I'm not sure why Threads makes your cut here, trading one walking negative externality of person in control for another is not really a sell to most folks.
it has Fediverse interop. Skepticism obviously is warranted towards the owners but you can at least interact with an open protocol or consume threads content from a Mastodon instance, say.
And Twitter used to have free API access. And Facebook Messenger used to have Jabber compatibility. I don't think those companies deserve any trust in regards of promoting them for their open initiatives.
Threads' activity pub gimmick is just a nice to have. It's the salad of the Big Mac. If you're going to eat it anyway, sure, glad it is there, but it doesn't make it deserve a spot in any serious discussion about healthy food alternatives.
It has been completely abandoned AFAIK. As expected, the good ol' classic EEE attempt, but it just didn't work due to decentralized architecture and just lack of actual capability from Meta.
An interesting new one for Canadians (that's built on AT and interops with bsky) is https://gandersocial.ca/. It uses our national postal service's identity validation, so it dramatically reduces foreign actors and bots, and without handing PII to shady private companies like Persona. They collect no PII either, they just get an "is_a_human" response back from Canada Post.
You can still do read-only things like see threads and follow users as an anonymous user. Just can't post or comment. Only thing I don't like is that it's app-only for now.
From their FAQ[1] the plan is to allow other countries eventually but for now it's read-only for non-Canadians. I imagine they have no interest in private KYC like Persona and integrating with national identity providers can be a real pain, if that country even has a unified service.
intersting take, I'm not Canadian but wasn't there some pretty draconian bills that were passed where you could be reported for voicing or sharing your opinions on some things ?
That already seems like a hard barrier for any sort of Canadian social network especially when you require your users to dox themselves and open themselves to all sorts of scrutiny.
The problem with all of this is that it creates a sterilized politically correct environment that won't have the same pull as a public square that upholds freedom of speech like American ones.
> intersting take, I'm not Canadian but wasn't there some pretty draconian bills that were passed where you could be reported for voicing or sharing your opinions on some things ?
Not a thing. You can't post hate speech or threats of violence.
> That already seems like a hard barrier for any sort of Canadian social network especially when you require your users to dox themselves and open themselves to all sorts of scrutiny.
Also not a thing. I was pretty clear all they get is a is_a_human".
> The problem with all of this is that it creates a sterilized politically correct environment that won't have the same pull as a public square that upholds freedom of speech like American ones.
Also not a thing. American platforms practice widespread self-censorship and have no protection under the law except from the state.
I am already on fediverse. My friends are too. It's where I post my dumb opinions on movies and pictures of my cats. But that is not what I used nitter for. I used nitter to pull posts of organizations and reporters to deliver breaking news in my area to me fast. I did this via the RSS endpoint in nitter. These journalists and organizations only post on twitter that fast. Their websites are updated much slower and often also don't have RSS feeds or APIs for me to scrape.
I wish these orgs post on fedi too but they don't. So what am I to do?
Nitter was for us people that have already left X.
I don't post there anymore but I do still check my DMs once a week, because every now and then someone will find my work through there, and I need people to find my work in order to survive. I unfortunately can't easily trade that in for a platform that no one visits.
They all get to the point where anime contents start flooding in pinning the system at capacity 24/7, scaring the wrong set of people,
and then they chicken out and start dying a long death. This situation itself is downstream event of Twitter doing the same, in a sense.
I only use X (via XCancel etc) to read the updates from things like the local train company that they only post on X. They aren't on Bluesky or Mastodon. When I tried Mastodon, I found it too politically extreme, it felt like walking into an angry students' union meeting. It never seemed to catch on in the UK, it surfed a couple of waves of dissatisfaction with X, but people quickly drifted away.
All of these are seriously bad copycat alternatives of twitter. And since twitter's foundations are laid on moving bedrock.... the whole thing is a horrible abomination where the tendrils are these "alternatives".
I'll take the bait, what makes Bluesky a bad copycat? It's just old Twitter. I can't for the life of me see what makes it "seriously bad", it has a pretty large userbase, it's seemingly got a decent number of normies to move over from X, it's pleasant enough to use. It's been a success.
I don't think any of them are better, I especially do not want to be on bluesky. on X you could still do your own thing and not be tied to the political extremism but its not the case with bluesky, people automatically perceive you to support the founder's political views and it has nowhere the same reach as X which is why I think the negative connotations are stronger on bluesky than X
X is used internationally, especially big in Japan and has lot of adoption among working professionals. Just my two cents and I personally don't really like X much either. Threads also isn't that great either.
I'm not sure why Threads makes your cut here, trading one walking negative externality of person in control for another is not really a sell to most folks.
it has Fediverse interop. Skepticism obviously is warranted towards the owners but you can at least interact with an open protocol or consume threads content from a Mastodon instance, say.
And Twitter used to have free API access. And Facebook Messenger used to have Jabber compatibility. I don't think those companies deserve any trust in regards of promoting them for their open initiatives.
Threads' activity pub gimmick is just a nice to have. It's the salad of the Big Mac. If you're going to eat it anyway, sure, glad it is there, but it doesn't make it deserve a spot in any serious discussion about healthy food alternatives.
FYI, threads does not have fediverse interop for European users.
As in, if you use threads and are in Europe, you have no option to enable mastodon to read threads replies.
> it has Fediverse interop.
It has been completely abandoned AFAIK. As expected, the good ol' classic EEE attempt, but it just didn't work due to decentralized architecture and just lack of actual capability from Meta.
Aren't many big mastodon instances talking about blocking Threads?
I don't like the mastodon culture but tbh I can't fault them for this move. Imagine if every post on r/all suddenly shows up on HN.
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Facebook Messenger also used to have XMPP interop until they got the userbase they wanted and shut that down.
An interesting new one for Canadians (that's built on AT and interops with bsky) is https://gandersocial.ca/. It uses our national postal service's identity validation, so it dramatically reduces foreign actors and bots, and without handing PII to shady private companies like Persona. They collect no PII either, they just get an "is_a_human" response back from Canada Post.
You can still do read-only things like see threads and follow users as an anonymous user. Just can't post or comment. Only thing I don't like is that it's app-only for now.
The web client just became available, actually! https://gander.social/profile/gander.social/post/17876029732...
"You need an account to view content on Gander" Why would this be a good idea?
Oh thank you for this, that's fantastic. Still some edge cases (thread expansion seems odd?) but just having it as an option is great.
Ah, yes, because I trust a social network founded by a guy that helped build Pornhub
Looked this up and yikes, Gander's CTO Jeff Wood did work at Pornhub.
Can us non Canadians sign up somehow ?
From their FAQ[1] the plan is to allow other countries eventually but for now it's read-only for non-Canadians. I imagine they have no interest in private KYC like Persona and integrating with national identity providers can be a real pain, if that country even has a unified service.
[1]: https://gandersocial.ca/faq/
intersting take, I'm not Canadian but wasn't there some pretty draconian bills that were passed where you could be reported for voicing or sharing your opinions on some things ?
That already seems like a hard barrier for any sort of Canadian social network especially when you require your users to dox themselves and open themselves to all sorts of scrutiny.
The problem with all of this is that it creates a sterilized politically correct environment that won't have the same pull as a public square that upholds freedom of speech like American ones.
> intersting take, I'm not Canadian but wasn't there some pretty draconian bills that were passed where you could be reported for voicing or sharing your opinions on some things ?
Not a thing. You can't post hate speech or threats of violence.
> That already seems like a hard barrier for any sort of Canadian social network especially when you require your users to dox themselves and open themselves to all sorts of scrutiny.
Also not a thing. I was pretty clear all they get is a is_a_human".
> The problem with all of this is that it creates a sterilized politically correct environment that won't have the same pull as a public square that upholds freedom of speech like American ones.
Also not a thing. American platforms practice widespread self-censorship and have no protection under the law except from the state.
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There is no American social media with more than 10,000 users that is not heavily censored.
I am already on fediverse. My friends are too. It's where I post my dumb opinions on movies and pictures of my cats. But that is not what I used nitter for. I used nitter to pull posts of organizations and reporters to deliver breaking news in my area to me fast. I did this via the RSS endpoint in nitter. These journalists and organizations only post on twitter that fast. Their websites are updated much slower and often also don't have RSS feeds or APIs for me to scrape. I wish these orgs post on fedi too but they don't. So what am I to do? Nitter was for us people that have already left X.
Have you tried reaching out to them and asking them to duplicate their posts to bluesky?
Wasn’t xcancel, sort of by definition, for people who have already left X?
Why would I leave when it's a more engaging and vibrant platform than ever before? As well as still being just as useful, if not more so.
I don't post there anymore but I do still check my DMs once a week, because every now and then someone will find my work through there, and I need people to find my work in order to survive. I unfortunately can't easily trade that in for a platform that no one visits.
They all get to the point where anime contents start flooding in pinning the system at capacity 24/7, scaring the wrong set of people, and then they chicken out and start dying a long death. This situation itself is downstream event of Twitter doing the same, in a sense.
I only use X (via XCancel etc) to read the updates from things like the local train company that they only post on X. They aren't on Bluesky or Mastodon. When I tried Mastodon, I found it too politically extreme, it felt like walking into an angry students' union meeting. It never seemed to catch on in the UK, it surfed a couple of waves of dissatisfaction with X, but people quickly drifted away.
This article has a good explanation of why "you, yes you" should leave:
https://publiccomment.blog/p/it-is-past-time-for-you-to-quit...
All of these are seriously bad copycat alternatives of twitter. And since twitter's foundations are laid on moving bedrock.... the whole thing is a horrible abomination where the tendrils are these "alternatives".
I'll take the bait, what makes Bluesky a bad copycat? It's just old Twitter. I can't for the life of me see what makes it "seriously bad", it has a pretty large userbase, it's seemingly got a decent number of normies to move over from X, it's pleasant enough to use. It's been a success.
Saying this as one of twelve Mastodon users.
There is no bait. I just pointed out that instead of creating something new and unique, they copy something and add nothing......
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Don't just throw some competitor URLs and tell us to "leave."
What's wrong with X? How are these options better?
You mean besides it being a factory for child pornography?
I don't think any of them are better, I especially do not want to be on bluesky. on X you could still do your own thing and not be tied to the political extremism but its not the case with bluesky, people automatically perceive you to support the founder's political views and it has nowhere the same reach as X which is why I think the negative connotations are stronger on bluesky than X
X is used internationally, especially big in Japan and has lot of adoption among working professionals. Just my two cents and I personally don't really like X much either. Threads also isn't that great either.