This is pretty standard online though - even regular Google has settings like “Safe Search:On” that you can toggle to moderate your search results.
It really just depends on what the default settings are when you arrive at a service before you start using it, and how obvious and discoverable you make those settings controls.
Well, that’s the whole point of the whole thing. Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol, which will be federated early this year. https://bsky.social/about/blog/11-15-2023-toward-federation
I know everyone likes to shit on all Social Media that isn’t called Mastodon, but that doesn’t mean Mastodon is the only option. I am on both (and Twitter a bit still too) but Bluesky is where I spend most of my time.
I like it over there. Of all the Twitter alternatives I think it ticks the right boxes.
If they can bridge their AT Protocol with ActivityPub then I don’t see why it can’t take off.
It’s more that it pops up in Image Searches all the time and it’s almost always a useless example of what you’re searching for.
It’s like the text version of Pinterest.
Honestly, I’m so jaded with this government that I just assume anything they announce is either just a disraction away from whatever ghastly thing they’re really doing or it’s some culturewar bait to stir up trouble.
Mastodon is great if you want a social media site that’ll have people shout at you for not putting a Content Warning on a post about you eating a ham sandwich.
Facebook are an advertising platform. They only offer a paid tier because they now legally have to. They don’t really want you to take the paid tier, they want you to explicitly opt in to the ad-supported ‘free’ one. - because by specifically agreeing to "I want the free Facebook with ads’ option it means you’re actively choosing to be served ads, which is what all the recent lawsuits have been about - users giving explicit consent to be targeted for advertising.
Or alternatively not taking the mobile operators side - being able to charge £10000 data costs to stream a couple of football matches worth of data shouldn’t be allowed.
In what possible way does that price come anywhere close to the costs of the providers in servicing that data?
Everything should be pirated, never use any Google or Microsoft service, use an email server you’ve built yourself, only get your social media access through obscure Mastodon servers, write your code in assembly language, only eat food you’ve caught or grown yourself, avoid the rental market by just building a hut in the woods.
The last election was in 2006. 17 years ago. The median age of people there is only 20. Most of those people didn’t vote for anyone, let alone Hamas. And even those that did vote, Hamas got less than 50% of the vote.
Also, nice use of ableist slurs there. Is that really appropriate?
But people advertise with Google precisely because they know the ads will be targeted at relevent people. If Google just sell loads of ad slots that just show to random users then that’s just a waste of money. If I’m selling motorbike helmets I don’t want to waste my money having Google show those ads to 60 year old men who only travel by bus or golfers or people who use wheelchairs.
Google won’t just sell loads of ads here, they’ll totally change their business model to something closer to the targetting approach.
Lens has been one of the most impressive bits of Google tech for years, but it still flies under the radar. I guess they’re just going to label it ‘AI’ now to get people to pay attention to it.
I honestly doubt he’ll do something this stupid - spend a year making everyone hate a service they used to like and then charge them to use it.
But then again I didn’t think he’d rename Twitter to X, so who knows what that boner will do.
I swapped over to https://www.themoviedb.org years ago and have never looked back.
It was invite-only for quite a long time, if memory serves.
Early numbers aren’t everything.
While a tech solution to replace Twitter is possible, the tech is only about 5% of what makes Twitter Twitter - the other 95% is the userbase. Which again counts in Threads favour because they already have a huge Instagram userbase. They could release any old hastily put together system and still get 30m users… Hmm.
It’s more different than people expect it do be, I think. So once people have gotten past the ‘what is an instance/ server, how do I actually join Mastodon…’ stuff that puts people off, they’re then in the infrastructure that kind of looks and acts like Twitter but in different ways that you don’t realise until you’ve delved into things. It’s just more barriers really.
There is Bluesky as an alternative, but that’s not ActivityPub, it’s it’s own protocol. Personally I think that’s the best option - it’s open source and decentralised - but I think some people have reservations because Jack Dorsey is / was involved. Plus it’s still on beta so is invite-only for the time being.
Your default timeline view on Bluesky is just ‘posts from the people you’ve chosen to follow, in date/time order’. That’s the algorithm.
Everything else is optional and you can choose whatever other timelines or views you also want to see. If you only want to see the posts from people you follow then you don’t need to subscribe to any other feeds / algorithms.