Anyone sane has left Xitter already and the crazies stay on their own platform, making the Web generally much more pleasant, as less and less sites link to Xitter.
The only reason that this is unpopular is that there are a lot of things that happened to the web that are far better than some overhyped group text vomiting website going downhill.
Twitter is still influencing the rest of the web (look at its influence on reddit since Musk bought Twitter, and Spez started wanting to live in his skin). I don’t think we can just take the good without the bad and assume a net positive.
Nah, as someone who came from reddit, we were generally a pretty terrible bunch even before bots basically took over. I don’t feel that Lemmy is much better but the platform’s overall practices seem to be better. My mileage with the community varies greatly from day to day.
I think the common denominator for all these things are people. People are pretty terrible in large numbers behind anonymity.
What annoys me about Lemmy, at least with the communities and instances that I’m connected to, is that it is a really bad echo chamber for left / far-left techies. It’s not exactly representative of what is going on in the world. Don’t get me wrong , I prefer a left mindset. But I believe this is dangerous to a certain degree. I’m starting to think I should go back to forae. This whole social bullshit disguised as a news-aggregator is just exhausting.
I don’t see this as an unpopular opinion, but I do agree with it - at least here (Brazil) Twitter was evolving into a containment cage for nutjobs and morons, until it was blocked. (And it’s damn easy to find who’s who in the Bluesky diaspora, as the nutjobs/morons miss Twitter while the saner people are glad to see it locally gone.)
I mean Musk said Twitter was a Bad Thing and problematic.
Then a year or so later bought it, and immediately started doing things which reduced it’s popularity and influence.
I think he wanted to run it into the ground or make it a fashist/rightwing/propaganda site before the US elections and it looks like he’s pretty much there. It’s in a horrible state. Could be worse, but it’s really bad.
It’s not dead though, it’s still linked to everywhere, from big news to niche communities because it still has that critical mass and inertia.
And I have to be cynical of the Fediverse, but realistically, what replaces it, at least here in the US? Discord? No, thanks, I’d at least rather have information be public.
I’m speaking as someone who has never used Twitter, but I can’t ignore it, as much as I’d like to.
If you think X is getting linked at anything approaching the level Twitter was back in the day … where have you been? That platform is slowly bleeding out his billions of investment (well, some of his, but lots of other peoples’ money I don’t mind seeing burn, either)…
It’s still everywhere in my news/internet diet.
It’s bleeding, for sure, but it’s big. Its gone bad. But I think its premature to say its collapse is a good thing, because it just won’t go away.
It’s so big that it can take a lot of bleeding before it dies. It doesn’t help that there is no significant enough consensus yet on an alternative.
It seems like some people are flocking to bsky, probably because it has better visibility and seems more accessible than Mastodon (“What’s an instance? How do I pick?”). Others are heading to Threads just because it’s there already.
If enough people move to some other platform to generate a critical mass, they’ll pull others too. Until then, inertia will keep X rolling a good while to come.
The future isn’t one big town square. The future is lots of interconnected communities.
I, for one, have no interest in the corporate internet.
