@FinchHaven@mastodonmigration I don’t think I really agree with this take that Musk only wants to watch the world (or xitter) burn or that trolling is his primary motivation. I’d argue he clearly wants to keep it going and some of his actions speak for that.
1/ Finnish government to make announcement on gas pipeline leak in Gulf of Finland.
According to Gasgrid Finland, the only possible reason for the unusual pressure drop in the Balticconnector pipeline is a hole in the pipe, which has only been in use for a few years.
Personal note: I'm assuming that the fact that there's a need for an announcement, is an indication of sabotage being suspected.
@hanse_mina they’re now saying a data cable connecting Finland to Estonia has also been damaged. The time of the press event also seems to vary between sources now, hs.fi is saying 17.30 while others are saying probably 18.00. In addition to that PM Orpo is going to make remarks at 16.00.
Twitter is collapsing as a platform, but people are turning away from Mastodon. It's a real shame. Personally I don't think Mastodon in its current incarnation will get such a favourable environment for growth. So something probably has to change for Mastodon or for federation before this works. https://botsin.space/
While I’m not at all convinced it’s game over for Mastodon yet I think the recent surge on shown on the mastodonusercount account was possibly a mirage, no other stat counters showed it and there’s always some instances (like pravda.me) pushing fake account numbers so it would be important to see a breakdown of where exactly the growth is coming when it is being reported.
@Loukas to offer some counterpoints, Mastodon is still way bigger than Bluesky and growth becomes more difficult when you have more and more of the people who were willing to move already on the platform.
Bluesky now has 1.45 million registered accounts but that is still far less than even Mastodon’s daily active userbase and most of those are probably inactive. As I recently posted the Bluesky stat counter says 0.6 million of those accounts have never posted a single message on Bluesky.
We also shouldn't forget that Threads federation is still coming, wordpress.com will enable activitypub support any day now, mozilla is working on their fediverse stuff etc.
I just think this level of doom and gloom is a little bit unwarranted at this point.
@Loukas well I would argue that the recent Bluesky developments must be the context for this since 3 days worth of lower daily active user numbers along with the disrepancies pointed out by @singe elsewhere in the thread alone don’t really show that people are turning away from Mastodon
🧵 Hey all! This is a new account, I'm still Zecharias Zelalem, freelance journalist and aspiring OSINTer providing news and analysis on the Horn of Africa for a variety of international media outlets. For the past year or so, I posted via @zekuzelalem, but I've transitioned away from that instance. I'll be posting from this account from now on. After recent changes on the journa dot host instance, I had no choice but to set up elsewhere. Hope to continue exchanges and friendships here.
Number 4. doesn’t make much sense to me since nobody is forcing you to use flakes.
Number 2. is kind of true I guess but doing the ./configure && make install dance never was a great solution to me anyway and nixpkgs is honestly easily comprehensive enough for me.
The rest are true to an extent but lack of documentation is really a general issue with free software and I really don’t find the documentation that does not apply to NixOS but does apply to every other distro to be that significant portion of them.
Having used a multitude of distros for over 20 years now I guess I’m not super worried about not knowing how to use a traditional distro either, but I could see that being a factor when choosing one for the first time or something.
Would also point out that manually modifying your /etc is really not the gold standard anyway, I'd argue you are always going to want to use some form of configuration management and that's going to push you one step away from the direct manipulation of distro-specific config files anyway even though it does not completely do away with it.
@publicvoit fair enough but these commercial binary-only things are always a pain unless you’re using one of the select few distros that they deem fit to support. Granted, you might have more luck hacking them onto a more “normal” distro than with NixOS.
I just don't get it what takes them so long. Musk openly spreads russian propaganda, mocks Ukrainian people and their struggle, tries to silence them, and Illia is doing this only now, and even then, as a sort of backup account.......... just nuts how strong is the hold to not leave.
@VikingChieftain@anderspuck@laimis I think @Tendar is also making it unnecessarily difficult for himself since he’s said he doesn’t want to post the same content on multiple accounts. I don’t think that really matters from the point of view of someone who is reading as long as he also engages with people on the platform (and it is still useful even it not). Of course even automated crossposting has its problems when Elon repeatedly comes up with ways to break it.
@w7voa “notorious for promoting lies” is a bit much in the case of sentdefender I think. I don’t doubt the article when it says the account echoed some false information or that it hasn’t done it more than once but at least AFAIK it’s a reasonably good OSINT account that does try to stick to the truth.
Has anyone yet said ”I tried Bluesky, but it was confusing and there was this weird ”use staging server” part in the sign up when I got that strange invite, that place sucks so that’s why I returned to Twitter”? For crying out loud it’s a beta app and people praise it already as the next thing? :blobfacepalm:
@rolle Yeah, I’ll be very surprised if this Bluesky enthusiasm does not start to fizzle out in a while because it definitely does not seem like the more mature product and it does not have the existing userbase of even Mastodon.
Meanwhile, I suppose people trying it out is better than them just doomscrolling on X.
"💸 The founder of Yandex will be paid $170 million less after criticizing the war
Instead of $250 for the sale of his share in the Russian business of the company, Arkady Volozh will receive only $70-80 million. So the government decided to punish Volozh for his words about the “barbaric invasion of Russia”: they say, “the company has actually shown its attitude towards Russia,” Kommersant sources say (https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6254171?from=top_main_3) »"
When I first saw posts about this movie on social media I kind of ignored them and scrolled on by because I thought they were talking about some kind of Conan the Barbarian movie LMAO but no it is nothing to do with that and it was pretty good. If you haven't seen it yet it's on Hulu #barbarian#horrormovies#horroronhulu@horror
Still wondering, are the familiar user interface and this certain "exclusiveness" (via invite) the only traits that attract people to join Bluesky? I mean it's so incomplete it blows my mind.
@rolle I think it probably just got semi-randomly chosen as the destination of the latest exodus, no real thought went into it. Same for when Mastodon was the primary destination too (I hope it becomes the one again) but building up the fediverse is certainly much more worthy as a goal as far as I’m concerned.
#Bluesky finally finished connecting it's first official federated server to the live system, so it moves closer to no longer being a Beta. Once people start making their own servers, moderation and managing federation becomes... well... just like Mastodon, essentially. Each server can then handle its own relaying and blocking etc.
Dorsey is part of Bluesky's board, and they waved his name around to give the fledgling project legitimacy, like any startup would. He was bullied off using the platform for being anti-trans. He focuses his posting time on Nostr (his other Twitter clone) now. So technically he has his name in it, but he won't interfere with it much since the board is bigger than just him.
Edit: removed text about Dorsey owning anything to do with Bluesky
@anianimalsmoe They may not control the codebase but they control the instance that they have spent months and months gathering users on. Even if other people are able to bring up instances that federate with it they totally control the only one that is going to matter anytime soon and could defederate themselves if they see that as better for business.
@anianimalsmoe there are some very important differences to Mastodon though. Mastodon was not built on VC money so Mastodon does not have the pressures to eventually start making it that Bluesky does and has not openly mused about how they may monetize through ads in the future for example. Mastodon did not wait to federate until mastodon.social already had a userbase in the millions, it was federating from very early on.