I miss the old Twitter when I saw the stupid X animation.

Twitter X is Elon Musk’s world. Pretty soon he’ll have so much control over his platform that he can practically cron kings and manipulate outcomes to fit his personal political agenda. And don’t even get me started on his whole stupid “X the everything app bullshit.

The only everything app that has succeeded so far is WeChat in China. But it’s apparently a surveillance app for the masses by the government. Seriously, why the hell would I want to link my social media account with my bank account and even my government ID? What’s the benefit in that?

I’d rather keep the digital me disconnected to the real me.

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
    31·
    1 year ago

    No matter what Musk does, he continues to bleed users and advertisers.

    It may not be going as fast as we like but the ship continues to take on water.

  • torafugu@artemis.camp
    29·
    1 year ago

    I hope he gets sued by the organization that made that font. I don’t think he was allowed to use it.

        • Mane25@feddit.ukEnglish
          7·
          1 year ago

          This means instance owners on Mastodon have certain privileges and can ban users.

          Sure, but since anyone can own a mastodon instance this isn’t unjust.

        • SkyeStarfallEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          You value the uncensored nature of platforms until the nazis join in and fuck everything up with bad faith and toxicity. Especially because once that starts happening, the good people get fed up and leave, leaving you with just a higher concentration of bad faith actors.

          This always happens in unmoderated spaces. You might not care now, but you will, eventually.

        • Mane25@feddit.ukEnglish
          6·
          1 year ago

          By “established” what I really mean is it’s already gone through the difficult part (i.e. while it’s not dominant I think it’s passed most of the hurdles that most attempted platforms have failed at). If something’s going to do better than Mastodon, it’s going to have to have something that people want that Mastodon doesn’t have, which I’m not seeing here, but maybe I’m wrong.

        • kspatlas@artemis.camp
          4·
          1 year ago

          I’m personally using a modded version of the official mastodon app called Moshitodon with my firefish account, not perfect and missing firefish-only features but it works

    • FooBarrington@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      It’s not just the data, it’s also about getting a cut of any monetary interactions, essentially the Visa/MasterCard model. The company holding the “everything” app for a given region has an incredible potential to earn money.

    • Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Wether it’s centralised isn’t really the main issue with these platforms. It’s their For-profit nature. Running a social platform in a for profit manner, is incredibly hard to do - only one company has been known to succeed, YouTube… and they stopped reporting their earnings in 2015, so no one can tell if it’s still profitable or not.

      If you are a not for profit company trying to create a social platform, you’ve got more of a chance of it working. However if you’re not for profit doing this, you need to release the soource code. That way if you decide to restructure into a for profit entity we can fork it and save said platform.

      Decentralization is the result of the requirements of financing large userbase not for profit platforms in a sustainable way - it actively spreads the cost load across multiple not for profit servers. Allowing donations to be the income driver of the platform right from the beginning. Being not for profit requires that you only ever aim to cover the costs of running the servers - it doesn’t require you to offer any additional services in order to increase revenue, or systems in order to lock people in.

      The fact that the data is spread across this server network, inherently making data breaches worth somewhat less than a megalithic platform is literally just an unintended side benefit, despite the fact it’s a little bit mitigated as a result of caching requirements.

      The thing is, a for-profit platform can look at this financing model and try to twist it to their moneymaking advantage - just look at bluesky. It gets nonprofits to host services, while keeping a tight grip on the algorithms, by providing a library of them to “choose” - the source code is closed, as a result it’s nearly impossible to tell if these servers are reporting analytics and data back to the central service (covered by the centralised algorithm provider and sign up system) for data collection and data sales.

      A decentralized platform like that, allows the company to offload hosting costs by taking advantage of independent nonprofits, while also getting to make a huge profit by selling a fucktonne of data mined from these servers.

      Also it removes the need for advertising providers be on the platform, which is a benifit not only because people don’t like ads, but also because advertising companies are fickle and very hard to meet their brand safety demands and retain them. Advertising revenue is rarely stable or reliable.

    • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I think a lot of people hear “everything app” and it sounds kind of magical but this is actually a specific category of app already, and it mostly means Payments App+ Restaurant and Convenience Delivery App + Rideshare App.

      An example is Careem, which serves the Dubai market only.

      You’re totally correct that X is not one of these Apps. Even by this more constrained definition.

      Uber is already 2/3 of the way to this in a dominant way with Uber and Uber Eats in one app. Both of those work very well and have already for years. Adding personal payments would probably mean lights out for anyone else with foolish “everything app” ambitions.

      Musk is 0/3 of the way there. The ONLY thing he has has to work with is an installed base of users. A large number of people have this app on their phone and have an account. That is something. But he still has to create, well, everything to have an “everything” app, which, as I’ve already covered above, won’t do everything.

      The installed base of logged in users is also less valuable than you might imagine because to do payments and delivery is also going to require everyone to enter bank info and home address and those are big asks just in terms of user effort but also privacy.

      So good fucking luck, Elon. Being a media company driven by ads sucks and I don’t blame him for wanting out but he’s chosen the most expensive possible path to becoming Careem that I could imagine. I’m just a tech middle manager but I could have given him better corp strategy advice than this.

  • Chaotic Entropy@feddit.ukEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    As ever, “we’re going to do everything” neatly translates in to “we’re going to do everything poorly”.

  • N3Cr0@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    I would wipe my butt with the everything-app, but I doubt It will ever offer this service.

  • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    The everything app, eh?

    So you can manage your Tesla vehicle and Powerwall home battery and Tesla Solar Roof from it, surely?

  • sucricdrawkcab@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I still read X, Twitter, whatever it is, but actually use Mastodon. The comments are the equivalent of football to the groin from the Simpsons to me. No doubt in my mind people are stupid enough to put all this information in, blame Joe Biden communism with a link to donate to help them keep up the fight.