have you quit twitter yet?

yea Twitter can be a fun experience if you follow the right accounts. for me it's mostly sports/music/comedians/random people I think are cool. I think the key is to not follow too many politics people

― frogbs, Tuesday, November 1, 2022 4:11 PM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Probably true. I think Twitter in the Trump era would've felt different no matter what, but it didn't help that I coped with Trump's 2016 win by following a bunch of political reporters and commenters in the months after the election.

Another tip for twitter enjoyment is disabling retweets from users you follow (on a user by user basis). I guess it would be cool if you could do a mass disabling, but I don't believe it's an option.

First time I had to do that was for Ava DuVernay because she would retweet EVERY TIME someone said one kind word about a movie or tv show she made. Cleared up so much space in my timeline.

Now I do it a few times a week.

The first person I ever muted was a coworker whose feed was 95% retweets of the "spreading awareness"/"signal boosting" variety. Prob wouldn't have minded seeing her own tweets but could not deal with all of that.

I know you're off twitter now, but you can just disable retweets instead of wholly muting the account.

Yeah, I did not know that! Good tip.

just got kicked off

don't know why, they didn't specify

anyway, good

Another tip for twitter enjoyment is disabling retweets from users you follow (on a user by user basis). I guess it would be cool if you could do a mass disabling, but I don't believe it's an option.

― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever), Wednesday, November 2, 2022 12:24 AM (forty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

you can mute the string "RT @" or you can run this https://turn-off-retweets.jvns.ca/

Irish politicians will be delighted if everyone quits Twitter. They absolutely hate it. It gives people the ability to counter their lies or mistakes without having to be invited on the TV or radio to debate them in person. If it wasn't for Twitter, we wouldn't have known that our minister for agriculture and a whole load of other grandees attended a big dinner dance at a golf club together at the height of the COVID restrictions, for example. Broadcast media tends to pick up the stories afterwards. I don't want to lose that immediacy or that fact-checking ability.

surprised to hear so many people position twitter as the only option for news aside from broadcast media. yall realize there are a couple big ones that you are leaving out?

Twitter isn't itself a news source, but it's a very good distributor of news. News can travel quickly through retweets, and users encounter it passively (often with useful context, or at least salience, already attached to it). Without Twitter, I spend more time browsing the NYT homepage and clicking on the odd headline that interests me, but it's not the same, for better or worse.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

It does get old, when everyone retweets the same thing but yeah exactly

Between having no cable and shitty websites and whatnot, I actually do find a lot of news relatively hard to access. We do subscribe to the Washington Post, and even that one is often broken in Chrome and frequently won't let me stay signed in and read stories (for some reason). So yeah, real-time news, especially breaking news, often gets to me faster via Twitter than it does via the actual news sources, and who I follow (and/or trust) helps control what news or kind of news reaches me first. Even a relatively slick operation like NPR often lags on important (to me) news by several hours, if not days.

do we have an alternate social media thread? I'm curious if anyone on ilx has experience with Mastodon

Twitter is a really good place for NBA news and highlights

also learning about stuff from multiple viewpoints in the same "timeline" i.e. Ferguson was really useful to get the "same" news from different angles

Mastodon suuuuucks. It's not centralized, so it's really hard to find other people; everyone basically has their own little Mastodon fiefdom. I've signed up for counter.social, but that one seems really annoying too. I doubt I'll ever use it.

for what it's worth, at least a couple of the people I followed on Twitter that have stopped have continued to post the same stuff on Instagram.

hard to imagine searching Insta for breaking news lol

Twitter really is the best for finding out about something in real time imo

xp
yeah every time I look into Mastodon I just get confused by the baroque descriptions of how it works and give up, oh well

what if everyone on twitter switched to ilx

the everything app

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i have soft-quit twitter (ie not deleted my account but logged out of it everywhere and not let myself log back in) several times and it is always a good move. i would be on twitter all day during work and then by the end of the day i would feel so anxious and depressed. i don't even hate-follow awful people but it's still constantly being bombarded with the worst news from everywhere in the world. after a while i tell myself i can manage it, i won't go on twitter if i'm feeling vulnerable that day but otherwise it's ok, but i still end up at that point where i feel so sad and terrible by the end of the day. so i should probably just delete my account. the only problem is the rest of the internet feels boring in comparison, there's nowhere else that is constantly generating so much new content and information (a lot of which is good and interesting and funny) so quickly.

time for ilx recruitment drive

Pretty much mute any current affairs on Twitter. The world ain’t so great. Mainly stay for music polls, and stuff like that

mastodon is quite slow right now, presumbly bcz there's a surge of ppl joining or rejoining

decentralisation causes one single hiccup -- apparently enough to be offputting to many -- which is that right at the start you have to pick an "instance" to join up. like the gate you go through in. there's an element of luck here (for practical purposes and for accessing the main flow and building a timeline it doesn't matter which one you're in; but some are very robust and others are flaky and if you don't have ppl advising you there's no way of knowing which in advance; the populous ones are likely to stick around but i think also more likely get sluggish; the tiny ones in some weird language may be totally fine or totally flaky, esp.if you don't speak the language) (i think there are some specialist ones with limited access so best avoid them also) but it's not that hard to switch once you're in and know yr way round a bit better

timelines: exactly as with twitter, you track the world via yr own curated timeline -- so you have to find yr faves and follow them (with certain exceptions it doesn't matter if they're in a different instance); in addition (twitter doesn't have this) you can track the world via a local timeline (everything else posted in yr instance whether or not you follow them) and a federated timeline (literally everything else posted by anyone whether or not you follow them); the second moves very fast and is in many languages -- mainly japanese last time i was using mastodon a lot -- and generally incomprehensible, unless u read japanese i guess.

the main drawback of joining is that (like any new socmed platform) you will have to rebuild yr network (which takes time) and some ppl won't be there at all! the main drawback of rejoining is that most of the ppl i enjoyed reading were gathered round the helldude when he was banned from twitter a few years back and that little community went dark when he started a new twitter acount

is it daunting? maybe! but i am older than you (most likely) and i puzzled it out quick enuf so stop yr blubberin

i am @dubdob✧✧✧@masto✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧

tweets are toots!

lol

at dubdobdee at mastodon dot social

agreed with NA, I follow mostly good people but Twitter still gives me a lot of anxiety and dread. a lot of leftist accounts really do seem to think everything is the end of the world and sometimes that attitude can just ruin your whole day. I think that as human beings we were not really meant to have the entire weight of the world on our shoulders especially when we do not have any power.

Can’t even work out the server thing on Mastodon and then when I got somewhere it wouldn’t accept my password :(

I’ll maybe try again

Or just check back in a decade or so

xp
haha fair enough and thank you for elaborating

tbh maybe it's less about incomprehension and more a more basic uncertainty about its value & appeal. i.e., "some are very robust and others are flaky and if you don't have ppl advising you there's no way of knowing which in advance" is more or less where I keep giving up. how did you pick an instance to start with? (ok I think I figured that out in the xpost of your id)

i gave it deep thought as you can see

I think the first thing I can across was like a furries server or something

unpossible

I’m going to try again on the big computer.

"mastodon is quite slow right now, presumbly bcz there's a surge of ppl joining or rejoining"

Yup, keeps timing out for me.

yeah eugen gargron sez he's awaiting delivery of a powerful new server

Good to know steps are being taken.

do we need an ilx-centric mastodon server or smth

yes get this sorted poster mh

i would rather use ilx

but tweets are now toots!

i will give mastodon a try if it survives the next few weeks lol.

I'm reading up on how it works. Seems like it'd work well with a number of small- or mid-sized servers, and the amount of traffic you'll get is completely dependent on what users on your server subscribe to. You can have the front page be a variation of the classic firehose ofall the toots (lol) from your server, plus those from all accounts that the users on your server subscribe to.

I think it'd scale super well with a myriad of small to mid sized servers with the most popular users not all being on the same ones. Obviously this is the opposite of what's happening.

It felt like I was picking the geocity I wanted to live in all over again. I’ll never use this thing.

I mean, we could collectively all join one instance, take a vote as to whether we want to keep it going, and then roll on or shut down

what would be the difference between that and ilxor.com

you could follow/retoot (?)/interact with other people not on ilx