Probably almost everybody has heard by now Elon Musk finally closed off his deal to by Twitter for the small sum of 44 billion dollars. Why on earth anyone would spend that much money on anything is beyond me, but he actually did it and everyone immediately lost their shit. I actually thought this would ultimately not happen because of all the issues that cropped up in the meantime and the price was just way too steep, but I guess I was wrong.
Like a lot of other people I also had a Twitter account that I frequently used at some point. I think I deleted mine at the beginning of 2021 or 2020 after finally coming to the conclusion that the site is just garbage. I never used it actively to post as I didn’t have anything interesting to say and never used it for direct communication with others as (thankfully) no one I know uses Twitter. Despite the fact that the site is and has been an insane trash fire for a very long time I kept using it because you can actually dodge most of that if you just follow certain people. You don’t even need to go block anyone, which seems to be preferred route for a lot of people. I actually did block Twitter users at some point and even used a project called “blocktogether” for it, but not because I wanted to create my own little echo chamber, but rather because I thought it would stop random bot accounts from following and interacting with my account. I eventually found out that that wasn’t really the goal of the project and I just went back to not blocking anyone.
If you only follow certain people Twitter basically just turns into a more retarded version of RSS feeds, but it actually works decently well for that. Granted that you block ads and don’t use the official Twitter frontend. When I still had an account I exclusively used Tweet Deck which made the whole experience more bearable and now I just use Nitter whenever I want to access Twitter as the main site will always nag you to log in which is something that I could rant about for hours.
Now that Twitter is owned by Musk people suddenly either feel like the site will magically improve or go down the drain. I think that neither will really happen, at least for a while, but Elon has already announced some changes and the 8$ subscription for the blue checkmark is already out, which kind of surprised me as I assumed it would take longer for something like that to happen. When the finalization of the deal was announced a lot of people immediately started to tweet slurs and other shit to see whether they now had freedom of speech. A decent amount of people probably lost their accounts that way. As it turns out things don’t change that quickly and maybe they never will, at least on Twitter. Musk did fired a bunch of staff so things might improve, but who knows.
While nothing has really changed for the average Twitter user, journalist and blue check mark, a lot of them still appear to be very upset at the idea that their precious safe haven, which they’ve carefully built over years of blocking, muting and reporting any opposition, might be torn down soon. Which is funny since at most a lot of accounts would be unbanned, but they could just block them again and be done with. For them it’s probably more about not having dissenting opinions on the platform at all. I guess the other thing that they might fear is that rules will now be applied more evenly and fairly again and the people who’ve enjoyed a lot of leniency and immunity over the past years might get their account suspended because their retarded behavior is suddenly not tolerated anymore. This is actually already kind of happening as it seems to be a bit of a trend to change your name to “Elon Musk” and then post stupid shit in a crude attempt at comedy, something that Musk apparently made legal again. Ethan Klein found that out the hard way:
That didn’t go so well…
Just to be clear: I don’t think someone should get suspended over this and Musk has definitely shown that he has a short fuse, but it’s also still a bit funny. How does the saying go? Just make your own Twitter, can’t be that hard. While you’re at it also make your own hosting company, data center, payment processor, bank, domain registrar, DDoS mitigation service and ISP. As it turns out impersonation is against the terms of service that Ethan read and agreed to, right? Apparently you have to make it clear in both the username and bio that the account is a parody. People who change their name now also apparently temporarily lose their verification which I find kind of stupid, considering that Count Dankula has been doing some S-tier trolling with this in the past, which now won’t work that well anymore:
But then again people who only read the username and not the account name, i.e the “@CountDankulaTV” part in “Justice Dankula @CountDankulaTV” and somehow not realize that the tweet content is too ridiculous to be true would probably still fall for this shit even if the user name also contained the information that this is a parody. In this case Dankula also wasn’t really impersonating anyone in particular so it might not even be against the rule under which Ethan got suspended. Ultimately people will still fall for this shit and no matter if someone has a check mark or not. We’ll see how this plays out, but because of all of this some people are now desperately looking for an alternative as they suddenly realized that being on the receiving end of account suspensions isn’t as fun as when it happened to others.
That basically brings me to the second part which is the fediverse, which a lot of people should’ve also heard about by now, but it’s often incorrectly referred to as Mastodon. The fediverse has been around for quite some time and I’ve actually first joined it around 2016 or 2017. I also initially only really heard about Mastodon, which is also where I made my first account. I eventually moved to niu.moe, which isn’t around anymore. I never really actively used it, but when niu.moe shutdown I didn’t bother looking for a new instance. A while ago I kind of remembered the whole thing and looked for a new instance and stumbled upon SPC, which is where I’ve been ever since. Considering how long the instance has been around I don’t think I’ll need to look for another one. At that point I also found out about the different frontends and backends that exist, like Pleroma and Soapbox. All the people that are coming over from Twitter not only think that Mastodon is the fediverse, they also think that it’s basically like Twitter and they want it to behave like that.
It’s both funny and a bit sad to watch. Apparently some journalists made their own instance and they received a warm welcome from the fediverse which included a lot of insults, which isn’t surprising as a decent amount of people on the fediverse are very suspicious of journalists. It was definitely funny seeing all those idiots realize that all those people that they blocked and reported on Twitter over the years were never actually gone, they had just moved to the fediverse. A bunch of other bigger Twitter users also moved to Mastodon who basically all also found out very quickly that things work a bit different on the fediverse. Ultimately they came here on their own volition and they should adapt to it, but it’s more like a manifestation of this comic:
Sadly it seems like the twitter refugees will either make their own isolated instances and recreate the echo chamber that they’re used to from Twitter or the more likely scenario is that they’ll just go back to Twitter once they realize that they can’t live without it and the fediverse is too harsh to them and there’s not enough of their own kind so after blocking everyone it’ll just feel extremely empty. We’ll ultimately just have to see. I don’t care too much about all these people joining since a lot of them will not stick around and those who do will have to make a choice of either desperately trying to recreate twitter or embracing the more chaotic way of the fediverse. While insulting journalists might be fun to some people it’s probably best to not overdo it since this can be a chance of getting the fediverse more widely established and taken seriously, but at the same time I’m not gonna tell people what they can or cannot post. The only thing that I dislike is the fact that most of the newcomers have no idea how the fediverse really works and what the idea behind the decentralization of the network is and the fact that it’s all free software that they could host themselves. The biggest Mastodon instances already have performance problems and aggregating ten thousands of users in one instance is not really what the fediverse is about and when the new influx of users basically demand the usage of large instance blocklists to become the norm it’s also concerning. This’ll increase the divide between instances that rarely block other instances and the ones that shut themselves off from those.
I overall think that Musk buying Twitter has a slight chance of improving the site. If it stopped banning people for a lot of the bullshit reasons they used to use that’d already be an improvement. If they stopped their retarded fact checking hints it would also help. Also suppressing links to certain news stories like the Hunter Biden stuff is also obviously something that has to go. I don’t care if a story turns out to be true, if some idiot wants to tweet out a link to a news article they should be able to do it. And if the story is retarded people should be able to tell that user so in the replies. If there’s one thing that I hope all the users on twitter realized it’s that they’ve been spending their time on a proprietary centralized platform over which they have no control and it could be taken away from them entirely at any moment and there’s nothing they can do about it. One can only hope that they do not recreate whatever circumstances they’re trying to flee from.
I personally would have no problem if the Twitter just disappeared, but if that were the case there’d be a high chance that TikTok or some other chink site would fill its place and I feel like that’s even worse so the best thing that could happen is if the site becomes less biased and rules are enforced fairly, but with a site that large that seems almost impossible. So all we can really do is just stand by and enjoy the show.