Mastodon and other twitter alternatives

[Onyx2]

13 hours ago, SuperBacon said:

People being able to buy verification is going well. 

There's an entire subreddit devoted to them /r/RealTwitterAccounts 

[David]

Surely the best result of Musk buying Twitter and driving people away would be for there to be no replacement? Where people just decide to spend less time bickering and being perma-raging on social media?

[DavidB6937]

12 minutes ago, David said:

Surely the best result of Musk buying Twitter and driving people away would be for there to be no replacement? Where people just decide to spend less time bickering and being perma-raging on social media?

Twitter is just one place for that. People will always find alternatives for their bickering and moaning if that's what they want to use the Internet for.

[Guest]

No they bloody won't.

[Guest]

They will come back to forums and ruin our peace 

[Carbomb]

20 hours ago, DavidB6937 said:

Twitter is just one place for that. People will always find alternatives for their bickering and moaning if that's what they want to use the Internet for.

Yup. Reddit and 4chan have whole sections dedicated to opposing views on anything.

[BomberPat]

as awful as social media can be, I'm not sure if it's better to have something as ubiquitous as Twitter where people's awful views and idiocies are there for all to see rather than them sitting in shitty little far-right forums and bespoke social media where it's allowed to fester into something even more rotten away from prying eyes. Because obviously the counterpoint to that idea is that we've had far-right views on social media for years now, and it's probably done more to normalise them than it's lived up to the hope that exposing these views to oxygen sees them shrivel up and die.

A lot of the entire market model of social media is what makes websites like Twitter susceptible to platforming extremist views, though, so even if Twitter collapses tomorrow, any viable alternative will fall into the same patterns and the same traps. One of the only ways to redeem social media would be to introduce a subscription model, just not at all the way that Elon Musk is trying to do it - if everyone had to pay to use it, and that became the chief funding method of the platform, rather than advertising, then no longer being beholden to advertisers means that social media is no longer a game of trying to elicit the most clicks, the most views, the most engagement, to keep them happy, and the algorithms won't be designed to shove the most objectionable content directly into your face every minute of every day. There are plenty of other problems that would come with charging for social media use, though, of course - but the benefits might outweigh the negatives.

Mostly, though, I'm going to have a book to sell in a few months, and I really don't want social media to all collapse and rob me of about the only way of reaching an audience that I have before then.

[Carbomb]

Problem with charging is cultural now, though - nearly every form of social media available has a free basic model, so people in general have been conditioned to expect to have it for free and funded by advertising. If they started charging now, it most likely would drive people to whichever platforms kept things as they are. 

[Tommy!]

5 hours ago, Carbomb said:

Problem with charging is cultural now, though - nearly every form of social media available has a free basic model, so people in general have been conditioned to expect to have it for free and funded by advertising. If they started charging now, it most likely would drive people to whichever platforms kept things as they are. 

It's all about the value for the money, if they charged for twitter I could either pay £5 to hear lots of ill informed opinions and the social commentary of a racist or I can buy a pint down the pub and get it as a sort of cabaret like I used to. 

[Chest Rockwell]

5 hours ago, Carbomb said:

Problem with charging is cultural now, though - nearly every form of social media available has a free basic model, so people in general have been conditioned to expect to have it for free and funded by advertising. If they started charging now, it most likely would drive people to whichever platforms kept things as they are. 

The expectation applies to much more than just social media. But the specific problem for social media is that if you want it to be a charged service then you don't have a product until you have a decent user base. So it's actually pretty much impossible to start on a charging model.

[Devon Malcolm]

Letterboxd started charging for access to premium features in about 2015, I think, 4 years after they launched. And the site gets progressively worse with each passing year. So make of that what you will.

[Weezenal]

3 hours ago, Devon Malcolm said:

Letterboxd started charging for access to premium features in about 2015, I think, 4 years after they launched. And the site gets progressively worse with each passing year. So make of that what you will.

In what ways has it got worse? I've only been on it a few years.

[Devon Malcolm]

34 minutes ago, Weezenal said:

In what ways has it got worse? I've only been on it a few years.

Filled with completely unfunny wankers doing 'hilarious' one-liner joke reviews to get hundreds of likes rather than people actually writing interesting stuff about the movies. An awful site now.

[Lorne Malvo]

Is Twitter actually on the way out then, or are people jumping the gun? 75% of my feed today has been people linking to their Instagram.

[Tommy!]

On 11/14/2022 at 11:36 PM, Devon Malcolm said:

Filled with completely unfunny wankers doing 'hilarious' one-liner joke

But enough about this place, what about Letterbox?