The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging With Elon Musk’s X::The former Twitter is incentivizing violent content, which will only become worse to stand out to users.
This is your daily reminder to engage and boost Twitter alternatives such as Mastodon. It’s not enough to ignore Twitter. We must build communities to draw in users, show them social media can exist without Elon or Zuck. Only when good alternatives exist, with content and people sought after, do users feel safe to abandon old platforms.
Firefish is my favourite, the design is fantastic, and I can read all of Mastodon on it. Very enjoyable and everyone is quite welcoming.
I made an account on Firefish as well. A bit of an adjustment after Mastodon. But my Mastodon account has been untouched since.
I think it’s just a very pretty design! For some reason I can’t explain it’s adorable.
I get that. I feel it still needs a bit of polish. It’s amazing but has some rough edges to work out. Sadly it probably won’t catch up to Mastodon. Mastodon has too much of a head start. The nice thing about the fediverse is that it doesn’t matter though. I can use the less popular option and still connect with the popular one.
Mastodon is never going to be as addictive without that algorithm. You can’t just replace one with the other when what you’re hooked on is the outage. What we really need here is regulation.
Can we take a step back for a second and think about the human condition that led someone to need a moral argument to get off X? What kind of pathetic, fucked up mind do you have where you can’t just uninstall the app you have to appeal to morality.
Well there is a difference between disliking something and believing it is actively harmful. If you believe it is actively harmful for humans and society, it makes sense that you want to appeal to the society as a whole. Then you need to reason for why you feel the way you do. And there we go.
Facebook causes genocides in every 3ed world nation they push into.
social media is, as it is now, designed to push the worst. most racist, most murderous rhetoric because it garners more engagement.
I am not saying you are wrong, nor right, but I am wondering why you tell me/us that now, here.
My assumption would be the purpose is to shame people.
I don’t think someone publishes an article to try to convince themselves to not use it. Of course it’s to convince other people why to not use it.
This 100%! I barely used Twitter to begin with, but as soon as he went off the deep end, I completely deleted my account.
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This whole twitter thing is like some lib version of a moral panic. Who cares, just get off it if you don’t like the experience. But no, they all need to tell everyone how this makes them so morally pure.
Moral panics are over things that don’t have negative real world consequences.
We’ve repeatedly seen what happens when disinformation and violent, extremist speech is given a place to flourish on social media. The crazies get even more radicalized, organized, and emboldened. They start taking actual action.
Qanon, the proud boys, unite the right, patriot front, January 6th – where do you think those ideas gestated and grew to critical mass?
4chan?
I made a burner to see for myself after using it for work a few years ago. It’s a complete dumpster fire now, way worse than before. Bots and shitty animated gambling ads everywhere. Porn bots and scammers are trying to follow you every 2 seconds. Elon’s dipshit musings/ragebait are forced into your feed even when you block him. Any tweets you make get zero engagement. remaining accounts are either bots, racists, fascists, or creators and celebrities moaning and/or hemming and hawing about leaving all the time because muh ego. It’s not even worth witnessing the spectacle.
It’s also fucking straight up broken half the time. Mastodon is a breath of fresh air in comparison even pre-Elon. Wish more would use it.
You forgot one major thing: the porn has left in droves.
Truth. Total ghost town now.
The forced elon spam reeks of insecurity. I thought the whole reason behind being extremely rich was not giving a fuck about what the world thinks, yet here we are.
That moral case was already there like a decade ago.
When he called the Philippine men, risking their lives to save children stuck and about to die in an underground cave, pedophiles because they refused to consider musk’s retarded dive capsule idea… That was the moment that the moral case was there and it never left.
Musk is a scammer, he is a dumbass, he is incompetent, got fired for being incompetent, he just got really lucky winning the company shares jackpot when that company got bought out. That’s all. He has a quality to make dumbass people listen to him and look up to him and make them somehow believe that he’s smart but every word out of his mouth is either a lie or just really really painfully dumb.
I worked for Musk for longer than I care to admit, well before the world caught on to what an evil snake oil salesman he is and I endorse this post.
Let me just say after my time that the pedophile thing is probably nowhere near the worst thing that man has said or done to others he deems unworthy.
It’s what we call failing up.
I had the idea of seeing if I could get an AI to draw a 10-point buck mounting him as a play on his name. No idea if that would be too far or not, but I would personally find it funny.
Lead by example. At least stop pretending that this news article/opinion piece belongs in a technology.
I love these websites posting, “It’s time to leave X” while also providing bait articles that just describe a Twitter conversation between two celebrities.
Ironically, there’s a “Share with Twitter” button on the left side of the article
Agreed
Agreed.
I joined Twitter fairly recently as Machine Learning Twitter is/was a thing, and I wanted to stay abreast of news from people like Andrej Karpathy, Chris Olah, Andrew Ng etc., especially since r/MachineLearning went down the shitter.
But I can’t even - I log on and just instantly see ragebait posts from Daily Mail talking heads and bullshit.
Are there any better alternatives for this purpose?
Believe it or not, for tech deep cuts, Mastodon is better.
If you know of a better ML related instance than sigmoid.social let me know, but none of those influential figures I mentioned post there, and the discussion is pretty much non-existent.
If there are better alternatives entirely depends on how active those people are on Mastodon, Bluesky or even Threads. (Not sure on activity on Bluesky, as I haven’t got an invite yet…)
I’m a PHP developer, many people (but not all) in the community crosspost on Twitter and Mastodon, so Mastodon is a good alternative for me personally.
There is a Mastodon instance sigmoid.social for this ostensible purpose, but it’s pretty dead.
TIL we need convincing about that on Lemmy
Lemmy just seems like a big echo chamber of tech, Linux, and Political news. Maybe some memes sprinkled in, but little else.
The Star Trek memes are good. So ha!
But this Stor stuffs is weird and I’m too afrais to ask what is it.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. If you’d like more fascism or mindless idiocy no one’s keeping you here
I’ve never seen furry porn before joining Lemmy, half the stuff I have blocked is furry hentai
Oh yeah forgot there’s a lot of that too. I blocked all that months ago lol
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That’s just an issue with your instance. Most instances defederate from outright porn sites unless they’re explicitly for made for NSFW.
The fediverse provides an alternative for people who care about using ethical products. Haven’t tried threads/bluesky but they seem like more of the same. Unfortunately I don’t think people care about the ethics of their micro-blogging platform; their biggest priority is having the largest soap box to shout from.
I’m not sure I’d call lemmy ethical considering how much genocide denial there is.
I think you missed the part where the person you are replying to is talking about the ethics of the platform itself, not the ethical viewpoint of the users using the platform nor the personal views of the developers.
Platforms don’t have ethics. They’re software, not people.
Platforms have the ethics of the people administrating them
Software is shipped with a license. There are licenses that are more or less ethical.
Do I have bad news about twitter… At least no one profits from it here
Lemmy isn’t one entity. It’s several different websites. That would be like calling Linux unethical because some people use it for weapons research… it’s open source, so people can do whatever they want with it. Douglas Crockford famously added "“The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil” to the license for JSON, but it was determined by various people to be unenforceable and not compatible with free software licensing.
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I know a lot of people relying on it for sharing research papers and finding them. It’s depressing to not have an alternative.
Sewers are useful even if they are full of shit.
Maybe it’s time to slowly transition to Fediverse?
It would be nice. The major issue is the network that people created there. It takes years to build it, and you won’t have it back on the Fediverse.
If torturing primates isn’t enough for u what is,???
paying for twitter
That says so much about u that animal torture is ok but don’t they dare demand $8 from u.
Oh no im not saying that about myself. left a long time ago when he started rate limiting and funding right leaning mfs. I’m just trying to imagine wby people stay on a service like that. I kinda hope elon starts charging for twitter so when i see who actually pays for it, its gonna be much easier to cut them off.
I deleted that shit months ago.
Downvote Musk spam.
The billionaire doesn’t need your help ensuring him and his businesses stay in the headlines every day. Don’t be a useful idiot.
Damn, this is actually quite compelling. I knew X/Twitter was bad, but didn’t realize just how bad it has become. Thanks for posting.
Does anyone here actually use it? I literally never made an account
I have an account that I use exclusively to DM companies for support. I found out that I can get help quicker and more easily than going through their website or call center hoops.
I don’t need a moral reason, I just think it’s shit as it was before it rebranded
