"To keep us addicted, many of the websites and apps we use fuel the same neural circuitry used by cocaine and slot machines.
But RSS feeds allow you to consume content in a way that's free from any distractions or sneaky cocaine strategies.
They allow you to see only the content you want to read right there in the feed, in its entirety, and without all the fancy ads or triggering comments."
Threads: I'm in a wrong party and don't know what to say. I feel awkward, everyone is so happy with their gym selfies. Everyone asking endless questions and asking things from the algorithm. Lots of people use it like Instagram, every post is a selfie with a meaningless caption. Some are copy-pasting the same sentence over and over again for each line. Endless quote-post memes... What the fuck is this shit I don't even...
Bluesky: A Twitter clone, but still very barebones. Notifications are still not working, there are no hashtags and I don't find any relevant content to me in any of the feeds. It's mostly Facebook-like what's up in life, furry scene and AI photos. No news, no tech/web scene, no nothing. Not to mention it's still invite-only and won't support ActivityPub (yeah I know the reasoning behind that but for me it's mostly bullshit, I look forward to trying bridgy fed).
Mastodon and the Fediverse: Here I'm at home on my own server. Most content, most features. A community is friendly but has also lots of nitpicking, some angry dudes. Still the most safest, most healthy and most customized, but somehow the most hated network elsewhere. "Too techie", they say. "Too difficult", they say. "No algorithm", they say.
Nostr: Kinda promising, but way too obscure, strange and even techier than Mastodon. Too much crypto shit.
Well, that's that. Sometimes I feel like Internet is ruined. But I believe in the open social web movement and I want to see this grow.
In no other place I can write a status update as freely as this, as long as this or with a low bar as this. I LIKE this 100%. The same can't be said in those other places I'm experimenting with out of curiosity. There I'm the weird kid. Here I feel like myself.
Max Bergmann, a former State Department official and now program director with the Center for Strategic International Studies, predicts Russian-fueled turbulence at the Democratic national convention in August. He foresees attempts of Russian operatives to infiltrate groups of protestors and attempt to turn protests violent.
He also notes that social media has “become way more of a cesspool than it was in 2016.”
This is a spectacularly good analysis of why traffic referrals from social media have fallen off a cliff and what it means for publishers. This all comes out of what @pluralistic calls the enshittification of publishing, social media, and ads. People are tired of and overwhelmed by clickbait journalism. The answer, of course, is to provide actually good content, and present it well.
How #Verified Accounts on X Thrive While Spreading #Misinformation About the Israel-Hamas Conflict
With the gutting of content moderation initiatives at the former #Twitter, accounts with blue checks, once a sign of authenticity, are disseminating debunked claims and gaining more followers.
Community Notes, X’s fact-checking system, hasn’t scaled sufficiently.
"TikTok? Last year after FB worked years to keep it sealed, a court unsealed its secret app audit. It showed 86,961 developers in CHINA HAD ACCESS TO ALL OF OUR PERSONAL DATA…yet crickets. This is the same app audit Zuckerberg promised Congress after concerns American’s personal data had been readily mined in RU. Throw in IR, NK, you name it. Press didn’t dig in. A good source told me DOJ & Congress hadn’t ever even seen this forensic audit."
-J Kint
Well, that's just plain stupid: Germany's government will apparently start to manually (!!) post screenshots of their tweets on their website, to circumvent any restrictions on #Twitter's visibility introduced by #ElonMusk.
But they don't have to post there at all. Just leave already. It's not that difficult.
Tweets in Kopie: Bundesregierung umgeht Twitter-Beschränkung mit Screenshots auf eigener Website