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).

173 points

What a garbage dataset to train off. The majority of everything there is all bots and AI anyway lol

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82 points

bots training bots. maybe this will (hopefully) corrupt the AI’s data. its kind of like copying off a copy again and again.

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52 points

This is in fact precisely what happens. LLM output becomes increasingly incoherent with each subsequent generation trained off of previously AI generated data.

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40 points

Sound like human

50und 11k3 hum4n

50()|V[) 11X3 |-|()|/|4|V

$[]|||||) |!|<[- #|_|///-||

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19 points

Don’t forget to yell into the data PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS!!!

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12 points

The AI version of mad cow disease.

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5 points

Grok Habsburg

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3 points

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.

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2 points

There are no buses in this picture

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11 points

Elon decided Microsoft’s Tay chatbot was a guidebook …

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3 points
*

At least its not…

I dunno, YouTube comments? I think Facebook is even far better data-wise than X, and thats a low bar.

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3 points

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.

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1 point

It’s just virtualised Deliverance

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147 points

Come on over to Mastodon, the water’s nice

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86 points

I’ve stopped recommending it. The discovery and trending post mechanisms are either garbage or non-existent, and it’s really hard to get a feed that’s remotely entertaining. Devs also seem ideologically opposed to adding any features like that. It’ll just give normal people who aren’t willing to deal with all this crap a bad taste in their mouth when it comes to the fediverse. I do recommend lemmy to people tho.

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37 points
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I feel like its the opposite.

Mastodon’s hashtag following is by far the best discovery method out there.

I’ve stopped using Bluesky because I can’t find any content and there’s just too much “screaming into the void” making it impossible to find anything of substance.
I’ve stopped using Threads because it’s just engagement bait.

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14 points

Yeah Threads has nothing of substance, just engagement bait as you said. X is similar now that users can make ad revenue

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6 points

I disagree, I just think some kind of engagement algorithm would be better. I haven’t used bluesky or threads so I can’t speak to them. I’m just saying that back in the day on twitter, I had no problem finding a bunch of very funny and clever posts, and posts were catered to me well. Through both me following people and I assume through the engagement algorithm. I’ve tried adding a bunch of hashtags, but I’m not finding a bunch of hilarious stuff to send to my friends like I did back then on twitter.

Bunch of spam too, because bots use the hashtags, so I’m often scrolling through a bunch of auto-posted stuff. Idk. Maybe I’m using it wrong. I just feel like your average person isn’t going to go through all that crap so they’ll cling to twitter until it dies.

And I’ve tried switching instances around, which is just confusing honestly, and didn’t really help with finding lots of content that I want to see. I used mastodon more when I was able to mirror people I know are funny on twitter to my mastodon feed lol. I want to like it, I just find I’m never tempted to go on it. Can’t figure it out.

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20 points

While I agree that it makes Mastodon less entertaining I also think that it makes it a lot more fair, representative and trustworthy as a lens through which to observe & participate in social discourse and share information and opinions. That in itself will probably mean that it remains less popular but I think it’s also what makes it more valuable IMO. We need to calm down from the urgency of the digital dopamine cycle, for many reasons. If social media is a truly human media then it should be boring at times because that is a human reality that we are adapted to.

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13 points

I agree. I love Mastodon’s calm columnar UI with lists and hashtags where I feel I’m in control of my experience, and that I can just stop whenever and come back in three days.

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9 points

Yeah fair points. I will say this implosion of the social media I used to use has pushed me towards doing other things than scrolling on my phone lol, and that is a positive thing.

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8 points

I wonder if they’re afraid of Eternal September’ing the service. A lot of people on Lemmy were upset when a bunch of people on Reddit joined. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have millions join in one day. I doubt it would be good for the culture of the community!

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7 points

A lot of people on Lemmy were upset when a bunch of people on Reddit joined

How many active users were there pre API fisaco? Fedidb graph doesn’t go back that far.

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2 points

That’s fair I suppose.

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7 points
*

Lemmy and Bluesky are what I use, atproto is just much more promising for microblogging than activitypub and Mastodon proves that. Lemmy is perfect for it though.

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4 points

Another issue I had was hundreds of saved toots having had awesome pictures, important data or things to do.

I saved them hoping to use some later, but it all remained an unorganized glop: unusable unless I looked at each one again, in order, to find the 75th one back, about a cat

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3 points

Yeah, once we have mastodon-wide full text search, it’ll be useful.

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2 points

Exactly, their official app is just pure garabage and they aren’t even trying to fix it

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3 points

Wdym they aren’t trying to fix it, their GitHub repo is very much active.

Though as for pure garbage, the app ain’t that bad IMO apart from the fact it’s made with React Native.

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2 points

It’s not perfect? Interesting. I’m sure that will be a deal-breaker for people exiting a failing platform run by a megalomaniacal MAGA asshole actively harming working people…

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2 points

Or just use neither, like I’ve ended up doing.

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0 points

I know what you mean. I’m self-hosting and use https://relay.fedi.buzz/ to subscribe to hashtags from all over the fedimicroblogosphere. It’s literally too much interesting content, I kept scrolling new stuff for hours and had to cut down on what tags I subscribed to. It’s like that Lemmy explorer but for microblogging.

I think a reasonable admin should be open to using the service to populate the federated timeline with niché content users ask for.

The only downside is “catch all”-tags and people abusing tags. “Hey #fediverse, check out my XYZ!”. No, I want fediverse news dang it!

But the dev stuff? Yeah.

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117 points
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Dude, that’s gonna be one hell of a racist AI just based on the dataset it’s gonna receive

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14 points

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.

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6 points

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.

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7 points
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This is why when we give vacuum robots AI powers, they run around your house shouting racist pejoratives

Welcome to the future

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50 points

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.

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21 points

He left in May.

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5 points

He left the board. As a “public benefit organization” it’s still a for-profit company and he still owns stock.

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11 points

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.

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2 points

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?

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2 points

Mike Masnick is also been added to the bluesky board which gives me some faith Bluesky will less of a Elon / Dorsey vibe

https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-06-2024-board

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2 points

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.

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1 point

When people tell you who they are, believe them

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2 points

im not sure people wont consider mastodon tbh.

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2 points

They should

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1 point

i know. but its our responsability to understand why the corporate shitty options are always preferred by the layman public.

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48 points

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.

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21 points

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”.

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16 points

The headline directly says half a million users left twatter. As far as I can tell that is literally a lie.

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2 points

Mastodon is still pretty rough around the edges. Especially for the regular Twitter Instagram crowd.

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3 points

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.

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4 points

Getting a 100000 new users when Twitter loses roughly the same amount is a pretty significant correlation.

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