Basically, Mastodon, the Federated Open Source client for microblogging is shifting itself to be a not for profit company. John Mastodon os no longer in control. Or, he won’t be. These things apparently take a few months to do. Tangentially related, its picture centric counterpart Pixelfed, has experienced unprecedented growth. I saw one post where a Pixelfed instance was no longer allowing Instagram importing and Facebook is apparently blocking links to Pixelfed.
Both of these moves are very good for the internet as a whole, but they also feel very much sparked by Facebook’s recently policy changes. Basically, as part of its push to bown down to the incoming administration, Zuck has shown his true colors and rolled out a new policy that fact checking is no longer a thing on Facebook. Instead it will rely on “user notes.” At the same time, and more maliciously, they also changed their policies around hate speech, with specific exceptions around calling out LGBTQ people as being mentally disabled. Basically, you can’t get banned anymore for hate speech against the LGBTQ crowd.
This pretty much aligns with the plans of the incoming administration to start stripping away people’s rights as rapidly as possible, starting with transgender folks, probably pushing through on gay marriage and gay rights, and eventually layering on top a good helping of removing women’s autonomy from US society.
With the destruction facts and reality on Twitter, and now Facebook, basically, propaganda and lies are set to take over. We already saw it on Twitter.
This change isn’t the only anti-LBGTQ thing happening on Facebook. They renamed (one report said removed, one renamed) some of the Pride themes on Messenger to be more generic (Example, I want to say the lesbian pride was now “rustic sunrise” or something). I also saw some people suggest they had had various pride based badging removed from their username and profiles.
I do feel like its a bit more though, than just the new policies. But I am sure that is a lot of it. I don’t use Instagram really anymore, the algorithm has destroyed my interest in that platform, but I follow the Instagram subreddit. In the past few months, there have been a massive influx of accounts and people being randomly banned from the platform by the new AI based moderation system. It doesn’t really tell why either. Just the vague, “violation of site policy.”
So, it does seem there are still ways to get banned, but just not for LGBTQ hate speech.
Not to be overtaken by Twitter and Facebook, WordPress, has also been making a huge stink for its users lately. Its much less in the came of hate speech, but more in the area of, “Their CEO is just being a weird, petty whiney bully.” There is some sort of feud going on between WordPress and something called WPEngine, which is apparently a popular WP host, but I had never heard of it before this recent events. Like I said, it all seems very petty. Like the log in form for WordPress had a checkbox that said, “I am not affiliated with WPEngine for a bit. When people complained it was changed to “Pineapple on Pizza is good.” There have been other similar incidents.
I have been mostly ignoring it from apathy, but lately, it feels like WP just wants to bring in and potentially monetize the shit out of everything, and its got me seriously considering changing my blog platform, despite that I am hosting the software on my own VPS. I have been looking at doing some sort of static site system for a while, its starting to really feel like its time to be serious.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Meta plans to roll out generative AI (genAI) characters on Facebook and Instagram this year in an effort to boost user engagement.
Also, they apparently also deleted these accounts after the backlash, with some excuse about it being a “test product” and that it was run by humans on the backend. You know it will come back though. These companies have wasted too much time and money on this AI garbage to turn back now.
But one, I don’t know why they need to do this, these platforms are already overrun with AI “influencers”. And those influencers are already posting what they know will drive traffic, AI ladies with boobs and skimpy clothing. Not boring AI soccer moms.
Two, and, less jokingly, if they want to drive user engagement, then maybe they could try promoting… engagement with… users?
I can only speak to how I use Facebook, but I have heard plenty of people say they don’t really use it anymore because it never shows them what they want. Same for Instagram. I have no idea about Threads, for the “Microblogging Wars” I have already given up on Threads. My OpenVibe app crossposts to it, when I remember to use it instead of the native clients, but at this point, I am just, Bluesky and Mastodon. Bluesky for “what’s hip and current and meme-able”, Mastodon as the underlying pulse of the old-school nerdy internet.
But I am not here to discuss other platforms, just Facebook’s various platforms. I’ve established I don’t use Threads. I really don’t use Instagram either. Insteagram is like 90% videos now, which I absolutely LOATHE. I want photos, I use Instagram for PHOTOS. If I wanted videos I would use TikTok or Youtube, but I don’t really want videos ever. I check on TikTok like once a month to catch up on the 3 accounts I actually care about.
Instagram is also way too inundated with ads every other post. And yes, I am including “you might like this” in ads. I want to see posts from people I followed, I followed them for a reason, because I found their posts interesting, or in some cases because they were not “amazing” but I want to feel encouraging. Because I know I am in that latter group. Because I don’t need to ONLY see perfect, edited, amazing 10,000 likes photos, I want to see the 2-likes mediocre ones too.
But instead, it just keeps suggesting things to me, or showing ads.
Facebook has a similar problem. They want users to interact and comment and treat their groups like little forums. But then when I join a group, or like a page, it never actually shows me that content. Just, more suggestions. I don’t need to join 10 Aurora fan groups and a dozen Retro Gaming groups, show me content from the ones I am already in damn it.
And I definitely don’t need these spaces filled with AI garbage. Because these fake “influencers” are only going to be used to promote more ads. When I look for suggestions from people, I want real people who have actually used this crap, not some AI trained on an ad read.
Speaking of broken and dead internet, when pulling a quote, for context, from another website, it copied and pasted an additional hidden section as well…
Like, thats not how this work, that’s not how any of this works. The internet is made for sharing. I don’t think Financial Times would sue me or anything for removing their stupid blub, but instead, I just changed the quote and linked news article. So now you get nothing FT.
Bravo. Now the marketer website can get the zero click-throughs I generated by linking it.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Something I feel like I take for granted a bit is just how good my state handles everything election wise. And it’s politics in general, for the most part. I mean, like everywhere it’s full of nuts in the rural areas, but overall, it’s traditionally just been a “safe” state.
One thing that I love that is newer is vote by mail. This started back in 2020 because of COVID of course. I mean, maybe it was an option before, but it was made extremely easy in the 2020 election. Previously, like many others, I would go down to my local polling place, often at like 6:30 in the morning before there was a line and before work, fill out a sheet, stick it in a machine, and vote. I tried to vote every year, at least in November, but not always in things like Primaries.
One option when they started the initial vote-by-mail push, was basically, “sign me up for every future election”.
And this has been sooooo nice. I get ballots for every election, even off-year and off-month elections. I have no excuse not to vote at all now, the only real previous excuse being, “I didn’t know there even was an election.” Which feels like an excuse often counted on by some folks with unpopular asshole-type views on issues. It’s less of a problem for my state because we run things properly and fairly. But occasionally I see news stories about some sort of shitty law that pushes some conspiracy tier referendum or whatever but it’s on the odd year early April election that like 4 people normally show up for, instead of on the ballot during a year divisible by 4 (Presidential elections), when many many people vote and can weigh in on the idea.
That’s just one reason to push ballots out to every eligible voter.
And they really should just go out to every eligible voter. Because so many people don’t vote, and they really should. I can only imagine part of the reason is the inconvenience of actually going and doing it. Or maybe people are simply unable due to disability or other health reasons. They don’t know that these options are available, so just, provide it for them automatically.
Another likely hang-up is the whole “I don’t know who to vote for” problem. I already know who I am (and am not) voting for, so I sent my ballot back the day after I received it. I didn’t have to though, I could have held on to it and spent over a month researching every name on the ballot to make sure I vote for the right people.
I did do this as well. Ballots often have a lot fo local offices, and very often have these “Should this judge remain in office” questions. How many people can even name one judge, let alone know if they are a decent judge or a decent person. With the at-home mail-in voting, I could easily look up every judge on the ballot and decide if I thought they should keep their job or not. I had one candidate that is a piece of shit Nazi quoter and should not be in office at all, but they are running unopposed, so I went looking for possible write-in candidates for that office.
It also takes all of the time pressure off. I’m not awake at 6:30am standing in a little booth in a room full of strangers trying to fill out the sheet so I can go back home and finish getting ready for work. I have all day, all week, all month. It’s even better than making election day a National Holiday, which some have suggested. It already really should be a week-long affair, but why not just make it simple and last a month with mail-in ballots.
Of course, there are a myriad of reasons why this isn’t happening everywhere. You can’t have a media spectacle horse race if it isn’t all focused on a single day. Another major factor is that if everyone actually voted, there are some parties in this country that would never win elections at all without pulling up from their myriad of incredibly shitty stances on various issues. There is probably some potential for more actual voter fraud, if you send ballots to every eligible voter, how do you know that particular voter filled them out and not their abusive spouse or parent? How do you know they aren’t a mostly comatose 99-year-old and their kid used their ballot? That sort of thing.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
A few things to note here, and some thoughts on it in general. He was doing this for a while, since 2017 according to the article, so it wasn’t like he made it in a month. Apparently, he was a music maker, he just wasn’t getting anywhere with his produced music. As he has been doing it since 2017, this predates even ChatGPT by about 5 years. He was not using the current crop of “AI” tools. My guess, he was just using a script of some kind to compile together loop tracks to mass-produce generic EDM music. Because AI is the current buzzword, this automation is being called AI by news outlets.
In the end though, the automation part is not the illegal part, it’s the scamming using bots that is the illegal part, as morally justified as it may be. Spotify is extremely popular, but Spotify doesn’t make artists any money. For example, Snoop Dogg, one of the most popular rap musicians ever, made about $45,000 for a billion plays. And a billion plays is a LOT. My favorite artist Aurora, has just under a billion plays on her most popular track, Runaway. The next most popular of her tracks is almost half that and third place is about 150 million plays.
Snoop Dogg has a LOT of plays.
The point is, that Spotify isn’t exactly the patron saint of supporting artists, and so the fraudster in the story above may be a bit morally justified in his efforts. That’s part of why I prefer to buy music, digitally, on CDs, on Vinyl. A larger chunk goes to the artist that way, especially on Bandcamp Fridays or buying direct from the band’s website, or even direct from the band at a show.
Anyway, I am not here to try to defend the guy in the original article above, just to talk a bit about AI and the Internet. I seriously doubt he is the only one doing this. He is just the first to get caught. Or at least the first high-profile one. Especially with current tools of AI, making it easier than ever to mass-produce garbage. Heck, I am pretty sure record labels themselves use software to pump up numbers on certain artists, less for the Spotify money, but for marketing.
But this also likely pushes into other areas too. It would be easy to do similar tricks on YouTube with bots, or Kindle Unlimited, just bots turning pages in free, AI-created eBooks.
A long while ago, probably a decade now, I came across a post on 4chan’s /g/ board (/g/ = Technology) with a guide on how to set up a Blogspot blog using scraping tools, add it to a ring of other Blogspot blogs, then automated a script that would click through the blogs gathering AdSense money from Google, to the benefit of anyone involved. I am pretty sure this was a regular post too, to keep new people coming in.
It’s the same principle as the automated Spotify system above. Hell, it may even be the brainchild of the same folks.
The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to intentionally manipulate the population and minimize organic human activity.
Which is probably less about “manipulating the population” and more just about extracting wealth through automated systems. Like the top level morally gray hero, it’s all a sort of, not necessarily evil activity. It’s very “Digital Robin Hood” in a way. Except instead of directly taking from the rich to give to the poor, this Robin Hood is out making posts on 4chan on how to create automated blog systems. I mean, Google has replaced all of its systems for support and everything with bots, why shouldn’t the users replace themselves with bots as well? It’s bots all the way down!
Bots are trivially easy to build as well. One of the lessons in my 100 Days of Python class was making a bit that would play a cookie clicker game in a maximum my efficient way.
Even without using software it gets done in manual ways in the real world sometimes, for marketing purposes. It’s all just manipulating the algorithm for money. I guess in the end the trick is to do it in a way that it doesn’t harm the “wrong people”. Sometimes I feel like I could be rich if I weren’t so honest because a lot of this isn’t that hard to do.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
I have really really tried to mostly avoid discussing Twitter and Musk and everything that has happened over the past, year and a half to two years there. I do occasionally share news in the link blog posts, but even there, I mostly just avoid it. I am pretty outspoken about my dislike of Musk and Twitter on other forums but not on my own forums.
Watching this death spiral is really entertaining though.
And it is a death spiral. It may not actually result in the death of Twitter, god knows we won’t get that lucky, but it’s just increasingly looking shittier and shittier over there. I stopped using Twitter completely the day Musk took over. I deleted a bunch of random secondary meme accounts I had after that, and I did log in a few times to pull all my Tweet archive data. I want to, someday, maybe, write a Python Script that will parse through it all and compile it into a bunch of daily digests I can dump into a WordPress blog, for posterity. I also started running some Python scripts before the API was cut off to delete all my old Tweets from the site. As far as I know, I still have my @ handles, mostly kept to prevent them from getting scooped up by spammers and bots.
I am not sure though. I blocked Twitter shortly after I started using NextDNS (Referral Link) everywhere. I can’t even check on my own accounts without a bunch of extra steps anymore. At this point, I really don’t care. I am not going back ever so long as Musk is even remotely connected to the service and I doubt he ever gives it up. I do keep watch from the sidelines. I see mentions of large businesses or politicians or news outlets moving permanently to Threads. I see people talking about how blue-checked bots are topping all the replies. I see complaints about all the crypto scams and weed gummies being advertised. I see it, and I quietly laugh to myself. Because all of this happening was clearly going to be the outcome of a big winey racist narcissist forcibly taking things over.
I’m not entirely convinced this wasn’t the intended outcome honestly. People like Musk, with their “free speech advocacy”, generally dislike actual open discussion and speech. They dislike when people can talk openly to each other and let ideas swell and become reality while smashing down stupid racist bull shit and conspiracy lies.
Fun fact, you can post a tweet with phrases like “Transwomen aren’t women” but if you post about “CIS people” you get flagged for using a slur.
Probably the first and biggest stupidity was the new pay-to-play blue check system that was implemented pretty early on. Blue Checks were originally issued as a way to verify people and companies were actually who they were. Someone at Twitter would do due diligence to make sure @McDonalds was actually run by the popular restaurant chain. This also meant not allowing blue checks for “@MacDonalds” or “”@McD0nalds” or various other typo-style fake accounts. It meant something. Early on, this was changed so Blue Checks just meant you had a paid subscription. Anyone could get a blue check. It also showed that you were supporting the racist jackass and his company, so a lot of previously verified celebrity types, refused to pay. Some were given checks anyway, which also upset these companies and people since it of course, implies support. It’s essentially a false endorsement.
As more advertisers fled the platform as it became increasingly filled with assholes and bots and scams, the Blue Check system has just been pushed more and more in a desperate attempt to make up for lost ad revenue. The irony being that even if EVERYONE signed up, it’s not where neat what advertisers were paying. The latest stupidity is that they now require new users to pay in to start posting. It’s pushed as a way to “deter bots”. Twitter doesn’t seem to understand just how cheap $8/month/account is for priority visibility for scams. One might wonder if it’s still worthwhile if so many are jumping ship, but it’s like those scam emails full of spelling errors. The scammers do this to weed out the intelligent users so only the choices of marks remain. Twitter is doing a GREAT job of weeding out the intelligence from its system leaving nothing but easy marks for these scammers.
I almost would feel bad for these people if they weren’t mostly the same people pushing all the hate-filled stupidity on the world in politics during the past decade. But that’s probably left to another discussion, if ever.
The really funny part is how this isn’t even the first time this has happened to a microblog service centered around “Free speech”. Gab, Truth, Parlor, and others I am sure I’ve forgotten are all basically complete failures after they failed to take off and get any real traction after being filled with right-wing extremists which at best just drives away any legitimate advertisers. Truth recently pushed a scam IPO as a way to grift money for Trump’s lawsuits which is failing pretty spectacularly.
Because of course it is. It was a grift to funnel money in a “legitimate” manner, and now it’s just a bunch of bag holders getting fucked over.
Alternatives
I have not really quite settled on a good alternative to Twitter yet. I’m not entirely sure I really NEED one. I wasn’t using Twitter a lot before the fall, though I had used it since 2006 when it was very very new. The alternatives all have their own sort of pitfalls.
Threads seems to be the most active. It’s run by Facebook and is technically a spin-off of Instagram. I kind of like Threads, because it’s full of people posting Toy photos. Basically, everything I used to like about Instagram, before it became TikTok but with ads every 3 posts, is Threads. I don’t super like that it’s a Facebook property. I also hate how the timeline feels really really algorithm-driven.
BlueSky feels the most like “old Twitter”. and I don’t mean “2021/2022 Twitter”, I mean like, “2007-2008 Twitter”. OLD old Twitter. But it’s also kind of dead as fuck. Even now that it’s open to anyone without the need for invites, it feels a bit deserted.
Mastodon is probably my favorite. People claim it’s “hard to use” but it really isn’t. The real technical hurdles on Mastodon kind of stem from servers and admins who tend to be a little… eccentric, for lack of a better thing to call them. There are admins who will ban entire other instances because ONE user on that other instance says something that is kind of maybe offensive to … somebody. Or heck, even blatantly offensive to everyone. But the whole server gets banned over one person. Which feels a bit shitty, especially since there also feels like a lot of mindset that “once banned, it’s banned forever.”
The federation also had some weirdness. Sometimes I get a new follower, so I go and check them out to see if I want to follow back, but in the app, they LOOK like they have a blank profile. But if I open their profile in a web browser, it’s complete and they have posts. So there is clearly some weird syncing issue there. I’m not familiar enough with how the federation works to know the details, but from what I have gleaned from other discussions, it’s something like that. Or maybe that server is banned for some reason.
It’s also kind of clunky to re-toot something, from that something. If I link to a Toot, and you want to re-toot it, from what I can tell, you need to cut and paste the URL and do a search to find it from your own server. Or do a weird login jaunt from the local server. And it’s all very doable, but it’s cludgy as fuck.
Anyway, I kind of post to all three, sometimes I post the same thing to all three, sometimes I kind of segment it out depending on “audience”. Not that I really have an audience. My pseudo plan is to mostly use Threads for Toy stuff, and BlueSky or Mastodon for everything else. I’m not entirely sure yet. There also aren’t really easy tools to post things like, blog posts, automatically to Threads or BlueSky. This was a factor that always felt like part of why Google Plus failed.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Ramen Junkie 
