Elon Musk’s latest changes for X are driving more users away – not exactly a surprise, granted – and many of them are flocking to rival social media outlet Bluesky. So many made the switch, in fact, it led to Bluesky briefly going down due to the volume of incoming new users.
The central move initiated by X that made the headlines for driving migration away from Musk’s platform is a change to the way the ‘Block’ button works. This was actually announced back in September, but is officially being implemented now (well, it’ll be in place ‘soon’ we’re told).
It means that going forward, X users who you have blocked will still be able to view your (public) posts – though they won’t be able to engage with them in any way (from replies to liking and so forth).
This is problematic for obvious reasons, in terms of enabling stalkers and trolls who will still be able to view the posts of an account that has blocked them, when previously this wasn’t the case. In the past, blocking meant that the blocked user couldn’t see any posts (or anything at all, save for a message telling them that they’ve been blocked), but soon, this will change.
Bluesky posted to say it had in excess of 100,000 new users inside 12 hours following the announcement by X, after the rival network highlighted the fact that its block function stops those who are blocked from viewing any posts.
In an update, Bluesky noted that it has now gained half a million new users in the past day.
There’s another reason that some folks are rapidly exiting from X stage left (and right, and indeed center, clambering over the audience, it would seem), and that’s a change to X’s privacy policy.
As TechCrunch reports, the new policy includes an update that allows third-party collaborators to use content on X to train their AI models – unless the user opts out. This is a notable extension of the reach of AI training on X, which has so far only been used to train Musk’s own Grok AI (unless users opt out, again).
Do they drift back though. Bigger accounts seems to struggle to kick the Twitter high .
This is problematic for obvious reasons, in terms of enabling stalkers and trolls who will still be able to view the posts of an account that has blocked them,
WTF thats some clown ass analysis
Huh? How? This is the problem I saw too. Knowing details about a victims life feeds stalkers and also gives them opportunities to connect to the victims physical location and movements.
Would blocking a stalker’s view of their victim’s social media solve the stalking problem entirely? Probably not. Would blocking kill off one lane of information that makes the stalking easier / more psychology rewarding to the stalker? Yes.
Posting publically online to avoid “stalker”
Do y’all even do basic thinking here lol
A victim could also stay in their house, never go outside, never talk to anyone to further limit a stalker’s access. But they shouldn’t have to let a stalker turn their life into an isolated prison.
Blocking people from viewing their account was one tool that was available, and now it’s not. People are saying they still want access to that tool and are unhappy it was taken away.
Not sure you’re intending to but you’re putting a lot of onus on the victim to address the behavior of bad actors.
Women don’t want to deal with men who would sexually assault them? Stop wearing “provocative” clothes and going to bars.
Kid doesn’t want to get bullied at school? Stop being “weird”.
Don’t want to be stalked? Stay away from public forums.
These are not solutions, these are ways to put responsibility for bad crimes onto the victims instead of the perpetrators.
Threat actor can create another account to easily circumvent what ever this “measure” is.
Also how did blocking somebody you don’t like online turned to SA situation, y’all sure love to escalate with idiotic analogies.
has so far only been used to train Musk’s own Grok AI
The Grok models are a laughing stock in the LLM space. They aren’t good over APIs, and they’re even less useful after Elon “open sources” them far later. Qwen 72B, and heck, Qwen 32B is already better than Grok 2, which is probably hundreds of billions of parameters. Qwen is runnable locally right now, Apache 2.0, and released day one. Grok 1 is… well, I dunno, no one has even bothered to try hosting it for anything.
I dunno what Twitter is doing with all those H100s Elon hoarded, but it seems like a big waste so far. Its certainly nothing to help the open source/self hosting space like Elon fans seem to think.
dunno what Twitter is doing with all those H100s Elon hoarded
Duh. Mining crypto.
How does this blocking thing make sense?
Either the profile is public, which means you can still open it on another account, or it’s private, which means no one can see it anyways if they’re not an accepted follower.
I don’t see how anything changes from Musk’s change…
What a garbage dataset to train off. The majority of everything there is all bots and AI anyway lol
At least its not…
I dunno, YouTube comments? I think Facebook is even far better data-wise than X, and thats a low bar.
It’s also about the art posted on it. I use bsky for that purpose and all the “migrants” didn’t want their work to be fed to an AI.
bots training bots. maybe this will (hopefully) corrupt the AI’s data. its kind of like copying off a copy again and again.
Man I think it’s already done, and been done for a long time, without AI. So much of who we are now is based on and informed by what we’ve read and watched online. It’s our been our dominant frame of reference, language and value system for quite a while. We are the AI.
There are no buses in this picture
Grok Habsburg
Sound like human
50und 11k3 hum4n
50()|V[) 11X3 |-|()|/|4|V
$[]|||||) |!|<[- #|_|///-||
Don’t forget to yell into the data PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS!!!
Haha, gooner.
This is in fact precisely what happens. LLM output becomes increasingly incoherent with each subsequent generation trained off of previously AI generated data.
The AI version of mad cow disease.
Elon decided Microsoft’s Tay chatbot was a guidebook …
Just helpful to remember, as all this horseshit persists, Bluesky is Jack Dorsey. Dorsey is former head of Twitter and musk’s good buddy.
It’s all a losing proposition, whatever direction you move - except if you move… Away.
I dunno. I’d say it’s more important to see what exactly he’s doing and what Bluesky is.
Right now Bluesky is really good. So until it turns bad I’m sticking to it.
He left in May.
He left the board. As a “public benefit organization” it’s still a for-profit company and he still owns stock.
But he’s left seemingly under a cloud, so unless the leadership changes I doubt he’s influencing decision making.
Let’s be honest these social media platforms will be a rinse and repeat. Just enjoy it whilst it lasts. Move on when the ownership go full Elon.
Jack Dorky got literally laughed off the platform.
So he’s completely removed from anything to do with that company and isn’t inherently woven into the DNA as it’s very recent founder?
Mike Masnick is also been added to the bluesky board which gives me some faith Bluesky will less of a Elon / Dorsey vibe
im not sure people wont consider mastodon tbh.
They should
i know. but its our responsability to understand why the corporate shitty options are always preferred by the layman public.
Because we are extremely simple and self obsessed animals in the whole. At the intersection of those two things, we regularly conflate base familiarity with earned trust. A bit of a narcissistic drive to tell ourselves that… if WE know about something, it MUST be good, otherwise we wouldn’t have taken the time to first learn about it!
It’s why your town is currently infested with hands-free signs in every public space. It’s also why incumbents have such large advantages in elections and why dead/convicted politicians (or Last-name sharing family members of those politicians) are often elected after the fact.
what
Is 500,000 actually a lot? Honest question, my sense of scale with these things is shaky.
For Twitter? No
For Bsky? Yes
No one leaves Twitter. They always come back. People are so addicted.
i thought that was my case with reddit, but here i am, i haven’t touch the thing since may 2023
I left Twatter in 2020 and haven’t missed it even slightly. (FB in 2009 and same lack of missing it).
lol
Just like a real girlfriend, but better. Apart from you having absolutely no sex life and apart from the fact that it has absolutely no emotional attachment or attraction to you whatsoever. And it will also never do anything like buy you dinner or a birthday present. Enjoy throwing money at your robot that you can’t even fuck like a fleshlight.
No, they can sync with toys like fleshlights now.
Fair enough, but I wouldn’t call that having a sex life unless you’re really into fucking tubes and aren’t just using it as a vagina substitute.
I hate Twitter, but I’m getting to the point where I want it to get better because if bluesky gets many more members we’re just gonna have Twitter again.
One thing I liked about the Muskification of Twitter was the scattering.
Neoliberal guano website is better than Nazi guano website
Idiots users just recreating conditions that created their misery in the first place. Freedom doesn’t happen from the grace of some cult leader and their slightly less immediately hostile app
What sets it apart is that on Bluesky you can create your own algorithm. You can also share this algorithm, if you want, so others can subscribe to it. This means you see only what you want to see, and not what some corporate algorithm wants to see to maximise some kind of engagement.
Moreover, Bluesky is also its own federation. There aren’t many who choose to do so, but you can connect to Bluesky using your own domain, which you have complet control over.
Ok, thanks ! Looks like I was wrong then, I see it is open source under MIT license Frankly I assumed it was another tech bro blitzscale project since it was from Rasputin himself There even is a 3rd party client so possibly it won’t be a open source but problematic, like Signal
Dude, that’s gonna be one hell of a racist AI just based on the dataset it’s gonna receive
It’s gonna train the little robot dog, which they’re gonna put a gun on. And drones. It’s gonna train drones, he’ll sell it to anyone who’ll buy the data.
he’ll sell it to anyone who’ll buy the data.
And if they will not buy it musk will sue them until they buy it.
This is why when we give vacuum robots AI powers, they run around your house shouting racist pejoratives
Welcome to the future
So let’s say on Twitter, someone blocks me and I can’t read their post. Can’t I just log out and read their post that way? I don’t have a Twitter account, so I’ve never seen a blocked link before.
Someone could just open another account with a new mail address. Blocking doesn’t help much against stalkers as long as your posts are public.
Yup, that’s exactly right. On Lemmy you don’t even have to log out, blocking someone simply means you can’t see their posts. If you don’t want a harasser or stalker to see something, and you post it publicly, you’re an idiot.
And this is the way it should be… You shouldn’t be able to silence someone from responding to stuff you say publicly by blocking them.
X is authwalled
I can see this random tweet from Taylor Swift just fine in incognito mode. I can’t look at replies but I can see her posts.
https://x.com/taylorswift13/status/1781171613058097619
People on Lemmy link to tweets all the time and I can navigate and read them. Not sure what you mean then that it’s authwalled. It’s an annoying experience and it bugs me every time I visit to make an account or log in, but I can see them.
Maybe it just authwalls shared IPs like Google does (eg YouTube)
You can see a tweet, but not list of her tweets, iirc.
You can view some profiles (authwall for others) and some show all content (tried it out with bbc and forbes), others drop relatively recent content while some others only show ancient content from a year or more ago.
The latter two were when I tried opening the twitter pages for some smaller podcasts I follow.
Wait this whole article just baselessly assumes that 1 new bluesky account = 1 person leaving twitter. That is so obviously unrealistic. Sure some people were probably curious and wanted to check out something new but that doesn’t mean they will immediately switch platforms.
You can’t just make fun of Those Guys for endlessly believing fake bullshit while unquestionably parroting this garbage.
Twitter is for narcissists, and when they say Mastodon is not as good as twitter they really mean that there’s not as many people watching them as on Twitter. So Bluesky gaining 500,000 new accounts could help in making it “better”.
The headline directly says half a million users left twatter. As far as I can tell that is literally a lie.
Mastodon is still pretty rough around the edges. Especially for the regular Twitter Instagram crowd.
What’s rough about it? I’ve never been a twitter guy so can’t really compare, but I have a Mastodon account that I pop into periodically, and it works fine.
Getting a 100000 new users when Twitter loses roughly the same amount is a pretty significant correlation.
I just go where the japanese artists go, and they are going to either blue sky or misskey, mostly blue sky since it has a bigger reach, misskey closed account creation for outsiders, and the way mastodon works I bet it’s defederated from a lot of the popular instances like baraag.
Misskey is like mastodon so you can just go to another misskey instance.
But if you’re talking about the misskey.io instance, it’s not that defederated from my experience (the 3 instances I’m on aren’t defederated from it).
The instance simply follows Japanese law so whatever Japan allows they allow and whatever Japan forbids they forbid (which is why censoring genitals is also mandatory in that instance lol). It’s not like it’s some nazi cesspool or anything like that.
Japan is weird as fuck. I just saw a Japanese disc store collaborate with an incest sleep rape game.
I don’t know how to see how much an instance is defederated, I just concluded it must be in the same rate of baraag because both misskey.io and it allows loli art. I know that baraag is on some default block list for administrators for example.
Baraag is way more permissive than misskey.io and it gained a pretty bad reputation in the past because of that, plus it essentially advertises itself as a safe haven for lolicon art and primarily focuses on that, so that’s why it’s on many block lists.
misskey.io is just a generalist Japanese instance (which is why many Japanese artists easily hop on it). It’s also the biggest misskey instance and is run by the main developer, so it’s usually not blocked by default because most people use it.
Defederating from misskey.io would be like defederating from mastodon.social. Some will do it but it’s not the default stance afaik.
Pussy. Ass. Bitch.
