"every single terrible thing you see on facebook — be it some sort of horrible right wing nonsense or a confusing and annoying product decision — is made in pursuit of growth. every bit of damage that meta has caused to the world has been either an act of ignorance or deliberate harm"
When I heard #threads was gonna federate, I got hopeful. all the journalists and politicians might leave #xitter for a place that can also provide them a huge audience but with less assholes. and we will slowly get them to go independent as they recognize that controlling their work doesn't require losing their followers etc. enough people do that and it gets "locked open". we win.
so of course now #meta has to tell them politics won't get the algo boost there...
What a pleasant surprise to have found an app (@openvibe) that aims to bring together all decentralized social networks in one! It saves you the trouble of having to post on each one separately. For now, it works with #Mastodon and #Nostr, but they plan to add #Bluesky and #Threads. Very good news! Check it out if you can. 😉
I visit Twitter maybe once a day & it amazes me that that place is basically one giant YouTube comments section... except that much of its content is absolutely critical to what I do.
There's simply no other place that publishes news & information from millions of sources in the same way. And no other social ecosystem has done ANYTHING to compel corporations & govt entities to contribute in the same way to their networks.
@kurtsh they definitely seem to be working on tweaking their algorithm because it's been a different experience every few weeks when I take another look around.
When they first launched, it was just absolute chaos. It felt like everyone talking at the same time. I literally got vertigo and noped outta there in 30 minutes.
Another visit some time later was nothing but engagement hacking and clickbait. Nope nope nope again.
More recently I've been seeing a lot of photography content. It was all from big accounts which I'm not interested in feeding.
This past weekend, I got hit with lots of photography threads again, but this time it was mostly small accounts and amateurs sharing tips and helping each other and that was really cool.
And then suddenly it was all about shaming the gay guy who had the misfortune of admitting he ate at Chick-Fil-A. I hit "not interested in this" and thankfully did not wander into that melee again.
Apropos of nothing, I'm heartened by the degree to which huge swaths of communities I'm attached to (thinking #lawfedi / #legal, #technology, #policy, #podcast, etc.) have seemingly rejected the siren call of going all-in on #Threads as a Twitter/X replacement.
I know many have been sailing under their own flag for quite some time, but we're hurdling towards two years and it feels like something that can persist.
Threads is giving young Taiwanese activists a space to connect and mobilize, reports @restofworld, drawing in 1.88 million active monthly users — the fourth highest user base globally behind the U.S., Japan and Brazil, despite having a much smaller population.
It continues: “Protestors have been using a range of apps, including Facebook, Line, and Discord, to coordinate the leaderless protests, but many have found Threads to be the most effective in connecting with people outside their own social circles.” But with Meta promising to cut down on political content across its apps, how long will Threads be willing to host their activism?
My biggest #gripe with #Mastodon is reach and the ability to discover stuff outside of chronological scrolling. Lists in #BlueSky make that better. Imho the algorithms in #Threads are too intrusive.
If there were simpler ways to connect with different topics on here it would make it excellent, to me at least. I guess it might come down to why you use different social media.
Article by Rest of the World on how popular #Threads is for young protesters in #Taiwan
"freshly created political communities could be fragile as Meta promises to reduce the amount of political content users can see. Facebook began limiting political content in 2021, and Meta said this year that Instagram and Threads would also stop recommending political content, unless it came from accounts users were following."
Meanwhile, one of my favourite features of #Mastodon: "Hide boosts from XY" (behind the 3 dots of a profile). I had to do it with people who boost every single post of crazy 60-posts-threads.
If you want to boost threads, it's enough to boost the first post! Or only post No 35. If they are numbered or signed with🧵 we can look for the rest ourselves! Please don't flood timelines by boosting every single post!
"Meta's chief product officer, Chris Cox, told Bloomberg's Tech Summit on Thursday that it uses publicly available photos and text from the platforms to train its text-to-image generator model"
Just checked a few other instances, and wondering why so many are blocking #threads. That's like having your email provider block Gmail, and a very weird thing to do in my opinion. Is it just fear/uncertainity/not understanding how Mastodon/ActivityPub works?