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 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.
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
Twitter Blue is not about being verified. It will designate paying customers. And if there is a money trail, the user is known, not necessarily by the name he chose. Twitter will take away features from free users until they pay up.
As simple as that. If you want to stay on Twitter, you will have to pay.
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’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
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.
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.
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”.
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:
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:
