The Antisocial Network

[Grath]

EDIT: Ah fuck they got unbanned, not a good news post any more. Fuck off Fuckerberg.

From what I gather they're still banned, it was just a false alarm because the page doesn't get removed when that happens, but they can't post anything to it

Unfortunately, they did get unbanned. There's a post from 8 hours ago posted.

[Mongrel]

Just FYI time is almost up to get a piece of Zuck's money through the class-action settlement over Cambridge Analytica. If you were or are an American Facebook user and had that account at any point between May 24, 2007, and Dec. 22, 2022, you're eligible, but the claim deadline is tomorrow (friday) at 11:59 PM Pacific Time.

The url for the claim form is: https://facebookuserprivacysettlement.com/

WaPo article with details.

[Thad]

Bluesky now available for anyone to sign up, invites no longer required.

[Mongrel]

Bluesky: "It's better than Twitter or Threads!"

[nosimpleway]

Careful not to trip on that low bar!

[Mongrel]

Ha. That bar's so low, the bathyscaphe Trieste couldn't trip over it.

In all honesty Bluesky's become sort of a weird place where it's just all shitpoasting all the time? There's almost no bots or active "official" accounts (though there's a lot of dormant 'just-in-case' ones) and the largest single political bloc is either far-left college/uni kids or dopey middle-aged Twitter refugees (hi). So the overall tone is... educated but not necessarily smart?

Which is to say it's comfortable, but certainly not all that useful.

[Thad]

It's got potential, if they're serious about decentralization.

[Büge]

Ha. That bar's so low, the bathyscaphe Trieste couldn't trip over it.

Good metaphor. I would have also accepted "The bar's so low, it's littered with Stockton Rush."

[Mongrel]

"The bar's so low, it's littered with Stockton Rush."

God. Damn.

[KingRoyal]

House passes bill to ban TikTok

This is not because of privacy concerns, since the US government does not recognize its citizens as having privacy, but instead because of their beef with China and because Meta and Elon Musk are tired of being outplayed

[beatbandito]

Pretty sure this is Israeli-backed.since their soldiers won't stop posting videos of murdering the elderly and children then laughing about it.

[Mongrel]

posting videos of murdering the elderly and children then laughing about it.

Ah, the Wagner Method.

[Friday]

how dare you suggest that the idf and their masters in israel are anything but patriot noble warriors doing their sacred duty and also what about hamas

[beatbandito]

how dare you suggest that the idf and their masters in israel are anything but patriot noble warriors doing their sacred duty

Definitely not denying this. They do believe murdering all Palestinians is their sacred duty, they just don't want to hear other people complaining about it.

[Büge]

and yet there's still videos of IDF soldiers merrily trying on the lingerie that belonged to Palestinians they've just killed

[KingRoyal]

This joins the Super Bowl and the Oscars as cover for the IDF that show a lot of people have lost the plot completely

[Thad]

I heard a couple of months back that Threads was joining the Fediverse but didn't actually see anything from Threads in my Mastodon feed until the past couple of days. Nothing bad; it was some posts by Aaron Rupar that somebody was boosting.

There's a debate going right now about whether or not Mastodon instances should federate with Threads. The "for" argument is that if we want Mastodon to be a mainstream social networking option, we can't just shun the single biggest source of potential converts; the "against" argument is that Facebook gonna Facebook and isn't going to moderate abusive posters in line with most Mastodon instances' guidelines. (Plus if you interact privately with Threads members you're giving Facebook access to those private messages.) I'm kind of in "wait and see" mode before I decide where I personally come down on this particular cost/benefit analysis, and anyway I'm not running my own Mastodon instance anyway so it's not like it's my call to make.

(I don't know if the harassment we were talking about on the private board involved anybody from Threads, but I do think that federating with Threads inevitably means that stuff like that is going to happen more often.)

I keep hearing good things about Bluesky (Scalzi, Masnick) and evidently Dorsey's no longer on the board, which I consider a mark in its favor. It's still early days for federation, but if independent Bluesky instances start to take off then I may have to give it a look.

[Grath]

Jack Dorsey's problem with Bluesky is...moderation. And the absence of Nazis.

"they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it. That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope."
(Bluesky is also fairly queer, since the LGBTQ community was one that Twitter moderation switched from protecting to actively attacking.)

It's not perfect, and not very federated at all, but there's some signs of their federation concepts actually being viable - there's at least one third-party moderation service running that flags accounts of shitheads, with options for hiding posts from shitheads or even automatically blocking every one of them.

[Mongrel]

TBH, I barely touch it these days because I'm really just doing that shit less in general, but BS has been pretty smooth sailing in my experience.

There's a running gag that it's "Twitter for shitpoasters", but the accounts running with this are decent people who actually have something to talk about. Which is to say it's very tongue in cheek, decent people jokingly passing off a good place as a bad one to modestly discourage the creep crowd, and yes, there's a big and encouraging QUILTBAG presence. From what I've seen, assholes tend to have a pretty hard time getting any traction when they do show up.

I think there's a legitimate fear that if BS finally does take hold as Twitter's replacement then the flood of new porn bigotry-seeking users will just make it into Twitter again, which is a legitimate fear for any platform looking to replace Twitter. But as Grath points out, BS does seem to have stronger moderation, and a bit more user filtration control than Twitter ever did, as well as a founding user base formed with far less tolerance for intolerance - and even "pre-Musk Twitter" wouldn't be the absolute worst place to end up over the longer term.

[Thad]

Yeah, the open moderation stack is what caught my eye in the Masnick article I linked. That's at least potentially a big goddamn deal. I'm still concerned about the centralization (open APIs are all well and good but having to trust a single for-profit company not to turn them off isn't, even if it is a public benefit corporation) but I'm hoping that problem gets fixed over time.