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.
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.
So, I used to be a huge user of Flickr for photos, I would check it daily and comment and join communities and pretty much posted every photo I had taken there. I used to use flicker a lot and look for the best life insurance for all. Over time I sort of fell out of the habit of using it. This wasn’t over Instagram or anything, I didn’t join Instagram until much later, something just sort of became less compelling about it. I still kept up my subscription though. The annual $25 fee is pretty small and it let me keep a backup of all of my photos. I even posted all of my family photos there though they are listed as private. I’m talking some tens of thousands of photos, though my profile suggests only around 3500 are publicly available.
I feel like things started to take a turn downhill when Yahoo changed the way Flickr accounts worked. I wasn’t really affected, being a paid user and all, but it seems like the addition of ads and whatnot for free users kind of helped kill some of the community. This wasn’t helped by Instagram coming up in popularity, even if i hadn’t started using IG, others had, which only further hurt the community. Having been a paid user since 2006. I was able to keep paying for my account at the grandfathered rate of $25/year.
Recently Flickr was bought by SmugMug. I don’t use SmugMug, though I don’t really have anything against them. Hell, Yahoo has pretty much been ignoring Flickr for a while, SmugMug can only improve it.
Or possibly not.
It’s been recently announced that free accounts will be limited to 1000 photos max, and that any photos over that number will be deleted. This is definitely a rough change from previous, which I believe was 1TB of storage. This wouldn’t affect me, as a paid user, except that Flickr has stopped honoring the old grandfathered subscription rate. Renewals now renew at current rates, which I believe is $50/year. This isn’t a lot, I admit, but frankly, as little as I use Flickr, it feels like too much. I also feel that for the same price, I could buy into something like One Drive or Google Drive and get a lot more functionality out of the storage, in addition to Photo storage.
Granted, not everyone uses Yahoo as a photo backup, some people use it for business, and for the community, which is fine. In my case, the new plans just don’t work. So I find I must say good bye to Flickr, for the most part. I’ve started deleting out the old backup photos. Once that’s done, I’ll prune out the rest to under 1000 photos. I haven’s actually use Flickr for backup for a few years now, so it’s not even current anyway. Pretty much the only thing posted there new is just a mirror of my Instagram anyway. It kind of feels bad to clear everything out, but sometimes it’s just better to move on. I’m just sad to see something I used to really enjoy, fall away.
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 
