Thoughts on social media sites? UPDATE: Apple, IBM, Disney, etc. stopped advertising on Twitter - Musk suing

[Kagavi]

I pulled the ripcord on Twitter quite a while ago, because of ... uhh ... yeah. I miss it though. Really made me feel informed on daily news - I never understood those who said it stressed them out, etc. Sort by chronological and follow people who aren't morons. Done.

There's a lot of hub bub this week about Threads, Meta's new competitor to Twitter. I'm not on it, but it sounds unfinished a bit cuz apparently they accelerated release due to Twitter's last flambé performance. I think it's an offshoot of Instagram but appears if you delete the Threads app, it also deletes Instagram. Also can't sort by chronological. Daddy Zuck gets to choose. No thanks. I don't have any Meta accounts.

Other upcoming companies:

Post - Focused on news, but I don't think that works longterm. Glorified RSS.
Hive - What?
T2 - Thought this one was interesting. Former Twitter peeps, but they are focused on being nice - not sure that works. Temp. name. (Shut down on November 1, 2023.)
Mastodon - I understand it in theory, but where does the money come from? Confusing for average user.
Reddit - Burned LOTS of goodwill lately. Demanding unpaid moderators kiss their feet. Very leery now.
Bluesky - Feels like a Psyop using buzzwords about federated, la la la but there's something that feels off about it.
Nostr - For cryptobros.

I'm feeling itchy for something. Gotta have the critical mass. Thoughts?

 

[GBlade]

Mastodon and Threads both use the activitypub federated protocol. BlueSky and Nostr use a different federated protocol. These federated servers just sound like moderated subreddits without the ability of a ceo taking it offline. An interesting reaction to what's been happening with Twitter and Reddit.

 

[Lexclone]

I pulled the ripcord on Twitter quite a while ago, because of ... uhh ... yeah. I miss it though. Really made me feel informed on daily news - I never understood those who said it stressed them out, etc. Sort by chronological and follow people who aren't morons. Done.

There's a lot of hub bub this week about Threads, Meta's new competitor to Twitter. I'm not on it, but it sounds unfinished a bit cuz apparently they accelerated release due to Twitter's last flambé performance. I think it's an offshoot of Instagram but appears if you delete the Threads app, it also deletes Instagram. Also can't sort by chronological. Daddy Zuck gets to choose. No thanks. I don't have any Meta accounts.

Other upcoming companies:

Post - Focused on news, but I don't think that works longterm. Glorified RSS.
Hive - What?
T2 - Thought this one was interesting. Former Twitter peeps, but they are focused on being nice - not sure that works. Temp. name.
Mastodon - I understand it in theory, but where does the money come from? Confusing for average user.
Reddit - Burned LOTS of goodwill lately. Demanding unpaid moderators kiss their feet. Very leery now.
Bluesky - Feels like a Psyop using buzzwords about federated, la la la but there's something that feels off about it.
Nostr - For cryptobros.

I'm feeling itchy for something. Gotta have the critical mass. Thoughts?

CF is my social media. If there’s interesting tweets or news links, quite a few get posted on CF. There’s also enough “characters” in here to give the site… character...

I left Twitter a long time ago, and I don’t miss it.

 

[carvers4math]

CF is about all I do. Husband has Facebook so we get the family pictures but I don’t ever want anything with my actual name given my crime victim past.

I do look at Reddit for information sometimes but do not have an account. I am concerned about the proliferation of false information out there. Used to look at Twitter when you could without an account.

I guess I just think too much of it is lies and manipulation and nastiness. I have news sources I trust but certainly do not trust any of social media.

 

[MugNight]

I have a hard time engaging with any of it. It feels like everything good eventually turns into an advertisement at best. At worst, I get a stream of things meant to make me upset.

CF is my main spot, and I have opted out of the political forums.

 

[Pat]

Edit: Oh right, can’t embed Tweets anymore.

 

[Clonehomer]

CF is my social media. If there’s interesting tweets or news links, quite a few get posted on CF. There’s also enough “characters” in here to give the site… character...

I left Twitter a long time ago, and I don’t miss it.

I feel like CF is at times a medium to view Twitter posts of topics that require news from outside sources. So really the question is which of these services would be an eventual replacement for those Twitter posts that we’ll all view on CF?

So really, which of these services will provide the best realignment “news”?

 

[tim_redd]

Threads seems the closest to a real challenger to twitter. They (hopefully) have a few features to add but it's been fun messing around on it so far. I like Mastodon but it never seemed like it was able to gain critical mass.

 

[clonechemist]

I deleted Twitter months ago, then signed up for mastodon but never figured out how to use it.

More recently I switched to Reddit as my primary ‘info browsing app’. OK, but couldn’t quite fill the hole Twitter left in my brain space.

Signed up for Threads last night and I like it so far. Found many of my old favorite Twitter follows on there (mostly oriented towards observational and politics writers, along with some sports journalists and entertainers). It’s not perfect, but it seems promising.

 

[HFCS]

It's interesting that Twitter only intentionally made their links dead links for a few days. Already today I can click on a link again and see it without being logged into an active account.

I'm really curious exactly what led them to do such a drastic thing then immediately admit it didn't work and reverse course. I'm guessing advertisers and paid promoted tweets were outraged that people who could see some ads before no longer could. Another possibility is they didn't see a huge surge in new accounts and by day three of not seeing that there was no real upside to being a dead links company.

I only used Twitter 3-4 times a week for maybe 20 minutes, before deleting my account. "Something" changed and it felt like it was suggesting mostly cults to me overnight and I didn't want to expend the effort to try to block all the cults. When I say "cults" I'm talking both mainstream political cults I don't care for and also cults like I was getting a ton of Scientology promotion overnight (probably because of my location but it all happened at the same time).

I do use IG kind of as a lazy work portfolio so I like the idea that Thread can connect to one of the few social networks I kind of begrudgingly use. I also think IG tends to have the least toxic discourse although I think a lot of that is just the format of looking at still photos is inherently less hostile than video/audio/news. I would expect a Twitter replacement born from IG to have more hostile discourse than IG itself.

 

[CoachHines3]

i don't get why everyone thinks twitter is so bad or going to go somewhere lol.

twitter is the best for up to the minute news

 

[HFCS]

I feel like CF is at times a medium to view Twitter posts of topics that require news from outside sources. So really the question is which of these services would be an eventual replacement for those Twitter posts that we’ll all view on CF?

So really, which of these services will provide the best realignment “news”?

It's definitely that to me for sports, specifically conference realignment more than anything else.

When Twitter decided to make purposeful dead links for a few days the one thing I missed was reading conference realignment news and all of that I got from people posting tweets on CF.

 

[KidSilverhair]

Threads has exploded in user base after its debut - not surprising, I guess given its connections to Meta and Instagram. I started up an account just to see what’s poppin’ - it’s a work in progress. It needs a chronological option, and a way to only show who you‘re following instead of having the algorithm pick what you see. There’s promise there.

I’m hanging on to Twitter. My “Following” feed is pretty well curated, I don’t see a lot of “Elon‘s purchased blue-check” trash, unless I choose to go into the replies to a tweet.

Never tried Mastodon, although I thought about it. It just sounds confusing, although I haven’t actually been there. Meta is making rumbles about “federation” that would allow cross-viewing and posting between Threads and Mastodon, which could be huge.

No one has given me a bluesky invite, so who knows what that’s like, lol.

Even though Threads is being run by Zuckerberg, who isn’t exactly a hero unless you compare him to Elon, a comment I saw on Threads today said “Even if it is the 2nd worst person in the world you decide to back, as long as you’re picking them over the very worst person in the world you’re still moving in the right direction” ha ha.

 

[HFCS]

i don't get why everyone thinks twitter is so bad or going to go somewhere lol.

twitter is the best for up to the minute news

Maybe I was using it wrong but my account really did change rapidly in a pretty toxic way.

I don't have the will power to totally ignore things I view as cults (even just actual cults in my case where it suddenly promoted scientology to me) when I'm clicking a link about Arizona considering joining the Big 12. It wasn't gradual, it was a huge change over the course of just a few days.

If I have to put some effort into keeping it on track with real news, real sports and a few other real interests instead of flooding me with things I hate or things that are not even real, it's not very valuable.

 

[Clonefan32]

I've been pretty well reliant on Twitter for all my news, so I've stuck with it. I downloaded Threads today and it seems fine. I'll probably try to move over completely after I get more acquainted with it.

 

[JP4CY]

i don't get why everyone thinks twitter is so bad or going to go somewhere lol.

twitter is the best for up to the minute news

The publisher of this site brought it up in the last podcast with Hassel. Said he'll talk about it in next episode.

 

[bozclone]

I have Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. I don't want another Meta social media account. I rarely use Facebook. It had a purpose at one time, but it is almost unusable now. Not a fan of Zuckerberg. I use twitter for most of my news and information. I try to limit who I follow and just skid stupid stuff. Instagram is mostly used for entertainment and mindless scrolling. 85% of my social media time is on CF or twitter.

 

[CoachHines3]

Maybe I was using it wrong but my account really did change rapidly in a pretty toxic way.

I don't have the will power to totally ignore things I view as cults (even just actual cults in my case where it suddenly promoted scientology to me) when I'm clicking a link about Arizona considering joining the Big 12. It wasn't gradual, it was a huge change over the course of just a few days.

If I have to put some effort into keeping it on track with real news, real sports and a few other real interests instead of flooding me with things I hate or things that are not even real, it's not very valuable.

I don't even really use the "For You" tab.

I stick to the "Following" so I can see the content that I want to see by the people I want to see it by.

The "For You" tab can get a little off the rails if you start clicking on others profiles and it ends up sort of changing the algorithm. But even for me, it's more so just sports news under that tab.

 

[Big Daddy Kang]

Meh. They're all avenues to spoon feed you ads/opinions/outrage. Aren't they?

 

[tman24]

I wont touch anything meta related so those are off the table. Twitter and Reddit are only used from webpages not apps. Probably stop using them soon. So that leaves me down to CF and discord.