Spaceman Spiff

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • As awful as that is, the design of those dumpsters will always lead to this. To put the bag in, you must hold the lid open well above your head (and higher than many people can reach) while holding a heavy bag of trash, then lift it even higher to get it in. If you are smaller than average (e.g. a child), physically disabled, or just not an able-bodied adult, that becomes impossible




  • It’s not that it’s bad per se. The whole federation thing is confusing enough that it’s a barrier to entry. There’s also the fact that change is hard. Mastodon has a different interface, with the associated learning curve. Beyond that, it’s not just having a certain number of celebrities/etc, but the right ones. That leads to a chicken and egg problem for a lot of users. Eventually enough people would sign up (and content creators posting to both) that it would trigger a mass migration, but that has not happened yet.

    So, after all that, most users decide that Twitter is ok enough for now.




  • Regarding Threads, It’s hard to see through the bullshit right now. End user reports are pretty abysmal, while media coverage remains glowing. Meta has clearly sunk a lot of money into promoting the launch, complete with a ton of astroturfing, paid endorsements, paid content creators, etc.

    On the flip side, people have been absolutely desperate for a realistic Twitter alternative. Too many tried (and abandoned) Mastodon. It’s entirely possible that Threads will be a just-barely-good-enough Twitter alternative to abandon the Musk abuse.

    I won’t even make a prediction on it until next month, at the earliest. Let the launch hype fade, and see if it has staying power.






  • The simple fact that they are former employees is meaningless. This is especially true in California (i.e. where Twitter HQ is, and presumably most of these employees) where non-competes are nearly completely unenforceable. Twitter will have to specifically show that it’s about their internal trade secrets, and not just the general experience they brought from their time at Twitter.

    But right now, it’s entirely Twitter doing the talking. We haven’t seen yet how Meta will respond. I predict there is a 0% chance that Threads gets shutdown any time soon.

    If you read the actual letter, it seems to paint a slightly different picture. They vaguely order Meta to stop using twitters trade secrets (whatever that may be), and serve notice to preserve communications. That’s fairly normal. But then they have an entire tangent about scraping Twitter’s publicly available data.


  • It’s because of the very impassioned speech by then-Senator Ted “Tubes” Stevens, where he demonstrated that he clearly had no idea how any of it worked. You could hear the lobbyists in every bit that he parroted, without absorbing it. He also had formed a strong opinion already, despite clearly having just been told how it works.

    It’s not that it’s a bad analogy. It’s that it’s (somewhat) reductionist, and most famously associated with an idiot.