6 ms·

X has a lock on live information that no one else has figured out yet not from a technical perspective but from an adoption perspective.

jeroenhd 1y ago
My government has been posting a lot of information (weather alerts, road works, etc.) on their own, dedicated Mastodon instance. They don't really advertise it, but it's good they have a platform to publish live information to in case the Americans continue to get weirder.
- _whiteCaps_ 1y ago
  Do you have any examples of this? I'd love to point this out to my local government.
  - jeroenhd 1y ago
    https://social.overheid.nl/directory https://social.overheid.nl/directory has a list of government services, municipalities, and other stuff. https://social.overheid.nl/@RWSverkeersinfo https://social.overheid.nl/@RWSverkeersinfo is for traffic conditions https://social.overheid.nl/@knmi https://social.overheid.nl/@knmi is the royal national weather service Some services have shut down their Mastodon presence because their social media team found too little interaction and they don't want to use simple forward bots that nobody responds to, unfortunately.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
It's network effect, same as Facebook
bpavuk 1y ago
Well, there are platforms that did figure it out, but it's quite fractured. For US, you have Bluesky and Fediverse (Flipboard, Mastodon). In Ukraine, you can use Threads. Germany seems to love Bluesky and Mastodon, given the amount of independent Personal Data Servers and Mastodon instances located there.
- ndr 1y ago
  Who is using Bluesky in the US? Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?
  - digianarchist 1y ago
    Other platforms are over-policed and Twitter is under-policed. There was a sweet-spot, subjectively speaking, for Twitter mid-2022.
  - toyg 1y ago
    > Who is using Bluesky in the US? A lot of writers and creatives who could not stomach X.com anymore (and were then likely burned by Mastodon's geekiness). > Is it just my friends? If your friends are in the right-wing sphere (e.g. Joe Rogan listeners, etc), then yeah, likely.
    - itsoktocry 1y ago
      I tried out Bluesky during the great migration about a year ago. It was incredibly toxic, but of course the "left-wing sphere" thinks they are the purveyors of universal "good", thus their toxicity is fine.
      - delecti 1y ago
        I suspect our politics are just too different for my attempts to defend the culture itself to be relevant, but it is super easy to cultivate what you see on Bluesky. You can detach your posts if you get quote-reposted, you can limit who can reply to posts (to followers, people who follow you, people you've mentioned, or only to yourself), blocking someone also means that 3rd parties can't even view the threads (and so can't jump into drama that one side has attempted to disengage from), you can hide replies to your posts, blocklists let you immediately prevent large lists of users from seeing or interacting with you, and there's a culture among many users to immediately block people who are thought to be potential agitators (a very proactive culture of "don't feed the trolls"). If your experience was toxic, you probably just didn't use the tools available to you to avoid that toxicity.
mrguyorama 1y ago
But X doesn't have a lock on live information. What people obsess over and see on X is literal propaganda If something matters so much to your life that you can't wait the hour or so it takes to filter through normal channels, you will not need X to tell you it is happening, and knowing an hour early will not help you Instead, X will tell you that the USA is loading nukes onto planes getting ready to fly to China (that the video shows is not nukes, not going to china, and from a marketing video several years back) X will tell you to invest in <Scam> X will tell you some right wing propaganda like Seattle being on fire. People who still insist that X has good, reliable, and timely news are saying they have really bad FOMO. If you validated everything that came from X attempting to tease out the signal from the noise, that validation takes longer than just waiting for actual news to filter out. So instead, people who get their "news" from X just don't validate. X is worse than the tabloids at the checkout line, and those tabloids have on occasion broken world news. But if you bought one every single day because of that, you would be a moron.
codingdave 1y ago
It certainly doesn't. About 1/3 of the people in the USA use Twitter. Which means 2/3rds of us do not. Reddit's audience is larger, at about 1/2 of Americans. Mainstream media's is 2/3rds. And the true information flow happens when people talk IRL after consuming some or all of the above. So while yes, Twitter has a significant audience, they are not holding a monopoly on live information in any form. (And this isn't even getting into whether or not people trust each of these information platforms. People often consume media but don't trust what they hear. Which is probably a good thing.)

jeroenhd 1y ago

My government has been posting a lot of information (weather alerts, road works, etc.) on their own, dedicated Mastodon instance. They don't really advertise it, but it's good they have a platform to publish live information to in case the Americans continue to get weirder.

_whiteCaps_ 1y ago
Do you have any examples of this? I'd love to point this out to my local government.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  https://social.overheid.nl/directory https://social.overheid.nl/directory has a list of government services, municipalities, and other stuff. https://social.overheid.nl/@RWSverkeersinfo https://social.overheid.nl/@RWSverkeersinfo is for traffic conditions https://social.overheid.nl/@knmi https://social.overheid.nl/@knmi is the royal national weather service Some services have shut down their Mastodon presence because their social media team found too little interaction and they don't want to use simple forward bots that nobody responds to, unfortunately.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago

It's network effect, same as Facebook

bpavuk 1y ago

Well, there are platforms that did figure it out, but it's quite fractured. For US, you have Bluesky and Fediverse (Flipboard, Mastodon). In Ukraine, you can use Threads. Germany seems to love Bluesky and Mastodon, given the amount of independent Personal Data Servers and Mastodon instances located there.

ndr 1y ago
Who is using Bluesky in the US? Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?
- digianarchist 1y ago
  Other platforms are over-policed and Twitter is under-policed. There was a sweet-spot, subjectively speaking, for Twitter mid-2022.
- toyg 1y ago
  > Who is using Bluesky in the US? A lot of writers and creatives who could not stomach X.com anymore (and were then likely burned by Mastodon's geekiness). > Is it just my friends? If your friends are in the right-wing sphere (e.g. Joe Rogan listeners, etc), then yeah, likely.
  - itsoktocry 1y ago
    I tried out Bluesky during the great migration about a year ago. It was incredibly toxic, but of course the "left-wing sphere" thinks they are the purveyors of universal "good", thus their toxicity is fine.
    - delecti 1y ago
      I suspect our politics are just too different for my attempts to defend the culture itself to be relevant, but it is super easy to cultivate what you see on Bluesky. You can detach your posts if you get quote-reposted, you can limit who can reply to posts (to followers, people who follow you, people you've mentioned, or only to yourself), blocking someone also means that 3rd parties can't even view the threads (and so can't jump into drama that one side has attempted to disengage from), you can hide replies to your posts, blocklists let you immediately prevent large lists of users from seeing or interacting with you, and there's a culture among many users to immediately block people who are thought to be potential agitators (a very proactive culture of "don't feed the trolls"). If your experience was toxic, you probably just didn't use the tools available to you to avoid that toxicity.

mrguyorama 1y ago

But X doesn't have a lock on live information. What people obsess over and see on X is literal propaganda If something matters so much to your life that you can't wait the hour or so it takes to filter through normal channels, you will not need X to tell you it is happening, and knowing an hour early will not help you Instead, X will tell you that the USA is loading nukes onto planes getting ready to fly to China (that the video shows is not nukes, not going to china, and from a marketing video several years back) X will tell you to invest in <Scam> X will tell you some right wing propaganda like Seattle being on fire. People who still insist that X has good, reliable, and timely news are saying they have really bad FOMO. If you validated everything that came from X attempting to tease out the signal from the noise, that validation takes longer than just waiting for actual news to filter out. So instead, people who get their "news" from X just don't validate. X is worse than the tabloids at the checkout line, and those tabloids have on occasion broken world news. But if you bought one every single day because of that, you would be a moron.

codingdave 1y ago

It certainly doesn't. About 1/3 of the people in the USA use Twitter. Which means 2/3rds of us do not. Reddit's audience is larger, at about 1/2 of Americans. Mainstream media's is 2/3rds. And the true information flow happens when people talk IRL after consuming some or all of the above. So while yes, Twitter has a significant audience, they are not holding a monopoly on live information in any form. (And this isn't even getting into whether or not people trust each of these information platforms. People often consume media but don't trust what they hear. Which is probably a good thing.)