kosure

It’s grim. Obviously twitter still holds sway over a lot of people. And spreading malinformed propaganda is bad.

But it really underlines that anyone with any conscience whatsoever needs to disengage from it. It’s not okay for governments to engage with it. And though I don’t suggest that capital cares has any sort of conscience, but engaging with it has been increasing in cost and decreasing in benefit. NPR recently left, for example, and saw nearly no impact whatsoever. So the cost of leaving is low.

Ideally people would deny it any money, advertising or otherwise, until it ceases functioning. I suspect Musk will continue to be a delusional asshole for years to come. But at least twitter will be dead and gone.

I think there is one main difference between xmpp and activitypub. A chat protocol gets better the more users it has. So the users were the killer app. xmpp arguably wasn’t much worse off after Google left than before it got there.

Mastodon is a bit like this, in that lots of users are probably looking for the same type of content from the same users as they got on Twitter.

kbin/lemmy are a lot less like that. I just need enough people to surface interesting content and have a meaningful conversation. And I’ve already (mostly) got that now. If meta brought all of their users to link sharing it would probably get worse with clout-chasing, organic marketing, and low effort crap.

From a product side, I think most meta users who are looking for microblogging are happy enough with Twitter. So I think it will be tough to get a lot of initial buy-in.

In regards to the embrace, extend, extinguish concerns: I can’t, off the top of my head, think of any feature adds that would outweigh fediverse peoples distaste for ads or corporate social media. I mean, are flashy ai filters enough to split the user base of a reddit-alike or twitter clones? Is anyone clamoring for vr group-chats to improve their link-sharing threaded convos.

I’m not saying there’s nothing to worry about, but I think the feature-poor nature of these types of services (that really aren’t significantly different than old bbses) insulates at least those corners of the fediverse to some extent.

Plus, feature-creep is something people usually hate, or are uninterested in with big social media before this all started to pop off? Remember Foursquare check-ins, deals, credits, crypto, live audio…

One way that I have used up/down votes, particularly on comments, is to surface the most valuable information. For example, if a post has valuable content, that is patently useful but it isn’t the top comment I will down-vote the top comment(s) and upvote the valuable one.

For example, if someone posts a question and the top 3 comments are low-effort jokes, and the fourth comment is the answer, I would down-vote the top three and upvote the 4th. In an effort to surface the best information.

Now, I try not to do this unless I’m certain of post 4s quality. And usually not unless there are enough votes that a joke-commenters would feel personally picked on, or like their joke wasn’t good.

Other examples of good comments (by my reckoning) are: transcriptions, useful links or context, proof, other examples of the same thing. Or somewhat verifiable reasons why the post is unhelpful or misleading.

The crowd isn’t always right. But it can provide useful context and I try to be a part of that.