Elon Musk’s latest changes for X are driving more users away – not exactly a surprise, granted – and many of them are flocking to rival social media outlet Bluesky. So many made the switch, in fact, it led to Bluesky briefly going down due to the volume of incoming new users.
The central move initiated by X that made the headlines for driving migration away from Musk’s platform is a change to the way the ‘Block’ button works. This was actually announced back in September, but is officially being implemented now (well, it’ll be in place ‘soon’ we’re told).
It means that going forward, X users who you have blocked will still be able to view your (public) posts – though they won’t be able to engage with them in any way (from replies to liking and so forth).
This is problematic for obvious reasons, in terms of enabling stalkers and trolls who will still be able to view the posts of an account that has blocked them, when previously this wasn’t the case. In the past, blocking meant that the blocked user couldn’t see any posts (or anything at all, save for a message telling them that they’ve been blocked), but soon, this will change.
Bluesky posted to say it had in excess of 100,000 new users inside 12 hours following the announcement by X, after the rival network highlighted the fact that its block function stops those who are blocked from viewing any posts.
In an update, Bluesky noted that it has now gained half a million new users in the past day.
There’s another reason that some folks are rapidly exiting from X stage left (and right, and indeed center, clambering over the audience, it would seem), and that’s a change to X’s privacy policy.
As TechCrunch reports, the new policy includes an update that allows third-party collaborators to use content on X to train their AI models – unless the user opts out. This is a notable extension of the reach of AI training on X, which has so far only been used to train Musk’s own Grok AI (unless users opt out, again).
What a garbage dataset to train off. The majority of everything there is all bots and AI anyway lol
bots training bots. maybe this will (hopefully) corrupt the AI’s data. its kind of like copying off a copy again and again.
This is in fact precisely what happens. LLM output becomes increasingly incoherent with each subsequent generation trained off of previously AI generated data.
Sound like human
50und 11k3 hum4n
50()|V[) 11X3 |-|()|/|4|V
$[]|||||) |!|<[- #|_|///-||
Don’t forget to yell into the data PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS!!!
Haha, gooner.
The AI version of mad cow disease.
Grok Habsburg
Man I think it’s already done, and been done for a long time, without AI. So much of who we are now is based on and informed by what we’ve read and watched online. It’s our been our dominant frame of reference, language and value system for quite a while. We are the AI.
There are no buses in this picture
Elon decided Microsoft’s Tay chatbot was a guidebook …
At least its not…
I dunno, YouTube comments? I think Facebook is even far better data-wise than X, and thats a low bar.
It’s also about the art posted on it. I use bsky for that purpose and all the “migrants” didn’t want their work to be fed to an AI.
It’s just virtualised Deliverance
Come on over to Mastodon, the water’s nice
I’ve stopped recommending it. The discovery and trending post mechanisms are either garbage or non-existent, and it’s really hard to get a feed that’s remotely entertaining. Devs also seem ideologically opposed to adding any features like that. It’ll just give normal people who aren’t willing to deal with all this crap a bad taste in their mouth when it comes to the fediverse. I do recommend lemmy to people tho.
I feel like its the opposite.
Mastodon’s hashtag following is by far the best discovery method out there.
I’ve stopped using Bluesky because I can’t find any content and there’s just too much “screaming into the void” making it impossible to find anything of substance.
I’ve stopped using Threads because it’s just engagement bait.Yeah Threads has nothing of substance, just engagement bait as you said. X is similar now that users can make ad revenue
I disagree, I just think some kind of engagement algorithm would be better. I haven’t used bluesky or threads so I can’t speak to them. I’m just saying that back in the day on twitter, I had no problem finding a bunch of very funny and clever posts, and posts were catered to me well. Through both me following people and I assume through the engagement algorithm. I’ve tried adding a bunch of hashtags, but I’m not finding a bunch of hilarious stuff to send to my friends like I did back then on twitter.
Bunch of spam too, because bots use the hashtags, so I’m often scrolling through a bunch of auto-posted stuff. Idk. Maybe I’m using it wrong. I just feel like your average person isn’t going to go through all that crap so they’ll cling to twitter until it dies.
And I’ve tried switching instances around, which is just confusing honestly, and didn’t really help with finding lots of content that I want to see. I used mastodon more when I was able to mirror people I know are funny on twitter to my mastodon feed lol. I want to like it, I just find I’m never tempted to go on it. Can’t figure it out.
Is that you, Elon?
What do valid criticisms/grievances about Mastodon have to do with the poster being Elon?
They crave the algorithm
Groan
While I agree that it makes Mastodon less entertaining I also think that it makes it a lot more fair, representative and trustworthy as a lens through which to observe & participate in social discourse and share information and opinions. That in itself will probably mean that it remains less popular but I think it’s also what makes it more valuable IMO. We need to calm down from the urgency of the digital dopamine cycle, for many reasons. If social media is a truly human media then it should be boring at times because that is a human reality that we are adapted to.
I agree. I love Mastodon’s calm columnar UI with lists and hashtags where I feel I’m in control of my experience, and that I can just stop whenever and come back in three days.
Yeah fair points. I will say this implosion of the social media I used to use has pushed me towards doing other things than scrolling on my phone lol, and that is a positive thing.
I wonder if they’re afraid of Eternal September’ing the service. A lot of people on Lemmy were upset when a bunch of people on Reddit joined. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have millions join in one day. I doubt it would be good for the culture of the community!
A lot of people on Lemmy were upset when a bunch of people on Reddit joined
How many active users were there pre API fisaco? Fedidb graph doesn’t go back that far.
Lemmy had around 1000 active users for the first half of 2023.
As someone who used lemmy pre migration, yeah it wasn’t exactly active
How did you view earlier in the chart? I figured it was low since maybe five instances existed before summer '23.
I didn’t; I made the chart almost a year ago, click on the link above it to see the 11-month-old comment.
I see, thank you for digging it up.
Most of the people upset when redditors joined were former redditors.
Yeah but they left before us so clearly they’re superior.
That’s fair I suppose.
Lemmy and Bluesky are what I use, atproto is just much more promising for microblogging than activitypub and Mastodon proves that. Lemmy is perfect for it though.
Another issue I had was hundreds of saved toots having had awesome pictures, important data or things to do.
I saved them hoping to use some later, but it all remained an unorganized glop: unusable unless I looked at each one again, in order, to find the 75th one back, about a cat
Exactly, their official app is just pure garabage and they aren’t even trying to fix it
Wdym they aren’t trying to fix it, their GitHub repo is very much active.
Though as for pure garbage, the app ain’t that bad IMO apart from the fact it’s made with React Native.
Why is React Native garbage?
Yeah, once we have mastodon-wide full text search, it’ll be useful.
It’s not perfect? Interesting. I’m sure that will be a deal-breaker for people exiting a failing platform run by a megalomaniacal MAGA asshole actively harming working people…
Or just use neither, like I’ve ended up doing.
I know what you mean. I’m self-hosting and use https://relay.fedi.buzz/ to subscribe to hashtags from all over the fedimicroblogosphere. It’s literally too much interesting content, I kept scrolling new stuff for hours and had to cut down on what tags I subscribed to. It’s like that Lemmy explorer but for microblogging.
I think a reasonable admin should be open to using the service to populate the federated timeline with niché content users ask for.
The only downside is “catch all”-tags and people abusing tags. “Hey #fediverse, check out my XYZ!”. No, I want fediverse news dang it!
But the dev stuff? Yeah.
Dude, that’s gonna be one hell of a racist AI just based on the dataset it’s gonna receive
It’s gonna train the little robot dog, which they’re gonna put a gun on. And drones. It’s gonna train drones, he’ll sell it to anyone who’ll buy the data.
he’ll sell it to anyone who’ll buy the data.
And if they will not buy it musk will sue them until they buy it.
This is why when we give vacuum robots AI powers, they run around your house shouting racist pejoratives
Welcome to the future
Just helpful to remember, as all this horseshit persists, Bluesky is Jack Dorsey. Dorsey is former head of Twitter and musk’s good buddy.
It’s all a losing proposition, whatever direction you move - except if you move… Away.
He left in May.
He left the board. As a “public benefit organization” it’s still a for-profit company and he still owns stock.
But he’s left seemingly under a cloud, so unless the leadership changes I doubt he’s influencing decision making.
Let’s be honest these social media platforms will be a rinse and repeat. Just enjoy it whilst it lasts. Move on when the ownership go full Elon.
Jack Dorky got literally laughed off the platform.
I dunno. I’d say it’s more important to see what exactly he’s doing and what Bluesky is.
Right now Bluesky is really good. So until it turns bad I’m sticking to it.
Wait this whole article just baselessly assumes that 1 new bluesky account = 1 person leaving twitter. That is so obviously unrealistic. Sure some people were probably curious and wanted to check out something new but that doesn’t mean they will immediately switch platforms.
You can’t just make fun of Those Guys for endlessly believing fake bullshit while unquestionably parroting this garbage.
Twitter is for narcissists, and when they say Mastodon is not as good as twitter they really mean that there’s not as many people watching them as on Twitter. So Bluesky gaining 500,000 new accounts could help in making it “better”.
The headline directly says half a million users left twatter. As far as I can tell that is literally a lie.
Mastodon is still pretty rough around the edges. Especially for the regular Twitter Instagram crowd.
These mfs will use literally anything except for open source, decentralised social meda
The masses yearn for the corporate boot
Is bluesky not federated?
So let’s say on Twitter, someone blocks me and I can’t read their post. Can’t I just log out and read their post that way? I don’t have a Twitter account, so I’ve never seen a blocked link before.
X is authwalled
I can see this random tweet from Taylor Swift just fine in incognito mode. I can’t look at replies but I can see her posts.
https://x.com/taylorswift13/status/1781171613058097619
People on Lemmy link to tweets all the time and I can navigate and read them. Not sure what you mean then that it’s authwalled. It’s an annoying experience and it bugs me every time I visit to make an account or log in, but I can see them.
You can see a tweet, but not list of her tweets, iirc.
You can view some profiles (authwall for others) and some show all content (tried it out with bbc and forbes), others drop relatively recent content while some others only show ancient content from a year or more ago.
The latter two were when I tried opening the twitter pages for some smaller podcasts I follow.
Maybe it just authwalls shared IPs like Google does (eg YouTube)
Yup, that’s exactly right. On Lemmy you don’t even have to log out, blocking someone simply means you can’t see their posts. If you don’t want a harasser or stalker to see something, and you post it publicly, you’re an idiot.
And this is the way it should be… You shouldn’t be able to silence someone from responding to stuff you say publicly by blocking them.
Someone could just open another account with a new mail address. Blocking doesn’t help much against stalkers as long as your posts are public.
deleted by creator
While anything that gets people off Twitter is good, I’m sorely unimpressed by those artists who “had to” to patronize the racist transphobic neo-Nazi hellhole “because my audience is there”… until Musk’s policies happened to offend their own personal interests, by requiring training for their AI. Countless models trained on all public images already exist, jumping ship won’t prevent their work from being scraped elsewhere, and frankly, any one image or even portfolio will contribute virtually nothing to the result, so quitting in protest is largely symbolic. But so many peoples drew the line at that, and not at Musk making “cis” a slur, or protecting child pornographers, or boosting white supremacist supremacy theories. It’s really disappointing to see.
Yeah this is pretty much how I feel.
I loathe musk, and despise twitter, and I’m happy about anything they will be unhappy about.
That said, I don’t have a lot of respect for anyone who is still there. Journalists, politicians, anyone who has to be there for their job… I still just don’t have a lot of respect for them.
This is a lesson in humanity. Artists can be pieces of shit too and to be an artist, so committed to oneself and one’s thoughts is to be to some extent - narcissistic, and in the end they look out for self interest first, and it’s only that the AI portion of this threatens their self-interest do they become concerned. #NotAll, ofc.
Like I said before, solidarity of the scorpion with the turtle.
And that’s on top of all the Brazil users who fled to BlueSky when he refused to comply with a court order (and pay a fine) so they blocked Twitter for a few days. I’m not sure how many went back after he paid the fine but BlueSky was fairly popular in Brazil even during the closed beta so I’m sure a ton stuck around.
There is notably more Portuguese content since then. I’m guessing quite a bit stuck around.
Social media like Twitter preys on people’s fear of missing out.
Manufactured Problem - not being up to date on internet bullshit. Marketed solution - be on twitter. Supply and demand died a long time ago. Now it’s all about manufactured problems, and conveniently marketed solutions.
This sort of psychological manipulation in marketing works. It’s why it’s so hard to get people to leave websites like Twitter, reddit, fb ect. They’ve made their brands synonymous with media trends.
It took long enough, but I’m genuinely happy to see folks wising up and realizing they don’t “need” Twitter. It’s like watching a bunch of people break up with a toxic ex all at the same time.
Not just Twitter. FOMO was what kept me on Reddit far longer than I should have been there.
Lol, that’s probably 30% of real people still using it
lol
Just like a real girlfriend, but better. Apart from you having absolutely no sex life and apart from the fact that it has absolutely no emotional attachment or attraction to you whatsoever. And it will also never do anything like buy you dinner or a birthday present. Enjoy throwing money at your robot that you can’t even fuck like a fleshlight.
has so far only been used to train Musk’s own Grok AI
The Grok models are a laughing stock in the LLM space. They aren’t good over APIs, and they’re even less useful after Elon “open sources” them far later. Qwen 72B, and heck, Qwen 32B is already better than Grok 2, which is probably hundreds of billions of parameters. Qwen is runnable locally right now, Apache 2.0, and released day one. Grok 1 is… well, I dunno, no one has even bothered to try hosting it for anything.
I dunno what Twitter is doing with all those H100s Elon hoarded, but it seems like a big waste so far. Its certainly nothing to help the open source/self hosting space or to “decensor” and “democratize” LLMs like Elon fans seem to think.
dunno what Twitter is doing with all those H100s Elon hoarded
Duh. Mining crypto.
Is 500,000 actually a lot? Honest question, my sense of scale with these things is shaky.
For Twitter? No
For Bsky? Yes
Bluesky is pretty great once you learn how to use it. I plan to slowly back off twitter.
Bluesky is vc backed by investors, it is a false promise that I am sure a lot of people working on the project believe, but it is a false promise all the same.
Bluesky is in the part of its lifecycle where investors tolerate no return on their investment in favor of drawing more people in. That is the relevant difference between Bluesky and other social media.
There are cool parts to Bluesky but it is absolutely a false promise of a future the fediverse already provides (however imperfectly). It is also full of “liberal” sheep who tell themselves they think differently but are so locked into the mindset of the way things are that they NEED their social network to be owned and operated for a profit by people orders of magnitude more wealthy than them.
Bluesky will end up essentially the same as all investor backed for-profit social networks, it will grow into a toxic, centralized (or in this case pseudo-centralized because of the moderation system), shithole where only popular accounts get any engagement with their posts. Mark my words.
That type of social media just isn’t really for me. But why would one want to choose Bluesky over Mastadon?
When I did try Twitter I somehow ended up following and be followed by a bunch of folks from Ghana… that was pretty neat. Although I did miss out because my Akan/Pidgin is basically non existent. Although I was introduced to the word “bomboclaat” which was interesting… lol
1 reason for me, the algorithm. I can never find a lot of new thing to discover or new people to follow on Mastodon when I first started, which makes me not use it very much even now.
That’s how Facebook went for me the last time I tried to use it with a new account… I was immediately swamped with friend requests from people in western and central Africa. I accepted some out of curiosity so of course FB decided that’s what I was really into. I’m not sure if these people just send out random requests or why they want to add Americans… I didn’t get hit up for scams or anything, it was just people posting and sharing photos of their lives as normal FB users.
