• alienanimals@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Literally every single day we have idiots doing Musk’s PR work for free.

    Downvote Musk spam. The billionaire doesn’t need your help making sure his businesses stay in the 24 hour news cycle.

    • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You think being inevitably forced to see every bit of harassment and spam is going to make that platform more popular and financially viable? Nah, if anything this is free advertising for Mastodon.

      • Kaosmace@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        How does mastodon work compared to twitter? I keep hearing about it but I’m still trying to figure out lemmy.

          • Zitronensaft@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            Firefish is another fediverse microblogging platform and it has search and quote tweets, but you can’t follow hashtags in your regular timeline (you can set up a separate timeline called an antenna that regularly pulls in posts according to a list of words or hashtags you specify). It also has a tweet deck style layout you can setup and you can easily follow and be followed by mastodon users from a firefish account.

            There are other alternatives as well, but this is the one I am most familiar with.

        • ADON15@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          In the same way lemmy is like many reddits communicating with eachother; mastodon is comparable to many twitters that can share users and posts with eachother

        • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It’s very similar to Twitter, I’d say even more than Lemmy is to Reddit. Mastodon federated like Lemmy but in practice you can follow anyone from any instance. You just need to follow people using @username@instance.tld rather than just @username

    • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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      Yeah, but every time these stories blow up, Mastodon, Threads, and BlueSky gets another user base boost. I’m ok with that. These stories keep making the alternative communities more and more viable.

    • dantheclamman@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I agree, he seems unwell and the attention is continuing the negative spiral. Unfortunately, I don’t think we can control what people are interested in. This is a total spectacle and media circus

    • uwe@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I have him blocked. It’s my fault. He noticed and now he is going to axe the whole feature

      • DarkWasp@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I could actually seeing that being the reason he’s doing this. Nothing a narcissist hates more than people ignoring them.

        • Brudder Aaron@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          This is PRECISELY the reason. He fired a lead engineer who told him they can’t control how many people engage with his tweets. So he made it so that EVERYONE gets to see his tweets in their feed. Queue mass blocking of him and now he’s upset.

          • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            Lol oh my god, I think you’re 100% on the ball with that hypothesis. I honestly can’t think of a better explanation, and it absolutely fits with his narcissistic neuroses.

        • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          I mean… I’m willing to fight this fight if he wants to play it that way. I’d be more than happy to make a lot more heinous troll accounts to spam him with, and I’m willing to bet that a lot of other people feel the same way.

    • pulaskiwasright@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      He wants shitbag, astroturf, conservative, fascist “personalities” to be able to respond to and every prominent non-fascist post where they can be promoted to the top of the replies.

      As a bonus, it will also help the astroturfing oil companies better kill environmental efforts.

    • Hank@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Maybe he wants to get rid off the somewhat smart people on Twitter so the rest can be easily radicalized with the intend that they vote against their interest and for the interests of rich people?

      I’d say it’s either that or he wants greater reach to feed his narcism.

  • Laticauda@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    “it makes no sense” literally every social media site in existence has the block feature, and the reason is to help people prevent harassment. Elon is like a fucking toddler, it’s obvious he just wants to get rid of blocking because he’s pissy about being blocked by other people.

  • Chenzo@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    So… Wait.

    This means someone can just @ someone else and destroy their feed with hate or dick pics or whatever?!

    • FaeDrifter@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      What I suspect will happen is that Musk cronies will be free to harass anyone they want, but anyone harassing Musk or one of this cronies will be banned.

      • Chenzo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        what’s the difference between block and mute? Block just lets them not see your feed and notifies them of this, but mute just hides anything they post from you?

        • ZILtoid1991@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Muting people that harass you instead of blocking them enable them to just spam libel about you onto your posts, which can have other effects. At least with blocking, they can’t just do it on your actual posts.

      • DreamySweet@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        If you mute someone, you don’t see their posts. They don’t get any notification that you have muted them. It’s the same as blocking but they don’t know they are blocked.

        • TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Blocking is a step up from muting. Muting just makes it so you don’t see the muted users’ posts and comments. Blocking makes it so that the blocked user is muted, plus they cannot see any of your posts and comments. Blocked users also cannot @ you.

          • pumpsnabben@sopuli.xyz
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            1 year ago

            Muted accounts can’t @ you either.

            The only difference between block and mute is that your are informing them they are blocked, prompting them to make an alt so that they can keep doing shit.

            • TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              Thanks for the correction. I thought it was different at some point, but to be fair I haven’t used Twitter in many years now. I just assumed it was still similar to how most other apps handle it.

              • Cryptic Fawn@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                1 year ago

                It is different, he’s just being dishonest.

                If you block someone else on Twitter, they can’t even see your profile at all (muting still allows them to see your profile and interact with everything you post or retweet). Sure, it tells them they’re blocked, but this also means they can’t interact with anything you post at all. If they want too, they’ll either have to make an alt account (someone most are too lazy to do) or ask fellow toxic assholes to screenshot your posts for them to see.

                Muting is useless when dealing with harassers. It’s why the block feature was added; because minority communities begged for it.

    • XanXic@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Even better they can spam literal child porn at you because of “outrage” and youll get a exec from Twitter defending you to parliament!

  • Silverseren@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    The block “feature” is a required tool for being listed on the Google and Apple stores, among others.

    Removing it will get Twitter delisted from them as well.

    • Thee0023@sh.itjust.works
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      That’d be nice if it actually applied, but Apple has already made exceptions for X among other large companies to allow them to play by different rules in the store. So I’m not holding my breath for any sort of punishment.

      Examples:

      • X got a one letter App Store name that was previously against the rules (other devs need their app name to be at least 2 characters) (more info)
      • YouTube had been blocking iOS PiP background playback (not sure if they still do) and put that feature behind the YouTube Premium subscription. Background playback and PiP is part of iOS’s system capabilities and the rule specifically says it’s not allowed. See Apple’s guidelines section 3.2.2 (ii) here. With this, one could make the argument that PiP would only support system supported video decoding, and YouTube uses DASH for higher resolution videos, but YouTube does offer video and audio streams that are natively supported by Apple as well so I don’t hold much support for this argument.
      • jamiehs@lemmy.ml
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        “Background playback” is behind the premium paywall; NOBODY gets YouTube PIP support on iOS; such a shame.

        I repeat, even if you pay for premium you simply can’t do PIP using the official app. You can however use a browser and use PIP that way I think (there used to be some weird workaround but I’m not sure if it still exists).

        Edit: I was (happily) wrong! I see now, they added it halfway though 2022 and I needed to go into settings and explicitly enable it. I’m a happy camper now! Thanks for the correction

          • jamiehs@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Fascinating… because I’ve been trying to get this to work for like years… literal years. I’m very happy to be wrong about this.

            HOW THE FUCK DO YOU DO THAT?

          • jamiehs@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            I see now, they added it halfway though 2022 and I needed to go into settings and explicitly enable it. I’m a happy camper now!

            Thank you for the correction.

          • Waraugh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            I don’t even have premium? I’m on iOS, I can’t keep up with what’s being criticized as real or not.

            • jamiehs@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Sounds like Apple may have forced their hand behind the scenes.

              https://9to5google.com/2022/07/11/youtube-pip-iphone-ipad/

              My initial experience is that it was missing, then tested, then removed again.

              Since you don’t have premium and can still use the feature on iOS, that means they were forced to make it available in general to iOS users. It was off by default for me though, so maybe they made it work but just didn’t turn it on by default?

              Someone else above was saying that Apple has rules about this, and another poster was saying that on Android you need premium for PIP. So maybe iOS did without it for years and then they were forced to add it for all iOS users regardless of the premium sub.

              • Waraugh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                1 year ago

                I will say it doesn’t work predictable with all my apps brought back into view. WefWef is one of the few where it does it every time.

          • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            Anyone else realize he uses the music from Dustforce? It’s very nostalgic because I played it a lot in college.

          • theangryseal@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I don’t have premium and I get PiP on everything but music.

            Even then, sometimes live shows will work or lesser known musicians.

            • canuckkat@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Thought people were talking about the native app not watching via the browser.

              But, yes, Firefox Mobile Android master race. Can confirm it’s so superior!

              • nomadjoanne@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                I still find the Firefox performance on Android to be a bit lackluster. Still use it for ideological reasons. They are making strides though.

            • TANSTAAFL@lemmy.world
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              Not on googles phones, pixels have a single good feature, call screening, if that wasn’t so necessary for my mental health these days i’d go back to samsung in a heartbeat.

              You can still play youtube through a browser like firefox and get working pip without paying for premium but if you want to use the official app its locked behind a paywall.

              • canuckkat@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Pixels also have the live captioning built into its sound ecosystem. Not sure if it got translated to other brand images though.

  • stochasticity@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This is incredibly consistent with the “free speech” crowd thinking free speech entitles you to an audience.

    • seitanic@lemmy.sdf.org
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      I feel sympathy for the people who are required to use it for work. Most users could quit it and replace it with Mastodon, though.

      • FrankTheHealer@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I tried deleting my twitter just now.

        The website is abysmally slow. I genuinely think they are throttling their deactivate account page to try stop users from leaving en masse.

        That or else the site is not functioning correctly after Musk’s optimizations’

      • whofearsthenight@lemm.ee
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        Honestly, this is a pretty clear case where federation should win out. I answered someone above, but governments using a private service like twitter for actual public announcements imo is broken. I hope that Mastodon and federated services take off and turn into a turnkey style service somewhere. Like, setting up your own Mastodon (or Lemmy!) instance I hope turns into something just about as easy as setting up an email account.

      • Hiccup@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        With Twitter’s dwindling user base and each, people should just jump ship and migrate to mastodon. It’s honestly what Twitter used to be and better than everything Twitter is now nor what musk has turned Twitter into.

      • Hiccup@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        It would be a godsend if there was a way to block certain results from search engines. I do not want to have want to have any more Twitter links or reddit links propagating my results. I don’t even care if I miss out on some vital piece of information to my query. I just don’t want those sites in my search results.

    • bdiddy@lemmy.one
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      I’ve legit never understood it’s appeal. Like what even is the purpose of it?

      • whofearsthenight@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I wasn’t a heavy poster on Twitter, but I was a heavy user. Unlike the Lemmy/Reddit model, it’s much more real time. So when I wanted to see how things were going with a piece of news of any sort, basically, twitter was better at that.

        Its also much more person centered - you curate specifically a list of who you want to follow rather than just topics, so there could often be crossover. Usually for me, this meant I’d listen to some podcast or something for a while, figure out I like the host and their personality or often just taste, and then follow them. The added benefit being that most people I’d follow on twitter weren’t so big that if you tweet at them and you’re not an asshole, you’ll get a response.

  • Bongles@lemm.ee
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    Unreal. It’s not even incompetence, he really is just tanking the site on purpose.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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      No he’s not.

      He’s a right wing grifter and always has been. And like many on the right, he views harassment as a form of “free speech” which should be acceptable.

      He’s not tanking the site on purpose. He’s tanking it because his bullshit ideology naturally results in creating a hostile environment that people don’t want to be a part of.

  • HuddaBudda@kbin.social
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    The block feature is not there out of the goodness of their CEO’s heart.

    It is there to limit liability from harassment. After all, why police harassment laws at your expense. When you can get the end user to enforce it for you.

    It’s just Dumb evil.

  • Anti-Face Weapon@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This is so dumb, what is he thinking? What’s the angle?

    Dumbness aside, Twitter is only usable if you block all of the blue check spammers who add nothing to any discussion.

    Maybe he’s doing it so you can’t block blue checks? But it still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

    • krakenx@lemmy.world
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      I half wonder if he is running an experiment to see how much his users are willing to put up with so that all the other tech companies can figure out how far they can push us.

      • FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I think it’s that and ads. Easier to sell promotional stuff when the whole user base is simply incapable of hiding your shill posts.

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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        This but his goal is to find the line and step over it, not toe it. He didn’t like Twitter being a liberal leaning platform that pushed extreme conservatives out so he’s reversing that. The only nuance he’s using is to do it slowly enough that there’s still libs to pwn on his platform over the rather than having them all leave at once. Plus if he can chase them away rather than ban them, he can claim to be more about free speech. But this is all about suppressing opinions he doesn’t like, with an added bonus that he can ban people for not loving him.

    • affiliate@lemmy.world
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      in the next iteration he’ll make it so you can only block people who don’t have twitter blue

      • Anti-Face Weapon@lemmy.world
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        This is pretty wise, I think. I do believe you have figured out the reason, or at least part of the reason. Driving up rage engagement!

      • kellperdog@lemm.ee
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        That’s what I was thinking. Either a specific person blocked him that he got upset about or the amount of people that have him blocked upset him. Either way it’s personal and he’s throwing a tantrum like a toddler. Again.

    • Durotar@lemmy.ml
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      This is so dumb, what is he thinking? What’s the angle?

      I’d guess that he wants to control what people see for one reason or another. I blocked a lot of communities here to make my feed more enjoyable.

    • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
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      Less work needed to maintain the system? He fired most engineers, those remaining can only do so much at one time.

      • Durotar@lemmy.ml
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        What’s there to maintain, the feature is already there and should be relatively simple. I can’t imagine that Twitter backend is so bad that it requires active work on all components.

  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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    Lmao this is going to be incredible to watch unfold. I am assuming Elon himself has blocked an absolute fuckton of accounts that are just out to troll him, so either he’s gonna (rightly) get absolutely inundated by trolls, or he’s gonna make the devs disable it for everyone except him and whoever else he wants to give that feature to.

    • notatoad@lemmy.world
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      yeah, elon’s not going to see the negative consequences of this personally, because he’ll just use the “ban” button instead of the “block” button.

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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        I’m betting I can reverse engineer how to create spam accounts in a mostly automated fashion faster than he can ban accounts. And I bet a lot of other people can do the same.

        I feel very confident saying that he’s not gonna win this one.