People aren’t going to be convinced of social/communism overnight.

I celebrate the move to BlueSky as positive in that they are no longer propping up an apartheid tech bro who’s now running a meme branch of US Government, and also because many of them are doing the thing they were scared to do before: leave. They now know how that feels and what it will be like rebuilding friend groups and such.

It’s not the anti-corpo step many are deluding themselves to believe it is, but getting out of the muck and learning how to take the step to change something are both things I see as positives that can be guided to better things in the future.

1. That’s lazy journalism. There’s a functional search bar as well as trending hashtags.

2. There will never be suggestions by design, but there’s accounts like FediFollow and guides on how to get started with Mastodon. If you meet those people in the future, tell them to follow hashtags for topics they like, and encourage them to start using hashtags. They’ll find people that way.

3. This is also by design: there’s no suggestions, because there’s no algorithm. You decide what goes on in your feed (boosting is another important part of that). If you’ve looked at everything, explore a new hashtag, follow more people, check the Local or Global feeds, or Satan forbid anyone actually take that as a sign to take a break and go touch grass.

or it sells out to another already established billionare that abuses the power of media control etc…

This cannot be overstated. That’s exactly how Elon ended up with Twitter, and nobody should think for a second that there aren’t richer, more tactful billionaires who could keep people credulously swimming in the propaganda in order to make their power plays.

I give it four years before their first enshittifying changes are announced.

It really depends what you’re after. You’ll find cool people by following hashtags, certainly, but if there’s somebody in particular you like, follow the person, too. Do both.

Also, some people bring their bad habits from Xitter and the rest, so it helps to have all the options.

Tldr, to help fight patent trolls:

They’re asking you to find evidence of preexisting technology – referred to by patent lawyers as “prior art” – that can kill off bad patents. This could be open-source documentation (including release notes), published standards or specifications, product manuals, articles, blogs, books, or any publicly available information.

They use this info to essentially undercut and invalidate the patent trolls’ filing, killing their ability to file suit on that patent again.

There’s also a contest with a $3000 prize for anyone who can help kill a current one on their plate.

https://patroll.unifiedpatents.com/contests/s3vQkRdTC6coNkjyx

I feel like there was a YouTube Premium series that paid homage to the original story, too, but I don’t remember the name of the show.

and try to effect the conversation,

And these people are insane. Elon has total control over the narrative, and the people that believe they can “throw sand in the gears” with some quippy xeets are delusional.

At least they’re moving, but fucking Christ; far too many people have main character syndrome.

When do we get the Home Assistant who falls in love with its owner and tries to kill their partner out of jealousy?

"States should decide everything!

…no, not like that!"

(Note that hypocrisy is fully expected, but they don’t get a pass from me pointing it out simply by virtue of it being their expected MO).

Yes. Isn’t it fun having a perpetual 54yo edgelord, who’s mentally 14 and stuck in the late 90s, in charge of an entire governmental department? 🙃

For anyone here who wants to switch to Mastodon, I recommend checking this guide first:

https://fedi.tips/

And don’t expect it to be Twitter. Expect better.

Mastodon is similar, and I like it but it’s not Twitter

And that’s honestly a good thing. We don’t need Twitter clones, because as much as people remember the Twitter of yore fondly, the people in charge made some really terrible decisions for their users, and a lot of people have forgotten that.

Mastodon is and should always be distinct from the Twitter-likes; if it starts to be a little too similar, then it’s probably lost its way.

AI creates fiction that sometimes intersects with reality, in the same way that Legends & Lattes has a few real-world things like coffee shops and lattes, but the things like orcs, ratkin, succubi, and magic that comprise the rest of the details are still currently fiction.

People just need to learn to assume LLMs are always writing fiction with a handful of details borrowed from real life.

Joke’s on them! My instance doesn’t save downvotes. /hj

Good. The more people leave the cesspit, the better off they’ll be.

Inb4 some speciously-reasoned lawsuit from the “Department of Government Efficiency” comes for BlueSky alleging anticompetitive practices or something equally ridiculous.

Discord at least has community moderation tools. Xitter is just a town square where all the Neo-nazis and conspiracy theorists get louder megaphones than everyone else.

But the “my friends are there” is such a weak argument, imo. BlueSky exists. Spoutible exists. Mastodon exists. If they’re IRL friends, they can just regroup elsewhere. If they’re only online friends, you can make new ones pretty easily.

“My friends are there” is just a tacit admission that they don’t mind sharing space with Neo-nazis.

I know I can’t ever go back. I donate to my instance, and I actually feel good about it, because I know it’s not going into the pocket of some faceless corporation who’s beholden to its shareholders instead of its customers.

Hardly. The Fediverse spans multiple apps and services, and it existed before Elon bought Twitter and it will continue existing regardless of what the billionaires do, because it’s not run by just one person.

The whole point is decentralization, not growth, so unless the billionaires can take out every server hosting an instance, the Fediverse isn’t going anywhere.

Yeah, but you’re not a shitty billionaire who’s directly contributing to and accelerating the decline of humanity, so you get a pass.

You mean head of DOGE? Because we live in the timeline where a terminally online edgelord with the brain of a 14yo and the body of a 54yo makes meme government agencies.

Anyway, get your passport now. They’re good for ten years, enough to last at least through the tentative end of Trump’s circus.