scattered thoughts on twitter and it's alternatives

2023-07-02

or "but what ends, when the internet shatters?"

It's always a shame, to watch your idealism collide with reality. I've been advocating for a more decentralised internet for years now. As the corponet collapses in on itself under the weight of the ever increasing demands of shareholders and the whims of billionaires detatched from reality, truly, our time is now. Nostalgia for the web of the 90s and 00s is at an all time high. Platforms like lemmy and mastadon are deep enough in their development to be fairly populated and feature complete. People are sick of being treated like second class citizens in their own computer. It's only a matter of time before the decentralised web rises from the ashes.

no. They're all just going to move to threads aren't they.

that is, if twitter or reddit actually collapse at all. For reddit, this seems unlikely. I don't see it going anywhere any time soon, since the recent issues only really effect a small minority of users. As for twitter, I sure do see a lot of hype about leaving twitter posted on twitter. People have been posturing like they're going to leave youtube for years and it hasn't happened. But let's assume that twitter's dumpster fire is really that bad, that people really do leave. Where do you think they're going to go? The nerds will keep pushing mastadon but well, it's going to be bluesky or threads. Threads reached 100 million users in a matter of days. I think that says it all really. And that's without anyone from the EU even being able to use it, due to it being so privacy violating it's illegal. Which of course is why I will not be signing up. Well that and I dont' want to be there because it looks extremely lame. As for bluesky, well we're all a bit in the dark here. I don't have access to bluesky but I can see it still existing, and being the slightly more niche, hipster twitter clone. of course, niche is a relative term here, we're still talking 10s of millions of users.

Threads plans to become a part of the fediverse. Bluesky is a little more interesting, as they've decided to make their own decentralised protocol. I'm reading the docs now and they talk about why they chose not to just use activitypub. "Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub. The migration tools for ActivityPub are comparatively limited; they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user's previous data." Honestly, this is actually a pretty good idea which adresses a problem I have with activitypub, but I also think a flawed standard that everyone can agree on is better than competing standards which aren't compatible. Since neither threads nore bluesky have integrated their federated functionality yet, it's too early to see how this will play out, but I will definitely be paying attention to developments here.

so, the obvious elephant in the room, mastadon. Look, mastadon, your heart is in the right place. I've tried for years to get along with you but I think it's time we admit, you and were just not made for each other. I'm not going to rehash stuff I've already said in this post but I will add one more thing. Frankly, mastadon users are chronically unfunny. There are many very talented individuals over there, creative artists, software devs, and plenty of average joes who post about their personal lives and interests. Much of the content of this site is quite informative. These people have clearly forgotten that the primary use case of microbloging platforms is to scroll while you're taking a shit. Now I don't personally do this because I don't have an app for these things on my phone but that is the vibe. I'm just not in the right headspace to read about infosec or whatever. This problem that bluesky is trying to address about unexpected bans is very real, I see people being silenced or suspended for the most inane stuff on mastadon, like just today a guy I follow was silenced by some instance for literally just complaining about a feature in fedora linux being opt-out rather than opt-in. This stuff is so annoying.

the other day I saw a reddit post about joining the fediverse, someone just asking how to join mastadon how to find people to follow etc. One of the most upvoted replies just said what I think sadly we've all come to realise. They said to ignore all the people saying to join a smaller instance to keep mastadon decentralised, just join the main mastadon instance. Joiing some small obscure instance just means you'll never find anyone interesting, and it's liable to go down or get nuked at any time. This is the problem with federation in this space. The rule of thumb is in any network, decreasing centralisation means increasing resiliance. Even if one node goes down, the network as a whole can survive and be fine. This being the case, these federated spaces need to be designed to assume any instance can go down at any time. This seems to be what bluesky's AT protocol does and that looks pretty promising.

mastadon struggles with an issue many "alternative" places do. Half the posts are just talking about mastadon itself, or twitter. The same is true on gemini. I tried to play my part in fixing this by creating an anime gemlog but then lost the password to the thing i was using to host it, whoops.

anyway here I am on my alternative to tihs bulsshit complaingin about the other alternatives to this bullshit so i just realised I'm literally reproducing the same problem. once again, whoops.

I myself am pretty sick of having an identity online. But i'm also pretty sick of imageboard culture these days. I've been a 4chan user for like what, a decade now? Sure there have always been /pol/tards shitting up every board, but the recent trans panic has really made so many threads insuferable. It's so easy to derail a thread by just baiting with trans stuff that there is no reason not to, and mods are very reluctant to actually enforce rule 3 (yes, in case you don't use the place yourself you may be surprised to find out that 4chan actually has rules). After using getting more and more into even older school anonymous textboards / BBSs (i think they're not technically BBS because that's not quite the same tech but like people still call them that) and more and more using altchans. Look I just like what I like ok. I also aim to post here more often. Hopefully more frequent, shorter posts. It's rare though. Because i just make those kinds of thoughts into youtube. ok my brain is done now. Goodbye