It’s not just lemmy that’s benefiting from Elon Musk.
I’m sure there were a huge swath of people who used Twitter and didn’t care at all about Musk one way or the other.
Then he rebranded and threw his ego and control in everyone’s face. And all the people who like Twitter IN SPITE of Elon were now forced to acknowledge that their Twitter is gone.
Just like over at reddit now, the latest move has alienated the people who really cared about the platform itself. If they rebranded to “Spez’s World”, though, a lot of the people who didn’t give a shit before would suddenly be ready to bail.
Lmao “Spez’s world” will be so funny though
He has so thoroughly ruined Twitter that you can’t help but wonder if that was his goal from the outset.
Narcissists like him would never seek failure intentionally.
You’ve obviously never played a board game with a narcissist. Flipping over the table and calling everyone, including the game they themselves purchased, cheaters is a totally expected move.
They’re not doing that to lose. They’re doing that because they already lost.
I GUESS YOU’RE RIGHT, LIKE YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO BE!
- Knocks phone over -
Fucking cheaters
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Musk ‘lost’ when he had to spend the $44 billion. I can totally believe that he’s burning Twitter out of spite from having to buy it.
That is quite fitting
To what end, though? The man blew 44b on a site that apparently was only worth 5-10b, and that was before he ran it into the ground. He also destroyed his reputation and the mystique as “genius entrepreneur” which the world can now clearly see he never was.
I can’t think of a single net positive. I think it’s an age old tale with people with too much money: he fell victim to an over inflated ego and too many yes men aiming to please. He started to believe he really was brilliant.
Sad thing is the man has so much money he still can’t fail, personally. He’ll have destroyed Twitter and even more people will lose their jobs. And autocrats around the world will be pleased. Musk will just shrug, tell himself it wasn’t his fault, “it was the libs” or something, and move on.
Eta: the only winners here, as per usual, are the shareholders.
44b sounds like a lot of money (it is!), but his net worth right now is 219b after this fiasco. At this point it’s just a score between rich assholes who got the bigger number.
You could take 200b away from his evaluation and he could still retire on a yacht and not work a single day in the next 100 years. Same for his children and his children’s children.
So yeah, “bad” financial investment, but it might be worth for him to kill one of the biggest platforms where he was called out for his bullshit.
Totally valid point.
Thing is, now ALL the platforms are calling out his BS. I don’t think he would have sold his golden boy reputation for any price, given the choice
To be fair, Elon doesn’t all have that money in cash. Also, like half of the Twitter buyout was made possible with a loan where he used his a Tesla stocks for like half of the operations as collateral.
Although I agree that he’s far from being broke, this can become a pretty bad financial decision to Elon.
That 44b had to be paid in real cash, not just the current theoretical value of the sum of his shares. He sold quite a lot of Tesla shares afaik to banks to give them a “small loan”.
Lol, “real cash”, look it up what he actually did. He took a loan in the name of Twitter, so he didn’t even use his own money. Pretty much financing half of the deal with the theoretical value of the company he just bought. And he took in extra money from Saudi investors, it’s not all his money.
There was never a 44b “real cash” transaction.
Chop one head off…
IMO Mush was trying to run a simple pump and dump scheme with Twitter stock. You know, make some statements about ho he’s going to buy it at a massively inflated price, sell all the stock during the uptick and then suddenly find some issue with the sale and leave. However, during the “make some statements” phase he managed to make some legally binding statements and Twitter and their lawyers held him to them.
So there’s no agenda or plan really, just a larger version of the Dogecoin pump and dumps that Mush has done in the past. It’s just this time rather than some crypto rubes he tried running it on a company with lots of lawyers and it blew up in his face.
Agreed, very plausible scenario. It played out that way as well, right up to the part where his lawyers told him “you legally can’t actually walk away from this deal”.
To reduce the ability of the 99% to interact with each other on a basis that results in change of the 1% methodology.
The people running this nation and the rest of the world absolutely do not want us getting together and figuring out how to make change effectively. I’m pretty sure it’s why they keep ruining all of the social networks, we can’t unite if there’s not a platform for us to do so on…
Take any of the top 3 social platforms, then have a look at their total number of users. If we were going to go unite, that shit probably would have happened by now. Instead we post memes about billionaires.
Elon jet tracker has way less of a following now.
True, but it popped up on other platforms, effectively defederating. And you probably jest, but if not: 44b is a lot more than the 5k he initially offered the guy to take it down.
Elon is a narcissistic idiot, but that’s all he is. He bought the same crap his own PR team was peddling a few years ago, figured he didn’t need his PR team because he was so great (according to propaganda they spread), and went on to confidently make idiotic decisions because of course the real life Tony Stark can make no mistakes
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Honestly even if the executive wanted to crash Twitter on purpose I’m not sure they could have done as good as Musk.
He’s carefully destroying the brand, the infrastructure, the finances and the credibility of Twitter.
You can’t be too quick because then people would take about for maybe a month and move over.
No it had to be slow and painful so everyone start to really hate it.
Actually the number of Twitter users increased
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Really?!? That’s surprising.
If it’s active users increased I’d be surprised, but if it’s not I wouldn’t be, most people probably don’t delete accounts when they stop using them
Those are all the flies attracted to shit.
Is this migration already called xit? Because it should…
Xodus
Xitting the Xitter (shit-ter)
Xatter (shat-ter)
It’s not the rebrand that’s killing Twitter. Elon is. He’s proving to himself that he cannot, in fact, run Twitter better than the prior owners.
I wonder if previous twitter execs are feeling a bit bad to have sold him twitter to see it destroyed like that.
I mean it certainly proves Elon is an idiot as he used fraud to manipulate the price and got played instead.
But was it worth it to let him destroy Twitter just because he tried to defraud it?
They got $44 billion, double what sane people thought the company was worth. It would be irresponsible not to take Elon for a ride.
Responsible financially, as agents of the corporation, sure. And I understand why they did it. Morally though (and I would argue civilly) it was wildly irresponsible. Thousands of people lost their jobs, hundreds of people are now forced to work at Elons insane business under threat of deportation if their visa is invalidated, and hundreds of millions lost a trusted, dependable direct link to governments, public figures, and other notable people. The world is a worse place for having let this deal happen. What is responsible financially is often irresponsible in pretty much every other way, and I wish this perspective was represented more.
As a shareholder in a number of other large corporations, I would actively like for buy-outs like this one to fail, even if it would make me a quick buck now, even if that quick buck is a lot. I much prefer stability to major erratic changes, even when they benefit me.
hundreds of millions lost a trusted, dependable direct link to governments, public figures, and other notable people.
It should not have been trusted and pervasive to such an extent. If anything, better to cut the dependency now than later.
That’s a fair argument, and to an extent I agree. That said, I don’t think firebombing something hundreds of millions depend on is not the ideal solution, and it could have been handled differently, like by adding contingencies, for example. Or working in some form of transition period.
In an ideal world, yes. But face it, you, I, and my aunt’s puppy knows that’d never happen. Get every govt agency in the world to cooperate? Yeah right. This might have been one of the best ways we could realistically have ended it.
I disagree. Nationalizing Twitter is definitely idealistic thinking, but adding some small contingencies to the deal definitely is not, and is actually pretty standard in large mergers, to maintain stability.
An easy counterpoint to what you just said: mahney. Nobody cares about doing the responsible thing when billions are on the line. Also, a lot of people say they wouldn’t do something for a billion dollars which just boils down to “you didn’t get a chance like that and you never will”. Hypotheticals are easy till it actually happens to you.
I have morals that I will not violate. Money does not matter to me beyond enough to comfortably live on my own (and I have reached that point already). I give the rest away to people in need, because that’s how my moral system works. You’re welcome to think whatever you want about hypotheticals, but in this case it doesn’t matter if they sold or not. The people making this deal would have been obscenely rich either way. At a certain point, money is nothing more than bragging about a big number, your life doesn’t get materially different. If your moral system allows for that kind of action, good for you I suppose, but I can assure you its far from a universal perspective.
Also illegal, since Twitter was a public company- they can’t discriminate on bona fide offers or they risk being sued.
As someone who doesnt use twitter… yes this was totally worth it!
I’d be bummed out but happy I have an unlimited supply of hundred dollar bills to wipe away the tears.
I wonder how long twitter would able to run at a loss if elon didn’t take it over as a slapstick joke went wrong.
Yeah. I left with the bluetlicker shitstain bump up in every reply. The dumbest people to ever buy a device and learn English that somehow didn’t choke on rocks as a kid…
Just had enough and had to leave
To be honest, for me it absolutely was the rebranding that made me delete the app.
Why? I’m really curious what difference the rebranding made to users
Imagine your favourite fancy restaurant suddenly adopts an extreme “Batman” theme. Same food, but just hardcore decorated a la the Dark Knight. You’d probably still go there, but you’d have a different time. And you’d reconsider the types of people you’d bring there, etc.
Brand is far more than the logo in the top corner, and I think marketing textbooks are going to use Twitter -> X as an example of how not to do things.
Now I’m imagining meeting a professional contact at a classy Italian sit down place, but the waitress greats us with a deep gravely “I’m Batman.”
Thank you for building that moment for me. And yeah, I see exactly your point now. If I hadn’t already left X, I would be concerned about sharing a personal and professional brand with it.
For me personally it was simply a gut feeling of how stupid that name and logo looked on my screen. I was of course annoyed but everything else going on before, but that didn’t yet push me away. This is a minor thing, but it was the tipping point.
It’s stupid and unnecessary.
If you said it was the final nail in the coffin, sure. But for that to be the only reason?? Why??
Are you one of those “my brand truck is better than yours because … bowtie” types?
You are jumping into conclusions. See my other answer here https://lemmy.world/comment/2511227
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This is how I mainly used Mastodon before Lemmy. It lets you follow topics instead of people; I prefer finding content this way. Unless a person really likes the format of Mastodon better, I’d suggest Lemmy over Mastodon for people that would rather follow topics than individuals.
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I found it very refreshing that it doesn’t have an algorithm at all. I know there are some downsides to that, but I think they’re worth it.
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On Mastodon? I distinctly recall reading that it did not have one but I guess these projects are fast moving so maybe it has changed or I am just mistaken.
Another good thing is putting people you follow into lists. I just wish we could do the same with hashtags.
Tusky is a great app. But it doesn’t seem to have a trending tab, which I use to find cool accounts to follow. For now I use trunks.
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Not not trending hashtags. Just overall trending posts. Maybe I need to uninstall and reinstall tusky or something.
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Those are actually not groups. Groups boost posts from all users that mention them. https://a.gup.pe/ is one implementation of groups with mastodon in mind, but lemmy communities actually work the same way when followed from mastodon. I believe other fediverse platforms implement groups in similar ways under the hood. This means that everything is more or less interoperable between platforms.
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Very true. Following hashtags is a pretty essential feature.
Groups boost posts from all users that mention them. https://a.gup.pe/ is one implementation of groups with mastodon (and other federated microblogging platforms) in mind, but lemmy communities actually work the same way when followed from mastodon. I believe other fediverse platforms implement groups in similar ways under the hood. This means that everything is more or less interoperable between platforms.
EDIT: Try it yourself! Follow technology@lemmy.world from Mastodon to see what I mean. Although I don’t know that I would stay a follower of a community that large unless I wanted significant impacts on my feed. A smaller, potentially more useful, addition to your feed are things like gardening communities.
Cool, but the article is from July 24th
Twitter under Elon looks similar to the UK under Brexit.
So smooth sailing right? Right??
Just deleted my Twitter account. Of course, the app gave nothing but errors so I had to do it on desktop, but it’s done!
So now you have an ex-Twitter account. Or an X account for short.
Maybe Elon was truly 200 IQ with his naming
I deleted all of mine and move to mastodon when I heard Elon was possibly going to buy it. I’m glad I did, because who knows what he has all implemented since then.
I am sure my account was never “deleted”, even under Jack, but at least I know I gave the best chance for my data to be deleted.
I find Mastodon very stuffy and boring, is there a way to shake up my feed? I feel like I’m missing something about how the app works.
I’d recommend following the hashtags you want to see. It’s sort of a build-your-own algorithm
This is a huge thing about the fediverse.
Users are used to being told what they want (algorithms) without any choice (centralised and only platform).
Whereas Lemmy and Mastodon require users to curate their stuff.
Perhaps some “meta fedi” sites would be useful. Things that generate lists of hashtags, instances and users “shake up” your experienceI found fishing for (and following) hashtags on Mastodon effective but Mastodon was also in much better shape to receive the waves of Twitter exoduses.
Lemmy lacks effective tools to organize a feed. I think many people recreated their favorite subreddits as communities but the userbase was too small to support them. Being able to create “multi-reddits” to group related micro-communities together to help mitigate the ghost town feeling as you raise the probably of at least one of them having something new to talk about.
I think naturally, Lemmy will gravitate to fewer, more generalized communities instead of many little hyper-specialized ones.
I’d love to see more smaller communities, tho. But, how to group communities?
Geographically is one way, if you want local news and banter.
By interest is another, if you want YouTube news/content but not Twitch news/content. Or just more generally “streaming content”?It is an impossible problem to solve easily.
And the risk of any instance suddenly going offline is very real. Which means, gravitating to a more technically adept or well funded instance makes sense.I feel like the current federation separation system isn’t going to work. Or it’s going to be “good enough” for a good while, but not really click.
Idk if separating “user instances” and “content instances” is better. Then some sort of “meta instances” that everyone actually interacts with.
Content instances can more specialise in the content they provide.
User instances specialise is currating their users.
And meta instances link users to content.
But then, that massively overcomplicates things. And who is going to want to run a user instance? Or a meta instance? Or a content instance? All require investment and work.I think that would have been a healthier start, to focus attention and generate some liveliness, but people’s preconceived notion is “Reddit” so that’s where community creation went.
Re-reading your post before I hit submit… I think I am just repeating what you are saying!
What I was saying:
I think the solution is “meta instances” or “meta communities” or “meta aggregators”.
A community or instance that aggregates the smaller communities.
And some way for smaller communities to submit content to that aggregator.
Like, I’m browsing my instance’s “all”. I find a good meme that suits my “programming memes” interest. So, I submit that post to the aggregator.Essentially like cross posting, but a community of all crossposts and everything is treated like it’s on the original instance.
But as a primary feature. Where it’s easy to “submit to aggregate subscription” or whatever.But then we would get every instance with their own meta-community, and it’s just a complication on top of communities and instances.
Curation is the term. The question is how our doomscrolling is curated. Go to the big sites, they curate for engagement, and thus ragebait.
Here, maybe we need some communities that have people curating in a more positive direction…
Reddit also used to be that way. FFS I think the best time on the Internet was that when we were all on traditional phpBB-style forums, where there was no “algorithm” at all (though I admit the concept doesn’t scale well and they too have their structural problems).
God i miss traditional forums
Have you seen the maple syrup meme video? (Sorry for the TikTok link.)
https://www.tiktok.com/@reddit/video/7231589390072597806
This was a pretty amazing feature of everyone using Reddit. Lemmy isnt close to that for specific interests yet. League of Legends was one of the biggest subreddits, but any league community here is basically dead.
It’s a lot harder to get critical mass for Lemmy than it is for Mastodon. And Mastodon migration hasn’t been what I think it should be. A good, reliable, large instance on .com or .net domain would probably go a long way for adoption.
Mozilla is supposedly releasing https://mozilla.social Mastodon instance I’m early 2023. Any day now… But it’s understandable if they want to wait for some event to open.
This is a welcome change tbh. All these other platforms push rage bait and crap just to drive engagement numbers.
It’s refreshing to go back a little to how the Internet used to be. You had to go and find what you liked, not have a million things pushed on you.
Subscribe to the hashtags you’re interested in.
Tools help, and because the Fediverse API is completely accessible, folks have already come up with awesome stuff.
- Populate your following list by finding friends, the Fedifinder still appears to work and helps find friends from Twitter on Masto: https://fedifinder.glitch.me/
- Now find friends of friends, the wider social graph. Followgraph works wonders: https://followgraph.vercel.app/
- Now you will likely miss posts, so try following updates of people if you really enjoy their content, plus of course pinning hashtags. PLUS. Up your game with an algorithm, either in the dedicated Mastodon app (trending posts) or with more customisation through the app Fediview: https://fediview.com/ Using Mastodon Digest (GitHub), you could also set up your own automation script.
- Folks have created lists and groups you can mass subscribe. The most successful one I know is from and for academics, perhaps there is a field for you in there. Journalists have similar stuff. See https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon
- There are many awesome apps out there to access your content, improving the experience. I recommend Phanpy because of its unique and sleek design, see https://phanpy.social/. If you miss Quote Tweets and other stuff, try an app like Elk.
- Mastodon is only one option, if you want all of Twitter’s tools and more cool stuff, try Firefish. You can migrate followers and posts. This way, you can skip many external tools.
And that’s just the beginning.
I agree… it feels like the Fediverse doesn’t quite have the same algorithms that the single-corporation services have, and I feel it most in the search to broaden the content I see. Hopefully the exploratory element picks up as time goes on!
The Fediverse doesn’t do algorithmic pushing and that’s a feature, not a bug.
The main ways to find new stuff on Mastodon are all actions taken by you, the user:
- Hashtags. Watch and follow hashtags you like. Hashtags are the main way stuff is categorized, and if you use them liberally on your own posts and find others posting to those same tags you can find accounts which align with those interests of yours.
- Home. Check out stuff in the “home” timeline which will be your neighbors on your own Mastodon instance. (In the case of general instances this isn’t so helpful, but in those instances themed around a hobby, subculture, geographical area, etc. you know you have that common ground with your neighbors to start with.)
- Boosts. When you find people and accounts to follow, they boost (reblog/retweet) things they like, you find things to boost, etc. and it all works like a friend introducing you to their other friends, friends of friends, etc. leading to your own circle of friends increasing.
All these are things you do and you have to put a little work in to make them happen, but it’s purely fueled by your own interests and wants instead of the traditional social-media algorithm which does a little aligned-interest stuff but is mostly powered by whoever has money to pay the platform to force them into your timeline. On Twitter or Facebook you get shown what the platform thinks they can get paid by showing you. On the Fediverse the rules of invasive centralized ad-choked personal-data-harvesting social media don’t apply; you get shown what you actually want and request.
It’s different and change can be scary, but when you get used to the idea that things don’t have to work the old way anymore it can end up being a good thing.
If you think about it, this is actually the old way.
The problem is that I as an user don’t necessarily know what I want to see. What if there is some super interesting hashtag out there, but I don’t even know that it exists?
I simply haven’t found as many good engaging posts in Mastodon, though, despite all that. It could be simply the challenge of building an interesting feed when you start from zero, but that’s a challenge nonetheless.
Algorithmic identification of novel content is in my mind neither intrinsically sinister nor beneficial; like all things, it’s a tool and the morality comes out of how it is used.
Things like (optional) recommendation tools could be a useful addition to Mastodon to help users find interesting threads. Could be run on a per instance basis.
Thank God it doesn’t
If you think about it, this is actually the old way.
It’s a bad feature lol. It should have algo content as an option. I’m tired of getting gaslighted and being told I’m not allowed to think this. We’re on Lemmy because of its algo content with the active/hot feeds. That doesn’t translate to Mastodon boosts.
have a look here https://lemmyverse.net/communities
Why isn’t kbin magazines in that list of communities?
Follow a lot of people to fill up your feed. Be generous with it, and if someone you followed continuously posts something you’re not interested in, you can just unfollow, or put up a filter so those posts from that person do not show up.
There’s also a feature to follow hashtags so they appear in your home feed, so just search hashtags of things you find interesting. That’s a good way to find new people to follow as well! Advanced web view also allows you to make feeds for specific hashtags or hashtag combinations for even more control.
And if you happen to find an instance catered to your specific interests, you can make an account there, and you can even migrate an existing account so your followers come with. Chances are the local feed will be filled up with content you enjoy on such an instance.
And if you want to help your followers discover similar people, be sure to boost content you enjoy.
On Mastodon, you are in control of your feeds. Even on the federated timeline, to an extent (as filters work there as well).
I wanted to use mastodon, but I haven’t even used twitter in years, so then I realized I just don’t social media that way anymore (or much at all for that matter).
I got it and I’m trapped in a weird bubble of shit that doesn’t really interest me and I don’t like microblogging I think
Same. @squizzy, I don’t like microblogging in general either. I was raised in the golden era of forums (the days of phpBB and vBulletin). My twitter account hasn’t been touched for years now.
I mostly used twitter for checking trending topics for news
I was finally super duper permabanned from Reddit, and decided to give up. No more workarounds, new accounts, new emails, spoofing MAC addresses, multihop VPNs… And I’ve got to say, I have gotten more done in the past few weeks than in the last year combined.
super duper permabanned from Reddit
What the hell did you do?!
I got permabanned for canning a right wing troll a loser. Apparently I had repeatedly violated the rules ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I posted unpopular opinions. Perpetually for over a decade.
I got permabanned for shitting on russians (I am a Polander so it’s my default behavior).
I never used Twitter save for occasionally hearing about tweets, but I have been enjoying using Mastodon because in practice it’s basically just a way for me to have a feed of cool astronomy pictures.
I found cool astronomy pictures on Reddit, and some now on lemmy! Cheers for random cool pictures of space.
There were stories that Tesla had a team in place to distract Elon any time he showed up to the office, and I absolutely believe that. Now that Elon has Twitter to distract him, I wonder what that team is up to.
Can we have something nice here please? I miss when the internet was nice, and you were allowed to talk to each other about whatever you wanted.
TRON FIGHTS FOR THE USER!
You have pretty skin.
Throughout history, the wealthy always have a habit of congratulating themselves on work that others have created while doing their absolute best to mess everything up.
I don’t know what’s going on here but I’m just glad to be part of something.
We couldn’t have done it without you
Your hair looks small.
Thank you! I got it off the back off a well fed lady!
Lemmy would be soaring too if it weren’t for terrible database code allowing for easy ddos.
Try using a smaller instance. I recently switched from lemmy.world to lemmy.zip and it’s lightning fast. While you still get all the content from lemmy.world :)
I find it interesting how many people are looking for the overall lemmy experience. The first thing I did was find the community niche that interested me and the relevant instance, then when I’ve exhausted that instance I switch to the Everything tab and all find the generic content.
Edit: I accidentally wrote fine the community niece…
How did you like the community niece?
They fined her, so they obviously thought she did something wrong.
Man, this is what I get for being illiterate.
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Oops
Yeah that’s what I said after my first community niece too.
I find it interesting how many people are looking for the overall lemmy experience
I’m one of them. I use Sync so the whole caboodle feels like just one site to me, whether it’s the Everything feed or my subscribed.
(I am not a techy person)
I also use sync, although I bought the lifetime ad-free version for Reddit years ago for like $5 and now it’s $100 which I can’t afford here which is a shame. Still, it’s my favourite app and I’m very familiar with it.
switched from LW to discuss online
I think I’m up to 5 lemmy instances now. Various reasons that others will figure out as they gain experience.
Hopefully they can fix that issue and the communist communities stop having hissy fits.
they’re prob ddosing themselves for failing the purity tests.
At least it’s open for collaboration so people who can or help contribute to fix bugs for them are able to do so. That’s the beauty of open source, anyone can help out.
Fuck spez. Why isn’t he doing more psycho shit like Elon so he can move more people to Lemmy.
Give him some more time. It’s not that simple keeping up with Elon’s adventures
By the way, your username shows as bot to me. I think you need to disable it in your profile.
Thank you
Well, don’t change it if you are a bot.
Hoping they rename Reddit to Y or some such
I am so annoyed that Twitter got ruined.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t like Twitter. I don’t follow anyone on Twitter. But if I had no other recourse I could complain about a corporation that wasn’t paying any attention to me and they would do something about it.
By the way fuck FedEX. Is there a place on mastadon I can bitch about FedEx? I have had a mis-delivered package sitting on my porch for over a month. I call about every three or four days and tell them, pick up your package so it can go to the right place. They say they will get it. They never do.
Never use FedEx.
Is there a place on mastadon I can bitch about FedEx?
#fuckfedex #fedex
Fuck FedEx. Whenever a signature is required, they won’t let me have the package held for pickup anywhere, so I get door tags… even if I’m sitting on the couch watching TV. Called them and they said they don’t require the drivers to knock or ring. I only figured out after a ton of aggravation that if you get three door tags, they will hold the package for pickup for a few days anyway (even though they say they can’t due to “shipper restrictions”).
