I like it over there. Of all the Twitter alternatives I think it ticks the right boxes.

• Decentralised
• Low barrier to sign up
• Not owned by a crazed billionaire
• No ads
• No popularity algorithm
• Interesting features, like custom feeds and moderation lists

If they can bridge their AT Protocol with ActivityPub then I don’t see why it can’t take off.

Honestly, I’m so jaded with this government that I just assume anything they announce is either just a disraction away from whatever ghastly thing they’re really doing or it’s some culturewar bait to stir up trouble.

Mastodon is great if you want a social media site that’ll have people shout at you for not putting a Content Warning on a post about you eating a ham sandwich.

Everything should be pirated, never use any Google or Microsoft service, use an email server you’ve built yourself, only get your social media access through obscure Mastodon servers, write your code in assembly language, only eat food you’ve caught or grown yourself, avoid the rental market by just building a hut in the woods.

The last election was in 2006. 17 years ago. The median age of people there is only 20. Most of those people didn’t vote for anyone, let alone Hamas. And even those that did vote, Hamas got less than 50% of the vote.

Also, nice use of ableist slurs there. Is that really appropriate?

Lens has been one of the most impressive bits of Google tech for years, but it still flies under the radar. I guess they’re just going to label it ‘AI’ now to get people to pay attention to it.

Love the nominative determinism at play here for Mr Bankman-Fried.

Sadly these still a lot of folks on there that haven’t moved elsewhere. If you curate your follower lists and don’t venture into the replies of big/ trending accounts then it’s still manageable. Mostly I just use to to read people I follow rather than post anything new myself these days.

Also, I’ve feeds of decent journalists that I’ve built up over many years that don’t post elsewhere. There’s still that immediacy that you just don’t get elsewhere.

For people still using Twitter, if you view it in a browser like Brave it will hide all the ads for you. Even better, you can save the webpage view as a Web App in your phone and access it that way and you barely even notice it’s the web version you’re using and not the app. I’ve not seen an ad on Twitter in months since doing that.

I like the fact that the article had to refer to the non-Musk site as XSM instead of its full name of ‘X Social Media’ because it would just make the article too confusing to use the proper name.

That perfectly illustrates the point.

I suppose it also means that if XSM lose the case because X is too generic, anyone can then set up a rival social media company also called X.

They can probably use the same logo too as it’s just Unicode.

This assumes everyone can have a charger at home. A large portion of people can’t. Apartments, associated spaces, on-road parking… a lot of people need public chargers.

Faster charging means a lower chance of all the chargers are in use at the service stations en-route. Currently if you’re in need of a charge you’ll have to wait for the others cars to get charged and then you still have the 20+ minute wait for your own car. That’s going to put a lot of folks off owning an EV. Coupled with the fact the EV uptake is growing a lot faster than the charging infrastructure to support it. Faster charging has a lot of benefits.

We had some good variety of search engines back in the day. Alta vista, Hotbot, Infoseek, Yahoo… Now it’s just Google, or slightly worse versions.

I know people say to use DuckDuckGo but I never get as useful results there as on Google. I just have to scroll past a lot more ads on Google to get to the actual links.

I hope it has good WiFi.

I guess if you’re mostly happy with how something is then you’ve no reason to bring it up.

Nobody is writing long articles, posting tweets or appearing on TV shows to talk about it being quite nice that they can currently go and buy a beer from a shop. But someone could easily decide that they want to rile people up about the easiness of buying beer. And it all goes from there.

A lot of people on Twitter have a “well we were here first, why should we be forced out just because these pricks are now here trying to take over?” attitude. And besides, if the only thing you use it for is to chat with your own mutuals, and keep away from the Trending stuff then it’s still a usable place.

It’s like Reddit used to be - If you curate your feed and stick to that rather than diving into the All view then you can still have a good time.

Why just admit defeat and give it over to the bullies and grifters instead of sticking around and fighting for it?

That happens when it mis-hears a trigger word. You can enable and audible ‘ping’ noise to play when you activate Google Assistant. It’s in the accessibility settings. Worth doing so you know when it’s actually been triggered.

Whether anyone is manually connecting to specific phones to listen in live to conversations is a very different topic. I’d say it’s a more important one then whether Google are recording everything so they can advertise things at you.

But yeah, that’s not what this article is about.

I don’t know why people keep thinking that phones are listening in on every conversation just so they can advertise ‘Volvo’ at you.

• they don’t need to - we give them loads of data voluntarily based on location data, what we search for, things we buy, things we ‘like’ on social media…

• they’d be stung for huge fines and reputational damage if caught doing it.

• it’d take enormous storage and processing power to manage all that data.

• Just think about how many things you talk about every day that you’ve never then seen an advert for (confirmation bias)

• my Google Home can’t understand me when I’m actually talking directly at it asking it a question, so the idea it can seripticiously pick out words while listening through my pocket is implausible.

Sure, that’s easy to say. But name another free, publicly available, instant mass message delivery system they could also use?