EDIT: I didn’t notice in the original post, the article is from 2023
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19707239
Researchers have documented an explosion of hate and misinformation on Twitter since the Tesla billionaire took over in October 2022 – and now experts say communicating about climate science on the social network on which many of them rely is getting harder.
Policies aimed at curbing the deadly effects of climate change are accelerating, prompting a rise in what experts identify as organised resistance by opponents of climate reform.
Peter Gleick, a climate and water specialist with nearly 99,000 followers, announced on May 21 he would no longer post on the platform because it was amplifying racism and sexism.
While he is accustomed to “offensive, personal, ad hominem attacks, up to and including direct physical threats”, he told AFP, “in the past few months, since the takeover and changes at Twitter, the amount, vituperativeness, and intensity of abuse has skyrocketed”.
You can find utterly vile replies from blue checks on that site now, even on the most heavenly, innocent, morally correct tweet. It’s insane.
Considering Meta is doubling down on disinformation, more people should go to Mastodon and Bsky over Threads or Twitter.
Hell no, fuck Bluesky. There is no reason not to adopt ActivityPub when trying to build an open, federated Twitter alternative. Except for power and control over the platform, its core protocol and ecosystem. Screw these guys, use Mastodon or anything on the Fediverse.
except they adopted atproto because it fixed issues with activitypub portability and sharing
This is their stupid excuse. They could still implement ActiviyPub as a secondary federation protocol. (Bluesky <-> Bluesky via ATProto, Bluesky <-> Fediverse via ActivityPub). They decided against it. It’s an intentional choice, and they’re just making up excuses.
i mean that’s pretty much already done via third party and endorsed by the bsky team (i can already follow mastodon users on bsky and bsky users on mastodon);
https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed
(shameless self promotion; my bsky account on my mastodon instance: https://tech.lgbt/@netkitten.net@bsky.brid.gy)
There are 3 issues with this:
- This is a third-party project, not an official part of Bluesky. Bluesky was never meant to work with ActivityPub, that was a clear design choice. This is just a workaround.
- It’s opt-in, meaning most accounts will never get federated, because people just aren’t aware that something like this exists. This especially applies to new users.
- It relies on a centralized service, Bluesky and ActivityPub servers don’t talk directly to each other, which would be required for true federation. Federation is always decentralized, this is the exact opposite.
I don’t understand why anyone should use Bluesky with cheap hacks to attempt to fix Bluesky’s poor design choices and or utter incompetence, if they could just use Mastodon and federate with the Fediverse over ActivityPub by default.
From a user perspective, Bluesky is just Mastodon with a recommendation algorithm. There is no other protocol required for this, everything could easily be done using ActivityPub exclusively. I will never care about Bluesky, since it tries to be the new Twitter, but the enshittification of Twitter began when they introduced their crappy algorithm, instead of just displaying tweets of accounts you follow in chronological order (like Mastodon does it).
Is blue sky really ok? Considering who started it…
i don’t think jack funded it he was just an original board member; but he left the board a month or two ago.
Yeah, it seems pretty good.
I’d agree. For now at least it’s pretty good.
The bit in the square brackets in the title was mine, because that’s what I went into the article to look for. If you’re on Mastodon and interested in that content:
The text from the article:
Glaciologist Ruth Mottram had more than 10,000 followers on Twitter but left in February and joined an alternative scientists’ forum powered by Mastodon -– a crowdfunded, decentralised grouping of social networks founded in 2016.
“It’s really been a revelation in many ways. It’s a much quieter and more thoughtful platform,” she told AFP.
On Mastodon, “I haven’t had any abuse at all or even people questioning climate change. I think we’d become far too used to it on Twitter… I had blocked loads of accounts over on the birdsite (Twitter),” she said.
I gave her a follow. She seems like a nice lady. I hope she enjoys the fediverse a little more than the “nether world”
Is there a list of all scientists that made the move to Masto?
Reality: you can stop fascism by deleting the app
Everyone: doesn’t
Oh, i didnt know this was like IT. i’ll tell my russians friends just to ignore putin’s regime
Pardon my ignorance. I may have a mild brain injury.
Could you perhaps rephrase?
I’m not sure if I understood what you said.
In IT (the movie and, i presume, also in the book) ::: spoiler spoiler The kids realize that IT feeds on attention and that the only way to fight it is by ignoring it :::
Imo, shitter (X) is a cesspool as it is now, but I dont believe that leaving it to the hordes is a solution to anything. We need a better approach to deal with this people.
Ah, that makes sense. I thought you meant IT as in information technology. Was very confused.
Brain still good yey
edit: typo. perhaps I need to make that appointment
If by ignore, you mean stop paying taxes and working in any capacity for government in one go, yes would work. The only fear is being singled out, if more than 0.5% of the people do it, army wont even have the guts to get tanks out, they will join.
No. Dunno where did you take that 0.5% from, it’s not empirically confirmed by anything.
Like 20% if you want to see civil war. Like 40% if you want to see regime change.
There is the semi-usually-known research that suggests 3.5% is enough for non-violent protests to reach changes. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/chen15682
0.5% is 1 in 200 people, essentially everyone knowing personally one person who is against the government. Maybe it isn’t enough.
But also, 0.5% homogenously (instead of country-wide being concentrated in Moscow), would be 600k people peacefully marching in Moscow streets
It doesn’t work. It’s some urban legend that this is sufficient. Even those 600k may or may not be stopped by a threat of real ammo being used. I’m not even talking about coordination.
One can “prove” anything with selectively chosen statistics.
They werent selectively chosen. " An original, aggregate data set of all known major nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006 is used to test these claims." As well as any researcher who isn’t a complete buffoon would only look at statistics that has only a 2-3 sigma chance of only being stochastic noise.
The set of indicators, of course, was selectively chosen. The authors, of course, have decided which of these they consider important and which don’t, that is, decided upon weights and criteria.
Touché
Venezuela has ~70% of the people against the regime, (nearly 90% counting the 5M that were not allowed to vote) and the needle isn’t even moving.
And in Russia being “singled out” is apparently a national tradition.
Sorry, I may be over pessimistic today.
I guess that’s a fair example. But logically sounds impossible for such control over the population to be had. If a group went out to the streets to oust the government, you would say at least maybe 45% would join.
If we can’t abandon Obvious Disaster Twitter we definitely can’t abandon the obvious disaster that is everything we think of as normal that’s driving civilization off a cliff.
The dumb masses always eventually follow the smart people. Reddit was full of mostly smart people in the beginning, if you can believe that.
I remember that /r/all was actually pretty educational back in the day. There were specific users that you would know by their user names that always posted something insightful.
The decline started somewhere around 2011-2013.
It got much, much worse a few years after that. I was amazed to see my first “conservative” on reddit.
I blame Digg for failing. It increased Reddit’s popularity too fast, which was a bad thing bringing too many people, fucking up the culture reddit had built (which wasn’t much, but it was ours).
Oh man, in 2024 I never thought I’d see some Reddit oldhead still complaining about the eternal September following Digg’s fall…
And this is why I’m perfectly happy with Lemmy being the size that it is. There certainly are trade-offs - I wish niche communities were bigger - but is it worth bringing in all the other crap that comes in, like all the shit you see on Twitter? No, in my opinion.
isn’t that why the hippie movement ended?
The size of Twitter’s user base and its ubiquitous use by celebrities and the media gave the platform an air of legitimacy that is Musk vaporized his billions to get. He obviously didn’t value the brand or the workforce.
We need that false sense of legitimacy to keep getting chipped away in the eyes of mainstream society.
Honestly not sure why anybody gives two fucks about celebrities anyways, some are okay but the underground scene has the realist people, because they live in the real world. Seeing through the illusions that what people think or believe in regards to some highly regarded opinions because somebody is popular due to ‘pop culture’ is a blessing. I say let Elon Musk have them. I’m not going to read it. Only twitter I read is the twitter cross-post spam of screenshots people post.
Zuckerberg telling us all what we already knew about being pressured to censor COVID, Hunter Biden, and whatever other posts goes to show left is evil, right is swinging around monkey bars like school children. Social media is a giant playground where everybody’s being swayed by their emotions and being tricked and lead around likes horses.
It’s crazy.
At least Elon’s having fun with it all.
We should as a community ensure Twitter\X lives forever…
If only as a place to keep certain social media users “entertained”
In all seriousness it does concern me how often I see such a wide variety of news agencies quote Twitter considering the amount of hate that goes on there
That’s dangerous. Look at what Fox is doing, as an entertainment company, to US politics across the country.
Disastrous, even
The irony of climate scientists ignoring a problem and waiting until it’s far to late to do something is honestly pretty funny…
At this point it’s wholly on you if you’re still using twitter.
You’d think smart people like science nerds would have left the Nazi bar ages ago.
That first line is so spot on. Brightened up my day
It’s because the news media industry as a whole has stuck with Twitter as their primary social media site. It’s kinda hilarious how much they seem to like it and how much time they spend there.
It’s a containment site; has been for a while.
Except the majority of mainstream news outlets use it as a source for 90% of their coverage.
This is why we need SCP.
Not what you intended, but:
scp /dev/zero root@x.com:/path/to/databases
I already accepted we’re already dead because oil & gas companies figured how to use doubt and false science to create a confusion among the general public (aided by the mass conservative Murdoch /Boloré media lol)…
It’s like tobacco companies in the 50s but we can’t afford so many years to wake the fuck up.
Yeah. I’ve been mourning the loss of Earth’s future for some time now. It’s very sad.
That said, we are not in a simple binary fucked vs fine situation. It’s a sliding scale. So even though things are very bad, we can always still take action to make them less bad. That is never not an option.
What do you mean? If it makes you feel any better, the Earth will be fine. Has been for a couple billion years. We did this to ourselves :(
I’m mean life on Earth, obviously. No one is saying that the planet is going to explode or disappear or anything like that. We’re talking about the climate, and life that depends on that climate.
And before you start coming at me with some “but but such and such life will still…” I’ll clarify again that there is a matter of scale here. A very large number of species that have been around for a very long time will soon be extinct (many have been lost already). So although we might still have mosquitos and jelly-fish for a long time to come, a lot of the complex life that is currently enjoying a comfortable and otherwise-sustainable life on Earth will no longer be able to do so; because of us. That’s what I’m referring to.
Yes, humans have does this to ‘ourselves’, but we are nowhere near the worst effected life in this situation. In fact, most of the ill effects on humans are just knock-on effects from other life failing. (In particular, reduced capacity to grow food is likely to be a problem for humans.)
Smoking companies still are with vaping (vaping companies literally sell to kids over the Internet and people literally are arguing it’s safe and healthy)
Which unfortunately shows that people don’t learn
Aaaaah i don’t want to be right :((
That’s great news. Looking forward to having more climate scientists on Mastodon.
Hell, I would like to have ANYONE on Mastodon. It feels so dead.
Start following hashtags of things you’re interested in. And interact with people in those threads.
Does it?
My Mastodon feed is more alive than my twitter feed used to be years before its demise. And also in my native language, if I were to follow english speaking people I’d be overwhelmed.
The trick is not to rely to much on the instance local feed and start following people from every instance.
Yes, and…
You can follow (and use) hashtags of topics you like.
Every time I give it another shot and look for things and people to follow, I find nothing.
Huh… “vituperative”, I like it.
The same Peter Gleick caught on forging documents to prove his point
I don’t even know who this guy is, but your screenshot plus a quick search says this guy added one forged document to a collection of legitimate documents released from the Heartland Institute. That was certainly not the right thing to do, but let’s at least be fully honest about it.
I am on Mastodon for 5 years now (fuck it is really 5 years since August 2019, that the hell) and just can’t get into it. It just feels lonely over there. What am I doing wrong?
Tbh, I think it is the post statistics thing. It says “1 reply”, then I click at ot and it has 4 replies and it ALWAYS says “0 davorites” even when 10 people comment how great that post was.
Twitter’s format feels a bit like yelling into the void and waiting for replies…you may luck out and get some engagement from a hub or a small subgraph of the network. Mastodon makes that stronger by removing the algorithm (I’d like there to be a user-customizable feed sort algo by an array of parameters, not sure what the technical limitations to that are: processing, security?)
Comment trees feel better (to me at least), because there is a hierarchical origin, a native indexing by topic>post>comment>countercomment…it sort of resembles how we relate with the world or navigate maps.
The statistics thing is a downside of how Mastodon implements ActivityPub.
Two possibilites:
-
I think you can simply hide the counts if it irritates you.
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You can install Fedifetcher to pull in missing interactions to your local server: https://github.com/nanos/FediFetcher
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Removed by mod
But what if I don’t want to follow people, but topics?
That’s why I’m here, and one thing that made Twitter acceptable.
Removed by mod
Idk, I haven’t used it in years. But I thought you could just follow hashtags, no?
I don’t use Mastodon either, so maybe that’s already a thing, idk. It was advertised as “federated Facebook,” and I really don’t like the people-based nature of Facebook (though TBF, haven’t used Facebook in… 10 years?).
Removed by mod
Can I follow them in a reasonable way? I don’t really care who makes the content, I care that it’s reasonably engaging.
Removed by mod
For me it’s the interface. I find it rough around the edges and not as inviting as Twitter used to be. I know it’s seen as superficial but UX/UI is important to me.
Like for example, to create a post or reply it’s usually on the left panel for some reason. I used to have trouble visually separating one post from the next in my head until I got used to it. Also, the way thread comments are nested could be improved. And why does it only show me the top 5 trending news stories? Why can’t I browse more? Idk, overall I feel like I’m fighting the UI mentally.
I think Lemmy did a better job and has subtly improved on the details. I don’t see Mastodon doing that much.
I know it’s seen as superficial but UX/UI is important to me.
Most of the people telling you it’s superficial are programming nerds who themselves are intimidated by UX design so use cope to justify its trivialness.
I know what you mean. I’ve had more than one conversation with devs who didn’t understand design basics.
What platform are you on? There are lots of alternative apps for both iOS and Android, and they can be customized beyond the defaults as well. I primarily use Moshidon on Android, and it’s great.
What sort of stuff do you like? Maybe some folks can make some good recommendations to jump-start a more interesting experience.
Recommendations and boosts from other users are how I’ve discovered interesting people there, and at this point, my feed feels just as full as my old twitter feed.
If you like news, a lot of breaking news is happening on Mastodon much more accurately and faster than on Twitter. There are a LOT of publications on there now, here are a few off the top of my head:
- Polygon (@polygon@mastodon.social)
- The Conversation (@TheConversation@newsie.social)
- The Intercept (@theintercept@jouna.host)
- Voice of America (@VOANews@mastodon.social)
- Ars Technica (@arstechnica@mastodon.social)
- Semafor (@Semafor@flipboard.com)
- Kotaku (@Kotaku@flipboard.com)
- The Christian Science Monitor (@csmonitor@flipboard.com)
- Fast Company (@FastCompany@flipboard.com)
- The 19th (@19thnews@flipboard.com)
- Vox (@Vox@flipboard.com)
There are a lot more local news sources too, so depending on where you live, you can probably follow news for your specific area. The account @FediFollows@social.growyourown.services regularly bundles up follow suggestions for different regions, interests, and topics. If you go that account and search for a hashtag (i.e., #texas) you’ll get a lot of active and high-quality local accounts to follow.
Among the sad stories about climate scientists having to deal with misinformation and abuse on the regular, suddenly, a unicorn: a statement purportedly by Musk that I wholeheartedly agree with:
Musk wrote in January: “People on the right should see more ‘left-wing’ stuff and people on the left should see more ‘right-wing’ stuff. But you can just block it if you want to stay in an echo chamber.”
Of course with the average Xitter post becoming ever more toxic, most people that have anything of value to add will probably leave sooner or later, whether lefties or righties or whatever.
When I still used Twitter, I followed people and that was the only content I wanted to read. I didn’t care about content from people I wasn’t following.
That’s why I’m now on Masto. No algorithm to decide that I should also get the very much not valuable opinions of xXx_nOnwoke_1488 in my timeline.
“Both sides”.
