{"id":4824,"date":"2022-12-31T12:56:00","date_gmt":"2022-12-31T19:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=4824"},"modified":"2022-12-31T14:38:11","modified_gmt":"2022-12-31T21:38:11","slug":"a-new-twitter-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=4824","title":{"rendered":"A New Twitter Year"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don\u2019t know how he does it. Really. Elon Musk started companies to make electric cars, orbital boosters, subway tunnels, and probably others I haven\u2019t heard of. And then he bought Twitter and put it on his Discover card. (Sorry, dumb joke. It was actually his MasterCard.) <\/p>\n

However he did it (and I think he paid way<\/em> more than it was worth) he now owns Twitter outright. You could hear the screams out to the edges of the atmosphere: Musk is literally Hitler! Twitter is a hellscape of viewpoints I disagree with!  Twitter is literally genocide!<\/em> The first thing our man Elon did was what needed doing most: Purging accounts trading in child sexual abuse material. The second most important thing: Ending the Blue Checkmark as a badge of the anointed elite. He now sells them for $8 a month. I\u2019ll probably get one sooner or later, just to support him.<\/p>\n

Twitter is now what it was intended to be: a virtual town square where lots of interesting things can be discussed and linked to. No more shadowbanning. No more throttling of reach. No more colluding with the Feds to suppress viewpoints that the Feds don\u2019t like.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not like there are no rules. As I mentioned above, Musk declared war on Twitter accounts that trade in child sexual abuse content<\/a> early in the game, and has canceled tens of thousands of accounts for breaking those rules. There are rules against impersonating other people, and probably some others that I\u2019m not aware of. Closer to home, I find I can post articles about \u201cforbidden\u201d COVID treatments, along with other contentious health issues, like whether or not red meat is a precursor to cancer and heart disease. I tried to do some of those posts a year or so ago, and every one got shot down. I had to call Ivermectin \u201cIVN\u201d and hope people could read the code.<\/p>\n

All gone, and good riddance.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t engage in political arguments for the most part, so I\u2019ve not heard much of the blood and thunder raging between those who liked the old Twitter and those who prefer the new. I have seen a lot of former bluechecks claiming to have left Twitter (whether they deleted their accounts in the process or not is often hard to tell) and go elsewhere. I find it interesting that the elsewhere of choice (there are actually quite a few) is Mastodon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mastodon is probably the largest single player in what insiders call \u201cthe Fediverse<\/a>\u201d because of the way that Mastodon (and some others like it) operate. Mastodon as a whole is actually a collection of seperate Mastodon servers (\u201cinstances\u201d) operating as peers over a protocol called ActivityPub<\/a>. Each instance controls who can join and who can be blocked, from individuals up to whole other instances. From what I\u2019ve read, there is a great deal of blocking going on right now. And that\u2019s all to the good; that\u2019s what federation is for<\/em>: local (rather than central) control. If you don\u2019t like the people on one instance, go find another. If you keep getting blocked, maybe you need some quality mirror time.<\/p>\n

There are three major problems with the Fediverse vis-a-vis Twitter:<\/p>\n