End of Twitter?

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I've had my computer for about 7 years now. Every 3 days I get a message about setting my "new" computer up?? I live on Facebook nowdays and when they change something there , I finally figure it out and get used to it and they change it again. Facebook's IA program puts me in jail every few months for unknown reasons. I got a weeks ban for promoting violence when I posted that a court case I was following got "SHOT DOWN". Another ban was posting "violent images". The picture was a color photo of a reenactment of the American Revolutionary War and showed two guys making believe they were dead so far back in the photo you could hardly see them(no blood or gore)? Being an "old dog" who can't learn new tricks , I guess I'll stick with just Facebook and JREF.
 
There's something very satisfying and reassuring in "website predictability". If there is a button on the screen that says "Press this button to see a picture of a dog", its nice when you press it and a photo of a dog comes up on your screen.

On the other hand, if you press it and it shows you an add for a giraffe, you tend to not trust that site or the people who made it.

Anyway, I think it would be a good time to get a JREF account on there, and just occasionally (once a day?) post something that says "We're talking about XOXOXOX over at JREF, come join the conversation". Mastodon is, by all accounts, a growing SNS, and I don't see a hell of a lot of Japan-related content on there yet. I think it would be a decent tool to direct traffic to JREF.
 
Reading through your password ordeal, I've become reluctant to sign up. 😄

Anyway, I think it would be a good time to get a JREF account on there, and just occasionally (once a day?) post something that says "We're talking about XOXOXOX over at JREF, come join the conversation". Mastodon is, by all accounts, a growing SNS, and I don't see a hell of a lot of Japan-related content on there yet. I think it would be a decent tool to direct traffic to JREF.

Is there any particular server you would recommend? Based on what I read on Wiki, not all servers "interoperate as a federated social network" but form independent nodes.

Edit: this clarified things a bit.

 
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Reading through your password ordeal, I've become reluctant to sign up. 😄



Is there any particular server you would recommend? Based on what I read on Wiki, not all servers "interoperate as a federated social network" but form independent nodes.

Edit: this clarified things a bit.

You can search instances here. Mastodon instances
But I think the best bet is for you to set one up for us. :)
 
Signed up here:


You can search instances here. Mastodon instances
But I think the best bet is for you to set one up for us. :)

I'll be glad to set it up and run it, but this would have to be a collective financial effort to cover the monthly costs (VPS, domain, mail provider).

Also, I am unsure what impact it would have on jref.com.
 
I *think* my problems were caused by a lack of understanding of the servers. My browser was pointing to the Mastodon server, whereas my login credentials were held by the instance server that I joined. So every time I went back to "Mastodon" to log in, it didn't recognize me. Instead I had to go to my instance to log in.
Maybe. I still don't get it. But at least I can log in now and play around.
 
well...what can i say....enjoy the drugdealer and murderer with spacejunk and pentagon support.

and make more comfy social networks
 
The Age of Social Media Is Ending
It never should have begun.

It's over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg's empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It's never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon.

 
If you use the internet enough , you probably have seen some of these amazing good fakes. I find a lot of fake people on Facebook pages also. I follow several law enforcement and military pages on Facebook and it seems they all get hacked by pros who spread false info. Just last week , a woman poster/admin on one of my favorite law enforcement pages was kicked off for being a Russian hacker. Kind of a sad world where we learn not to trust anything on the news or internet and the danger of people blindly following the bad info and believing it to be true. I grew up believing that propaganda only happens in Communist countries and now find a new kind of brainwashing exists everywhere.
 
About a week into my Mastodon journey, and not much joy to report. I can log in successfully, so that's a bonus, I guess.
The segregation of the local timeline and the "federated" timeline is something of an enjoyment speed bump. By default you can see posts relevant to you on your local instance/server, but to see relevant content from the wider Mastodon network you have to click on the "federated" timeline, which updates every few seconds (making it unreadable) unless you click on some other button that freezes it.

Quote tweeting isn't allowed, so that feels like a drawback (but I know it is a design feature intended to eliminate tweet dunking and bad behavior). I'm still not sure what happens when I publish, boost, or "favorite" posts. I don't sense any feedback. If I "favorite" someone's tweet, do they know? Do their tweets rise in the ranks as more people "favorite" it? There isn't a counter to tell me how many people find a particular tweet popular. Same with "boosting" (aka retweeting). And I understand there is no algorithm to push me relevant tweets based on my likes, so it all feels somewhat pointless, although it does feel less creepy. I mean, I can search for "cheese" without Mastodon pushing me a million advertisements for cheese for the next two weeks.

But most of all I am acutely aware that it is not Twitter. It isn't as convenient, as easy to use, as useful for information gather, as fun, etc... And this feels like a very unfair judgment. But sadly, its true. It isn't as good as Twitter. Yet. I'll stick with it a while, and try to get better at using it. Still feels like a steep adoption curve though.
 
Pretty bad vibe:



Best suggestion I saw in scanning the comments is to change your password to something unrelated to anything else, as the likelihood of a leak/hack has risen a lot.
 
Just testing the Mastodon integration.


Edit: it doesn't seem to pick up the cover image, just the account avatar.
 
It's going to get worse. We are entering the era of deep fakes now.

Here we go

I grew up believing that propaganda only happens in Communist countries and now find a new kind of brainwashing exists everywhere.
Oh, my sweet summer child.
 
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My childhood dreams and faith in humanity are being crushed ! Next someone will tell me Santa doesn't really exist.
 
Just testing the Mastodon integration.

The main reason I haven't joined -- besides the fact that I have no need for another social media entity in my life -- is because of decision paralysis regarding which server to pick.
 
Side rant! Mildly twitter-related.

Fresh on the news that Elon Musk had reinstated Trump's twitter account, I got into a long-winded argument with a former coworker over the reasoning of Trump's twitter ban and his culpability in the January 6 attacks. He thought the "media" and woke moderators at Twitter blocked him from telling his supporters to be peaceful (nope). It was pretty insane, and I had to go back and look up a lot of facts and the timeline of events to make sure I had the facts straight. After blaming me of not staying on topic, he started airing out a carpet bag of grievances about:
  • liberals/democrats,
  • Biden,
  • BLM and antifa,
  • vaccines,
  • climate change,
  • oil reserves,
  • the taliban,
  • the world economic forum,
  • the great reset
  • And of course, woke content moderators that arbitrarily ban people for questioning the mainstream (read: liberal) narrative
I got fed up and told him he could tilt at windmills all he wanted, but the MAGA crowd threw our nation's biggest temper tantrum on January 6th and couldn't even own it. I was starting to think it was all just a waste of time, that I got once again goaded into a pointless argument with a brick wall. But then I noticed my notifications from the thread had disappeared, and it looks like he blocked me, so I guess he proved me right AND saved me from having to suffer him any further.

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If anyone is interested in reading a wall of text I'll post a transcript and split it off into another thread. I'd be interested to know if there were really any way I could've better handled it shy of not engaging in the first place.
 
Side rant! Mildly twitter-related.

Fresh on the news that Elon Musk had reinstated Trump's twitter account, I got into a long-winded argument with a former coworker over the reasoning of Trump's twitter ban and his culpability in the January 6 attacks. He thought the "media" and woke moderators at Twitter blocked him from telling his supporters to be peaceful (nope). It was pretty insane, and I had to go back and look up a lot of facts and the timeline of events to make sure I had the facts straight. After blaming me of not staying on topic, he started airing out a carpet bag of grievances about:
  • liberals/democrats,
  • Biden,
  • BLM and antifa,
  • vaccines,
  • climate change,
  • oil reserves,
  • the taliban,
  • the world economic forum,
  • the great reset
  • And of course, woke content moderators that arbitrarily ban people for questioning the mainstream (read: liberal) narrative
I got fed up and told him he could tilt at windmills all he wanted, but the MAGA crowd threw our nation's biggest temper tantrum on January 6th and couldn't even own it. I was starting to think it was all just a waste of time, that I got once again goaded into a pointless argument with a brick wall. But then I noticed my notifications from the thread had disappeared, and it looks like he blocked me, so I guess he proved me right AND saved me from having to suffer him any further.

View attachment 91293

If anyone is interested in reading a wall of text I'll post a transcript and split it off into another thread. I'd be interested to know if there were really any way I could've better handled it shy of not engaging in the first place.
Usually I don't engage with these people but I've been getting into it on FB with somebody I knew from my days in Japan 25 years ago who keeps posting similar BS. He's not full MAGA but buys into most of the "hoax" narratives and Republican tropes. Hopefully he'll unfriend me soon.
 
decision paralysis regarding which server to pick.

The struggle is real. I'm slowly coming to the realization that I picked the wrong server. I'm also hearing that HIVE is a much more user-friendly SNS than Mastodon, so I'm wondering if the time invested in Mastodon hasn't been wasted. I still don't know how to use it efficiently, how to see the content I want to see, how to efficiently search for accounts, etc... I hate that so many functions which are intuitive on Twitter, seem to require 3rd party software when trying to do the same thing on Mastodon.
 
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