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).
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.