Some wars can’t be won. It can be hard to come to terms with this fact when you’re still on the battlefield, but if somehow you manage to step out for a moment, then the truth will become obvious. You have lost, the people on your side have lost, the villains have won and, if anything, you should have run away a long time ago.
Good luck, so many people won’t leave even still - “it’s where all the people are, I need to reach people, yadda yadda”.
Yep so many people say this. Well their supporting this stuff.
If you haven’t left X by now you are a supporter of these things.
So wait they were cool when Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter did the Nazi salute?
Yup
Only used X for following artists I liked anyway. What does it offer that the fediverse or Bluesky does beyond that?
Fascism and CSAM
Oh I thought it was Grok spreading lies that was the final straw, and before that the fascism, and before that it was the manipulative algorithms promoting racist views, and before that it was lack of oversight to keep content legal.
But OK let’s say it’¨s the illegal AI generated sexual abuse. Which by the way are clearly illegal in Denmark, not because of nudity, but because it is illegal to exploit the likeness of a real person.But by my count this is at least the fifth final straw.
Some see it like this for sure is the last one.
meanwhile X-users:
Yeah, you can’t dictate what the final straw is to others. It’s a personal matter to each individual. I for instance never accepted any amount of straws from twitter so to me everyone that ever used that site was crazy.
I’m pretty sure the author is well aware of this. It’s a good piece because it comes across as honest and takes a look at the psychological causes why so many people are still active on X. An honest look at yourself is the first step to free yourself from denial, and it doesn’t really matter how long it takes and how many bad things have to happen if they get it eventually and take action.
@RedstoneValley @Buffalox Marie Le Conte left X and joined Bluesky ages ago. She’s mostly trying to make the point to some of her fellow journalists who are ridiculously clay-footed and don’t seem to have realised that they haven’t “made themselves a nice little corner of X”, they’re just swimming in fascist waters now.
Don’t forget Biden!
The finalest straw!
X is a right-wing brainwashing machine
I feel like for the people still using X, AI-generated bikini photos of minors are pretty far from being the final straw.
Unfortunately, this. Pedo stuff is A OK for the alt right folk over there.
There were so many final straws. So many lines crossed. Zero chance this is “the” final straw…
it pains me how many leftists are still on twitter after all this
i get that bluesky is too liberal, mastodon too complicated and technical, and tumblr has too much pointless discourse, but… surely, mecha-hitler generating csam on command is worse?
Wow, somehow I forgot all about Tumblr. For some reason, I thought they were absorbed into something else.
mastodon too complicated
Literally the only thing to understand before using it is the multiple instances, which doesn’t take a PhD. (Even better, you can safely use it even without knowing about instances.)
If people don’t want to move to Mastodon because it’s “too complicated”, they’re not actually looking for an alternative.
Instances aren’t even the biggest pain point for new users (though it’s certainly a big one as much as people insist that it’s easy for anyone to grasp).
The fact that by signing up to mastodon you don’t even get access to all content (every instance has their own block list and federated content) is a massive sticking point. The decentralized nature of mastodon means that you can’t have one uniform experience across the user base, and that’s a huge hindrance to new adoption because people see social media as central squares where everyone is seeing the same thing, but that can’t happen on mastodon by design.
Also, and I’ll die on this hill: the majority of people do not want chronological feeds that they curate themselves. They like recommendations and automatically curated home feeds with the hot new content tailored for them. Any product that only has chronological feeds is DoA when it comes to mass adoption.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on the fact you lose everything if your instance goes down (I’ve been through it twice, not fun). This is not actually the case with blue sky, funnily enough, since AT Proto was built specifically to detach your identity from the platform/instance you’re on and carry all your content anywhere.
Insisting that mastodon is easy to use for anyone is delusional. Mastodon, by virtue of being federated, requires you to be a much more conscious user than average. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and some people are happy about having this “normie filter”. I also think that anyone can learn to use mastodon if properly taught, but regardless, it is a massive wall for adoption.
It’s not that people aren’t seriously looking for an alternative (bluesky’s increasing popularity proves this), it’s that mastodon is too antithetical to what people want and expect from a modern social media platform. You can argue if it’s good or bad that mastodon is not following the trends of popular social media, but whether you like it or not, not following said trends is what makes it massively unpopular.
At the end of the day, people just want Twitter without the nazis.
I suspect it’s mostly about network effect.
If enough people they cared to follow were only on Mastodon (or Bluesky or whatever), people would make the effort.
Hell, Eternal September start loooooong before the Internet was easy. When people really wanted it enough, they made the effort - dial-up was maybe “too complicated”, but once the promise of porn was there, they got online…
If the Nazis weren’t too much for someone I doubt anything is too much for them.
I used the opportunity to make my first post on Twitter in a year. Another guillotine picture, of course. Guillotines are the only appropriate thing to post there now.
