I’m pretty close to being a free speech absolutist (side-eye to the guy who ruined the term), but IMO one of the worst things to happen to free speech is this conflation of “right to speak” with “right to be heard”.

People have a right to ignore speech, and to establish standards for speech on their private property. If there is market demand for a service that filters out content based on ideology, whether mastodon.social or Fox News, so be it.

It can be toxic and a social negative, but any fix is worse than the problem.

What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read? That should be solely in the user's hand.

Are they choosing what people can read, or are they choosing what they're willing to federate? No one is stopping people writing and publishing things on federated services. People are only choosing what they're willing to broadcast over the part of the service they run.

You are entitled speech, but not to force a theatre company to give you their stage from which their captive audience has to hear it.

It's not practical for every user to choose each individual message to read. We allow others to help us filter. If you want the unfiltered version you go get it (and then try to find something under the torrent of spam).

The right to speak is not the same as the right to an audience. If users want to hear you they will seek you out. If not, you've said your peace, and that's all you're entitled to.

I run a very small instance and have zero problems finding content. I have a constant stream of posts to the point where its hard to keep up with. It's pretty much a myth that there's no content unless you're on a large instance.

It’s not actually that concentrated.

https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

If you don’t like how your server is run, go to a different one! That’s the whole point of the thing. You can even set up your own without too much trouble. If you believe servers shouldn’t be doing this stuff then you can make it happen. Nobody owes it to you.

Instances often block users or other instances because their users have asked them to do that. They often have posted guidelines about what they will or won't allow. Users will hold them to it. Users can and do block other users on an individual basis. If a lot of people are blocking you, the problem might not be them.

> And cancel culture. Highly politically motivated cancel culture.

Most of the people who started on Mastodon are people of the LGBT+ community that were getting constantly harassed on other platforms. This 'cancel culture' is just a healthy attitude to having a zero tolerance policy on abuse, it is how it avoids being the enormous bigoted alt-right techbro mess that is now X.

Since Mastodon is federated, you can choose the instance you want to use, and what you see. Just don't expect other instances to actively want to engage there.

'cancel culture' is when you decline to federate content users don't want, I guess?

you are aware that he doesn't actually believe that he "[...] could have convinced [..]"

it's a manner of speech

a instrument of telling a story

a way to express how completely absurd "US getting involved into Greenland" is for anyone who understands the land (geography/weather) and people even unrelated to geopolitical aspects like alienating allies

There are probably parallels with rap artists. There are those that improvise and flow.

(the rest of us edit and re-edit)

It’s a British newspaper columnist style. Read anything from AA Gill if you like it.

If you grew up writing (and reading) a lot, it's quite natural to have a "voice." It makes sense too: it's akin to having spent a lot of time with a certain person.

Although, I do not know if this is really that shining of an example of anything, although a fine blog post!

If you are surprised, I wholeheartedly recommend just reading more. Something clicks after 1000 pages of Swann's Way, or Infinite Jest, or even the Gnus manual where you simply must reckon with a certain kind natural voice that can be cultivated and exhibited without exertion, without even a "thought."

And I know the implication here is maybe underhanded, and that you feel its "entertaining" as a party trick is; where one compensates for content with flowery prose. That might be fair, but I see this charge more and more, and I just worry one day everyone is just going to deem reading and writing itself as a waste, as a compensation for some unnamed "other" thing we should all be doing (optimizing productivity). Which is why I must defend every labored, silly metaphor I read now to my death from all yall editors that popped up three years ago.

AI? I just read it and remembered how I got busted for writing papers for friends. Style and voice are tangible and I'm getting an uncanny valley creepy crawlies from the opening of this article. edit, maybe some AI segments, I would guess the author is young and will write differently in a few years.

But Elon Musk literally made the website unusable because now it no longer shows profiles in chronological order and posts are now essentially just screenshots. 12 years of using twitter without an account and in a few months he made the site completely unusable. Ignoring anything else this is a massive change that was implemented shortly after he took over and now I cannot use the site anymore.

I laughed so hard. The whole articles tone is really enjoyable to me.

Like anyone is going to listen to anything for 20 minutes.

The US has long since wanted to purchase Greenland, not "fight" them, for strategic reasons. I'm not sure why there is this fantasy that the US is going to fight the Greenland people? Honestly.

The wire services are the source of practically all news. There are vanishingly few other actual news-gathering organizations. (One fewer with the Washington Post deciding that they don't want to be one, either.)

That's the news. Everything else is repackaging.

The actual truth (or as close to it as can exist) has been out there and readily accessible this whole time. People choose to get it through pre-digested outlets instead, and then get outraged that everyone else is ignoring "the" truth.

he doesn't want new from social media

he wants somewhat reliable news

and isn't getting them anymore from US news outlets

but found them (surprisingly) in the fediverse

----

putting that aside finding news on social media isn't really that absurd but it highly depends on you algorithmic bubble/followers. Through a lot of it can be people sharing links to new.

the think is many smaller independent news outlets have very limited means of reaching (new) people by them self, so like everyone else trying to reach people they will use social media

then there are people which share/retweet news. Prefilled by quality and relevance based on their expertise. If you have enough media literacy to be able to judge their expertise you can follow those which have it and even know what bias is involved in their choices.

And sure all of that only works if you yourself have expertise and media literacy. And tends to work best for specialized/expert topics, not for "simplified" everyman news. But you kinda need that media literacy for any news today.

A example around Twitter was in the past one of, if not the, best ways to get tech. computer security news (about vulnerabilities, attacks etc.). That is iff you followed the right people.

Ironically the dynamics for that where very similar to what he describes: "Proper" news outlets being hardly usable. But other people with expertise sharing relevant news for the sake of the information, not for cloud, ads, propaganda etc. (Just the reasons differ. For tech. security news the problem is a. lacking specialized technical understanding of outlets and b. also that most news are too specialized(i.e. boring) for most of their audience.)

I want to know exactly how far the Iranians have gotten against the IGRC in the last 24 hours. I subscribe to WSJ but they don’t have that details. X and Reddit do, with some obvious caveats (I do find Community Notes on X very good though).

It’s a little wild to read comments like this because this was just how the Internet worked before Twitter got popular. I still get “happy birthday” emails from forums I joined 20+ years ago.

If you don't want to choose, install the official mastodon app. It should direct you to create an account on mastodon.social, unless you go out of your way to pick something different.

I suspect the sign up flow has changed since you last tried.

This is a big turn off for me too. I don’t want to “figure it out for myself”. That’s why I became catholic as an adult.

With the fediverse I have an overwhelming fear of missing out if I pick the wrong communities. I feel like it needs aggregation which defeats the purpose.

> mastodon feeds are prone to shameless promotions, scams, and attention whoring

My mastodon feed contains only the users I follow. If they post unwanted things I unfollow them. Mastodon doesn't force you to see content from people you don't follow.

The sfba trending list has engagement-bait, but you shouldn't look there (on any social media site) if you don't want that sort of content.

For me, having been on fedi for like 7 years now, there are cool places, and there are not so cool places. I might be more lucky than most in that I barely need to curate my time there, cause I follow cool people, and so I just see what they like too

> Puff piece with 1000+ words that doesn't ever assert anything in particular that the author was wrong about

His article mostly talks about other things but I think his title is sufficient. He says that he never thought that the news would become so unreliable that he would end up getting his news from randos on Bluesky who simply share what they know without an intention to monetize it.

Yeah, the choice of title is indeed strange. But it does convey a personal point of view about the platform very well. Largely inscrutable? Compared to what?

Very much the puff piece of someone living in a social media bubble. The real problem is how the fediverse is going to survive the onslaught of laws related to social media age verification, data retention, data privacy, data not-privacy (breaking e2e encryption and retaining data for a really long time to spy on users), etc. There are a lot of problematic laws right now, but the velocity of new laws is alarming.

One can make an argument that compliance is possible -- but it isn't free. I don't see how small, independent websites will survive. Operators chose not to follow the laws (which sometimes conflict with each other.) As long as you don't scale too much or the operators or anonymous they can probably get away with it.

I use Mastodon. I use Twitter. Twitter is still fine as long as you keep your follow list clean. That means unfollowing people who post noise, which somehow people haven't figured out 17 years later?? Only view the chronological feed. Could this all have just been RSS feeds? Probably.

He asserts to being wrong about the Fediverse being as bad as all the rest, because the Fediverse is full of real people instead of corporatized bullshit.

>sfba.social

Seems pretty cool TBH

The win for mastodon is that it's a choice to view those feeds at all. Some have none by default (e.g. librem.one), you only see who you follow. Same with bluesky. "Discover" is there by default, but can be removed. It's a tad annoying in some places, like when your feed is "empty", they still show it at the bottom, but it's a big banner which, for me, is a perfect indicator to stop scrolling. You can also hide "Trending Tooics".

Thank you for your opinion.

Says the person commenting on a site where random people give their opinions about various things..

Ok random person with opinion on a thing.

“So when Twitter was accidentally purchased by a fascist high on ketamine” was enough to predict the rest of

> Just the ramblings of a bitter person with which the Internet is filled.

https://mirror.forum [0]

[0]:(I recently bought it and it was idling around, your comment made me think what I should add on it so I did. I hope you evaluate that you were being bitter in your comment as well)

> Why would I be interested in random people's opinions on various things?

Sadly, if you are asking such question, I don't think that the blog post was intended for ya.