseshit persists, Bluesky is Jack Dorsey. Dorsey is former head of Twitter and musk’s good buddy.
It’s all a losing proposition, whatever direction you move - except if you move… Away.
im not sure people wont consider mastodon tbh.
They should
i know. but its our responsability to understand why the corporate shitty options are always preferred by the layman public.
Because we are extremely simple and self obsessed animals on the whole. At the intersection of those two things, we regularly conflate base familiarity with earned trust. A bit of a narcissistic drive to tell ourselves that… if WE know about something, it MUST be good, otherwise we wouldn’t have taken the time to first learn about it!
It’s why your town is currently infested with candidate signs in every public space. It’s also why incumbents have such large advantages in elections and why dead/convicted politicians (or Last-name sharing family members of those politicians) are often elected after the fact.
what
I dunno. I’d say it’s more important to see what exactly he’s doing and what Bluesky is.
Right now Bluesky is really good. So until it turns bad I’m sticking to it.
When people tell you who they are, believe them
Dude, that’s gonna be one hell of a racist AI just based on the dataset it’s gonna receive
What a garbage dataset to train off. The majority of everything there is all bots and AI anyway lol
It’s also about the art posted on it. I use bsky for that purpose and all the “migrants” didn’t want their work to be fed to an AI.
At least its not…
I dunno, YouTube comments? I think Facebook is even far better data-wise than X, and thats a low bar.
It’s just virtualised Deliverance
Come on over to Mastodon, the water’s nice
These mfs will use literally anything except for open source, decentralised social meda
Is bluesky not federated?
How do we know this bluesky isn’t just the same shit run by different assholes?
I’ve been on the platform for about a year, it’s more community driven than other sites.
we already know bluesky is run by former twitter assholes. but it’s the same with everything. people disappointed in new facebook policies move to band…
there are better alternatives, guaranteed not to turn into a heap of shit because of designed safeguards - but people don’t like those things; they always opt for the devil they already know.
Although it also helps that places like BlueSky have less of a barrier to entry.
Alternatives like Mastodon are a bit more confusing, compared to a centralised site, where everything is linked in through the one interface.
i disagree. the only barrier of entry is when people are pushing the fediverse concept as a whole. for the vast majority of people; all they need to know is to go to mastodon.social and sign up, done. they’ll get the wider picture on their own terms and at their own pace if left alone.
Most of the coolest places have barriers to entry
lol
Just like a real girlfriend, but better. Apart from you having absolutely no sex life and apart from the fact that it has absolutely no emotional attachment or attraction to you whatsoever. And it will also never do anything like buy you dinner or a birthday present. Enjoy throwing money at your robot that you can’t even fuck like a fleshlight.
Is 500,000 actually a lot? Honest question, my sense of scale with these things is shaky.
Pussy. Ass. Bitch.
Bluesky is pretty great once you learn how to use it. I plan to slowly back off twitter.
Bluesky is vc backed by investors, it is a false promise that I am sure a lot of people working on the project believe, but it is a false promise all the same.
Bluesky is in the part of its lifecycle where investors tolerate no return on their investment in favor of drawing more people in. That is the relevant difference between Bluesky and other social media.
There are cool parts to Bluesky but it is absolutely a false promise of a future the fediverse already provides (however imperfectly). It is also full of “liberal” sheep who tell themselves they think differently but are so locked into the mindset of the way things are that they NEED their social network to be owned and operated for a profit by people orders of magnitude more wealthy than them.
Bluesky will end up essentially the same as all investor backed for-profit social networks, it will grow into a toxic, centralized (or in this case pseudo-centralized because of the moderation system), shithole where only popular accounts get any engagement with their posts. Mark my words.
But is it filled with the people that many want to follow and interact with? Twitter was popular for this reason, and people will tolerate being advertised to and sold on if it recreates that experience.
I had brief conversations on Twitter with Ice-T and John Carmack. Twitter’s nature enabled that remarkable connection. Could it happen on Mastodon? Absolutely, but those celebrities and geniuses need to embrace it. If it’s Bluesky, it’s better than X if only for a time.
Bluesky is the promise of Mastodon with none of the failsafes of Mastodon.
So let’s say on Twitter, someone blocks me and I can’t read their post. Can’t I just log out and read their post that way? I don’t have a Twitter account, so I’ve never seen a blocked link before.
ive been enjoying bluesky more than twitter. i just wish more bug accounts would migrate. i post on both platforms with a script that i wrote and my engagement/followers ratio is far higher
Bug accounts, or big? Bug as in programming?
no like giant bugs
Lol, yes that’s a very good point.
While anything that gets people off Twitter is good, I’m sorely unimpressed by those artists who “had to” to patronize the racist transphobic neo-Nazi hellhole “because my audience is there”… until Musk’s policies happened to offend their own personal interests, by requiring training for their AI. Countless models trained on all public images already exist, jumping ship won’t prevent their work from being scraped elsewhere, and frankly, any one image or even portfolio will contribute virtually nothing to the result, so quitting in protest is largely symbolic. But so many peoples drew the line at that, and not at Musk making “cis” a slur, or protecting child pornographers, or boosting white supremacist supremacy theories. It’s really disappointing to see.