Tag: #twitter

5294

When Musk bought Twitter, I gave up on the platform, immediately. I left a verified account with thousands of followers behind, removed all posts and unfollowed everyone.

Ever since Musk revealed himself to be an insufferable jerk when 12 boys and their soccer coach were trapped in flooded caves in Thailand in July 2018, I knew that I would never ever do business with him. As in “buy one of his cars” or “work for him”. When he took over Twitter it was time to go. I wasn’t going to work for him.

Strangely enough, this retired account still has 5294 followers, and the number keeps falling. As of today, 5294 also happens to be the number of followers I have on Mastodon, in the Fediverse.

Trust me, this is a much better place. Martin Holland keeps a list of verified media accounts on the platform that can be searched, filtered and exported for mass following.

I also maintain an account on Bluesky which I am not posting to at the moment since engagement has been way below Mastodon recently. Granted, it only has 3450 followers. I still read posts on the platform once a day and I may return in the future. Here is a starter kit with fellow authors.

Das wird niX mehr mit Twitter

Unter Elon Musk hat sich der Blue Check von einem Kennzeichen für respektable und authentische Accounts zu einem Abzeichen für Schwurbler, Neonazi-Sympathisanten und Wichtigtuer entwickelt. Also Leute, die 8 Dollar im Monat für ihre Wichtigkeit ausgeben.

Die Tatsache, dass Twitter diese Leute nun in den Replys nach oben schiebt, kann man sich zunutze machen. Das kostenlose Plugin Blue Blocker blockiert diese Accounts, sobald sie auftauchen. Bei mir nun schon 65536 mal. (Ja, das ist 64k oder 2^16.) Das ist jedenfalls nicht die Obergrenze, weil die Zahl schon nicht mehr in einen Unsigned Int passt. Es gibt bei mir nur zwei Möglichkeiten, auf diese Liste zu kommen: Blue Check oder Sponsored Tweet, neuerdings Ad genannt.

So oder so, das wird nichts mehr mit Twitter. Elon Musk hat den Laden zerstört. Warum Twitter, aber nicht Tesla oder SpaceX? Diese Unternehmen haben ein ganzes Management-Layer, welche die Unternehmen vor seinen spontanen Entscheidungen schützen. Seit sich Musk in Twitter verbissen hat, gehen die Geschäfte glänzend.

Nur nicht bei uns. Musk hat uns erfolgreich vor einem Tesla-Kauf bewahrt.

Block the paychecks

The Blue Blocker plugin has gotten really good. It scans the Twitter stream for people who pay Elon $8 a month and blocks them. Just very slowly, so that it does not trigger Twitter. This makes even the For You page useful. It will also remove all the self-important reply-guys. This now needs to be extended to people with Twitter handles ending in five numbers and more and to all those who promote tweets.

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Don Elon

NPR:

In an unprompted Tuesday email, Musk wrote: “So is NPR going to start posting on Twitter again, or should we reassign @NPR to another company?”

Das ist eine Drohung, direkt aus dem Lehrbuch der Don Corleone School of Business: “Einen schönen kleinen Laden hast du da. Wäre doch schade, wenn was passiert.”

Ich denke, die Nachricht kommt an: Mache keine Geschäfte mit Elon.

I am not missing Twitter (or Facebook)

The blue checkmark will eventually go away. I did not pay for it, and never will.

I often make decisions based on principle. Years ago, I stopped posting on Facebook and last year I stopped posting on Twitter after Elon Musk bought the platform.

Both decisions may have limited my “clout”, but they have improved my life. When I have something to say, I do it here. Sometimes I post on Mastodon, but these posting are ephemeral.

Twitter is dying

Since Musk took over he has set about dismantling everything that made Twitter valuable — making it his mission to drive out expertise, scare away celebrities, bully reporters and — on the flip side — reward the bad actors, spammers and sycophants who thrive in the opposite environment: An information vacuum.

It almost doesn’t matter if this is deliberate sabotage by Musk or the blundering stupidity of a clueless idiot. The upshot is the same: Twitter is dying.

I live here now: social.heise.de/@vowe

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Heute handeln: Mastodon einrichten

Wer von einem sozialen Netzwerk zu einem anderen umzieht, landet zunächst in der Wüste. Er muss erst einmal seine Quellen finden.

Für den Umzug von Twitter zu Mastodon hat man eine Methode gefunden, auch im neuen Netzwerk auffindbar zu sein. Man fügt seinem eigenen Twitter-Profil einfach die neue Adresse hinzu. Bei mir ist das @vowe@social.heise.de respektive https://social.heise.de/@vowe. Dann können andere einen Service nutzen, der die eigene Follower-Liste per Twitter API abgrast und die neuen Adressen sammelt, um sie dann in Mastodon zu importieren.

Twitter hat sich auf Geheiß von Musk dagegen gewehrt, in dem sie Links auf Mastodon als kriminell brandmarkte. Wie so viele Musk-Aktionen wurde das mittlerweile zurückgenommen.

Ab Mittwoch, dem 9. Februar 2023 aber soll das Twitter API kostenpflichtig werden und damit sind die Umzugsdienste wie Fedifinder vom Aussterben bedroht. Darum sollte man heute noch ein Mastodon-Konto anlegen und die Follower-Liste importieren. Beides ist super einfach.

Morgen könnte es zu spät sein.

Twitter Trust and Safety

“Twitter’s policies and practices in the trust and safety space were built around defending the rights of users around the world, especially the most vulnerable and marginalized communities,” the former executive said. “Since the acquisition, the company’s only actions have been to silence critics of Elon, to expose journalists and others to harm, and to violate basic ethical standards and privacy laws.”

BNN Bloomberg

Twitterrific has been discontinued

A sentence that none of us wanted to write, but have long felt would need to be written someday. We didn’t expect to be writing it so soon, though, and certainly not without having had time to notify you that it was coming. We are sorry to say that the app’s sudden and undignified demise is due to an unannounced and undocumented policy change by an increasingly capricious Twitter – a Twitter that we no longer recognize as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer.

iconfactory January 19, 2023

I don’t want to work with Twitter either. Iconfactory is currently developing a Mastodon client. Find me at @vowe@home.social.

BREAKING: Twitter

I am surprised how quickly Elon Musk is sinking his Twitter ship. I stopped posting there a while ago and have been watching this train wreck from outside. Like facebook.com/volker my profile twitter.com/vowe will stay up, until Elmo makes up another rule that I retro-actively broke. But if you are looking for content, it is now happening at home.social/@vowe

If you don’t know where to sign up, got to https://home.social/ and let the operator know that vowe sent you.

Social Quitting

And then…Stuff happened. Mark Zuckerberg got worried about losing users and decided we were all going to live as legless low-polygon cartoons in a metaverse that no one wanted to use, not even the Facebook employees who built it. Twitter got bought out by a low-attention-span, overconfident billionaire who started pulling out Jenga blocks to see whether the system would fall over, and when it did, we all got crushed by the falling blocks.

Great piece by Cory Doctorow on the “MySpacing of Facebook and Beboizing of Twitter”.

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The power of Mastodon

I ran a quick poll yesterday on both Mastodon and Twitter. You can see the polls below, and I will comment on the results further down. The poll wasn’t really meant to find out anything about Covid. There are way better studies out there. What I was trying to find out was how the engagement on Mastodon is, compared to Twitter. Three numbers:

  • Mastodon (2400 followers): 11667 votes, 1381 boosts, 298 favorites
  • Twitter (6800 followers): 330 votes, 22 retweets, 5 likes

I have about three times as many followers on Twitter than on Mastodon, but the engagement is so much higher on Mastodon, that the two do not even compare.

The results are mostly useless. People do not know how often they have been infected and the medical standards vary widely between the US and EU. You can safely assume that there are more infections, but you can also learn that infections are not inevitable. I have many replies from people who mask religiously because they have other medical conditions that would make an infection with Covid-19 much more dangerous that to the average person.

Your next steps:

  1. Sign up for Mastodon. If you have trouble finding an instance, go to https://home.social
  2. Search for me as vowe@vowe.net and follow.