ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝 @ Emperor @feddit.uk

A geologist and archaeologist by training, a nerd by inclination - books, f

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The mask has slipped because they know they can get away with it.

After all,this isn't anything forced on Meta, they are taking advantage of the incoming president being all for this and binning policies they clearly only follower reluctantly (and poorly).

It feels like the statements about the removal of fact-checking (which is all I heard about on the news) is misdirection, so the changes made deep in their policy documents get less attention than they deserve.

Not coincidental at all, apparently.

Here is the archived version of that FT article, which includes:

If you’re a libertarian who believes that inequality is natural and lives in fear of race war, you will be drawn towards a certain type of American politics. You certainly won’t want government or institutions to try to intervene against racism. In 1995, a year after the ANC began attempting that in South Africa, Thiel and Sacks, who met at Stanford, published The Diversity Myth in the US. It’s a well-written defence of “western civilisation” against “multiculturalism” (or what the right now calls “woke”), written by two white twentysomethings who are sure racism isn’t the problem. Indeed, they explain: “There are almost no real racists . . . in America’s younger generation.”

Three decades later, this duo and Musk, with whom they united in Silicon Valley’s “PayPal mafia”, are backing a white Republican ticket that peddles made-up stories about Black immigrants from Haiti eating pets. The opposing Democrats are fielding a Black presidential candidate for the third time in five elections. The racial aspect of politics is almost as plain as it was in South Africa.

Possibly, but:

In theory, deleting your account is the only way to have all your data wiped from Twitter’s servers. Even if you do so, however, you can never be ultimately confident that the service will carry through with its promise.

One thing that I thought was good advice was to delete your account, then sign up with the same username so no-one can pretend they are you. I'd bet bots are hoovering up such accounts during the Xodus and it won't end well.

Yeah, if you are buying cheap stuff from sites like this (Temu has had similar accusations levelled at it), then you have to accept that it may be being built by slave labour.

Is that the current exchange rate?

I remember as a kid, we used to drive past one near Moss Side and it always struck me as the scariest boozer ever. Don't think I've ever seen another one with such "fuck you!" vibes and I've been in some dodgy drinking holes.

So not necessarily A Bad Thing.

There are dozens of @Blaze@feddit.org.

This is generally good practice, as Lemmy is a link aggregator, so it needs the canonical link. If you are using an archive link, then drop it into the post, which will cover all the bases and give people options.

The kind with a German shepherd on the roof?

And the sheer number of bots on Xitter makes you wonder how many actual people are left. Considering Musk used bots in his (poor) negotiations, it's funny this might be what he relies on now to keep his numbers up.

Or, perhaps even better, Hubzilla.

It would be Interesting to have a way to use it as a kind of plug-in on Lemmy, especially for location specific instances, especially ones that love talking about the weather, rather than our feelings.

Isn't the AI content on specific communities for that can be blocked if you don't want to see it?

There is a debate to be had about AI generated art, which is trained on artist's work and may not be the harmless fun people might think. AI summarising an article seems a different beast as it is merely pulling from that one piece and, while there may be questions about accuracy, it doesn't seem as harmful. I'd, personally, want to read an article myself but it could be useful for other people. I could see an AI summarising videos being an actually useful tool.

FT has the numbers:

Repelled by the direction that both the site now called X and its owner have taken, an exodus from the platform is under way. That exodus — oh go on then, Xodus — has been particularly apparent in Britain, having gathered steam since Musk started posting things like “civil war is inevitable” during the riots that broke out over the summer. Many have left the platform entirely, while others merely lurk. “I have an answer to this, but discussion only on Bluesky these days am afraid [sic],” I saw someone reply on X recently.

Data from Similarweb shows active daily users in the UK have dropped from 8mn a year ago to only around 5.6mn now, with more than a third of that fall coming since the summer riots.

...

As disillusioned X users become, yes, ex-X-users, they are finding their way on to alternative sites. With Mastodon having proved off-puttingly techy for many, that tends to either be Meta’s Threads app, or Bluesky, the platform that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey helped to start. But while the former is winning in terms of absolute numbers — about 1.4mn daily active users of Threads in the UK, compared with just over 100,000 for Bluesky — it is the latter that has grown the most rapidly over the past six weeks, and that is cementing itself as the top choice for media types, policy wonks, academics and the broader chatterati.

Although they have to make it weird:

That there is a new place for such people to congregate is all well and good, but the problem is that the chatterati — very nice and non-conspiracy-theorising and non-overtly-racist though they may be — tend to coalesce around some quite similar viewpoints, which makes for a rather echoey chamber. I’m not sure I have ever felt more like I’m at a Stoke Newington drinks party than when I’m browsing Bluesky (including when tucking into Perelló olives and truffle-flavoured Torres crisps in actual N16).

Before carrying on:

An even more fundamental problem is that nobody on Bluesky seems to actually mind that they are in an echo chamber. When I told a friend, who happens to be an enthusiastic Bluesky user, what I was writing about this week, she replied “oh yes, but it is an echo chamber, that’s what people like about it, it’s lovely”.

Many enthuse about how like “old Twitter” Bluesky is, which is telling in itself: in the old days of Twitter, progressives far outnumbered their conservative counterparts in terms of how much they posted about politics on the platform, but that share has fallen dramatically since Musk took it over. According to the British Election Study, in the run-up to both the 2015 and 2019 elections, about 30 per cent of the most progressive Britons posted about politics on the platform. This year, while the most conservative Britons remained no less likely to post than before, the share of progressives posting on X had halved to 15 per cent; presumably that has since fallen much further, given that this survey preceded the riots.

He's posting a range of graphs on Bluesky:

https://bsky.app/profile/jburnmurdoch.bsky.social/post/3lbdekbj4r22b

https://bsky.app/profile/jburnmurdoch.bsky.social/post/3latc7g4iuc2t

Pity the bulk is to Bluesky, not anything not Musk is a good thing for national discourse, although it could lead to worsening of echo chambers.