“Mainstream” media, such as CNN and BBC, mention Mastodon as Elon Musk drives users (and advertisers) away in droves. Bonus: Facebook was also a fever dream that traded as a valuable stock.

The “mainstream” media is mentioning Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter.

CNN notes today that Mastodon gained 230,000 users since October 27, when Elon Musk officially took over Twitter. For a total of 655,000 active users. BBC also mentions it.

CNN failed to mention that while Twitter has more “users”, many millions of them are just spammers, bots, advertising accounts, and dormant accounts, some of which haven’t been logged into in years.

I also saw an account that monitors Mastodon activity which, as of around 1 AM last night was showing about 6 million total accounts, with approximately 6,000 new accounts being created per _hour_ in the past day, but now I’m having trouble locating that to link to.

At any rate, it’s impossible to deny that the Fediverse is growing and that Elon Musk is the reason why.

When Andrew Lee took over and ruined Freenode, he ultimately chased out 91% of the users, and dealt with the problem of people abandoning their channels and saying the new room was on OFTC or Libera.Chat by taking over and resetting channels.

So far, many Twitter users are saying their last post will be to advise people where to follow them on Mastodon. How long until Musk has someone detect this and ban the account for talking about leaving and where they’re going?

Musk has been furious at the pace at which Twitter’s largest advertisers have been bailing on him. He “threatened” a “Thermonuclear Name and Shame” if “it doesn’t stop”, so apparently “freedom of speech” means being extorted by Musk into propping up his company which loses “$5 million a day” and rising, “or else” he’ll put your company on a “boycott list” for his followers.

Musk is not a very smart man. Like most rich people, he was born into generational wealth.

Worse, the generational wealth in the Musk family was generated by slave labor in South African emerald mines.

When people are rich they can buy media coverage and cover up for the fact that they’re not smart, they just “have people” for everything.

TED Talks are a joke. When they have people like Musk, they don’t ask him hard questions. They ask softball questions, and he even has to flub his way through these.

Like saying that the biggest threat to humanity is “malignant AI”. Like, he almost recalls watching The Terminator or something. In reality, we have nothing close to “AI” at the present time.

We unfortunately have “voice assistants”, which are different. They “fake” AI by having a wide range of pre-programmed responses, and if it very nearly does sound like someone is sitting in your phone answering your questions, it’s because of this and the fact that a voice actor sat down for hours on end recording speech samples so that “Siri” could have a voice.

But it’s not AI. Not even close. It’s unfortunate that they can fake it well enough to have lonely and depressed people form emotional attachments to a phone, but it’s not AI.

“Siri” is a product of marketing scum and psychiatrists knowing how you’re wired and creating a product to exploit you.

(These voice assistants are “always on” spyware that can be a wiretap.)

Elon Musk is a clown. He gets away with faking “intelligence” because nobody ever forces him into a corner and asks him anything hard. He’s just really rich and he’s an attention whore with personality traits that are very much not unlike Donald Trump.

When Musk wants attention, he shows up in a bad cowboy costume smoking dope and saying “something something Mars” and people listen to him.

Back to Musk’s empty threats….Boycott lists almost never work. They just don’t.

People might say they’re mad at Coca-Cola and GM, but they all keep buying Coke and Chevy trucks, so what difference does it make?

Fox News is portraying this as-if Musk has the upper hand by making these absurd threats, and he doesn’t.

There’s better deals for advertisers out there. Even FM radio, because people still listen in their cars.

He’s also busy pissing off people with millions of followers who made Twitter popular as an advertising platform by claiming he’s going to get them to pay him $20 or maybe $8, depending on what mood he’s in, for a blue check-mark.

Stephen King said he’d leave if he had to pay Musk anything for a blue check-mark, and King has a lot of money. He’s offended by the idea he should pay Musk to make Musk’s platform more popular for advertisers.

What’s driving away all of the advertisers and users is Musk’s increasingly erratic behavior.

Literally the second day he owned the company, he tweeted a bizarre anti-LGBT conspiracy theory about the attack on House Speaker Pelosi’s husband, and then deleted it.

Then he’s allowed hate speech to swell by over 500% without doing any sort of content moderation. Why would brands want to be associated with this? Twitter is becoming the official platform of right-wing cranks and Klansmen.

He defended laying off 3,750 people, in the middle of the night in some cases, by claiming the company is losing too much money to let them remain employed, without mentioning that his bid of $54.20 per share, a weed joke, was probably an over-payment of at least $4.20 per share, and would have allowed him to spare everyone who got laid off.

Not that he wanted to spare the people he let go. His first targets were the ethics team and the people who police misinformation, voting scams, and hate speech.

Put it all together, and not only is Twitter basically finished, but Musk has put on full display that he’s so incompetent that it didn’t even take him half a month to make it unsalvageable.

Proprietary “social media” with advertising, Russian (and other) troll farms, and government back doors are finally on the way out.

On top of Musk ruining Twitter (such that it was anywhere close to acceptable before) and leaving people scrambling to adopt Mastodon, Facebook has been losing advertising revenue while burning all of its cash on “Metaverse”, which is turning into a bigger joke every day, with investors more or less powerless to oust Mark Zuckerberg or stop him from burning cash.

(He controls 90% of the B Shares, which have 10 votes for each publicly traded A share.)

“Meta” (Facebook) stock is currently worth about a fifth of what it was just last year, and most analysts see a Long Term Negative outlook.

I notice whenever I do look at who is using Facebook these days, that it’s old people. People like my dad and Aunt (dad’s sister) who re-share their own posts because they don’t know how posts work, or make 8-9 accounts because they keep getting taken over by spammers.

Facebook hasn’t had anyone interesting on it for years, but the “mainstream” media says it’s “growing”.

It has every reason to want to be in denial. Billionaires and the governments (not just “your” government) have put a lot of money into these platforms.

They have back doors set up. If they fail, then the government is less effective at spying on you. They also let these companies into the major stock markets using fake valuations.

Facebook being in the S&P 500 in the first place was like the stock market version of allowing Greece into the European Union and Eurozone, and now the price tag is beginning to become known.

The losses won’t stop piling up at _only_ ~80% of what the company was said to be worth last year.

The people holding Twitter stock were lucky that a billionaire idiot came along to rescue them, because it wasn’t worth 10% of what he paid.

Had Twitter actually been worth anything like what he had paid on its own, there’s no way that the people running it would have sued him to force him to buy it, knowing they would all be fired. They got a good deal for their investors and themselves (as their shares vested upon being fired at the price Musk paid for them), and got out quickly.

Now Musk is furious because he’s such a narcissist that he thought he’d come in and fix everything because he knows everything, of course, and it’s just another failing Musk cash furnace. Already losing money, and now losing their advertisers and the people who would have been seeing the ads had the advertisers stayed.

Musk thinks he’ll charge people $7.99 a month for Twitter in the middle of the worst recession in global history.

If they don’t pay it, I think they’ll see “fewer” ads anyway until it’s down to the point the company is disbanded.

Now, Musk apparently thinks that he can _also_ turn Twitter into a YouTube competitor.

I can only speak for myself, but I don’t even use YouTube that much anymore. The drive to monetize everything has led to a lot of non-genuine content that you can only sort of roll your eyes at.

When Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips deliberately broke Pop_OS! to get “likes” and “views”, he knew what he was doing. No actual user is stupid enough that, when presented with a warning from a package manager that something’s not right and proceeding will most likely break the operating system, there’s no way they would type “Yes, do as I say.” and hit ENTER. But it generated a lot of attention, and attention (for advertisers) is all most people uploading YouTube videos are after.

So Musk says he’ll make Twitter an even more fake/synthetic form of “social” network than it is now, to drive “engagement”.

But Facebook is finding out that you can’t engage like this, even with “algorithms” except to a very stupid part of the population, and they’ve lost 4/5ths of their stock price to get to where they are today.

Similarly, YouTube (Google), responded to negative reactions to fake/synthetic “content” by neutering the Dislike button so you couldn’t look at it and see what real people thought.

It’s a way of gaslighting. You can still see “Likes”, but are they even people that are “Liking” the video? Who is clicking on this crap? Bots?

I don’t think there’s a future in the fake Social Network business.

Was it all just a meme that went on for a couple decades only to crash because they got too greedy and started squeezing too hard? It certainly appears that way to me.

I believe, and hope, that we’re witnessing the people swiftly rejecting this madness and forming actual communities, using open standards.

More Matrix.org/Freenode fun… Bonus: Why VPNs should be normal, not just for cranks.

Yesterday, I ran into more Matrix.org/Element fun.

Since Cancel Culture runs rampant on Matrix.org and entire rooms and users get knifed and disappear daily, I decided to try to use nerdsin.space instead, and the problem is that while the Matrix protocol supports federation, the IRC bridges are not available locally on nerdsin.space, leaving you to do a double shim into IRC.

To get into Freenode, you basically have to load Matrix.org rooms and then select the Freenode room you want, and then you’re logged into nerdsin.space, federated to Matrix.org, and then bridged into Freenode IRC.

The problem here is that now, any issues on any one of those platforms can compromise your ability to use IRC.

I’m rapidly finding out that just because Matrix is “modern” doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t an even bigger rat’s nest than just using IRC directly.

Yesterday, around 1:35 PM local time, and going on for about a day, nothing from Matrix.org would federate into nerdsin.space, but if you sent a message from nerdsin.space it would reach the Matrix.org room.

For a while, I wondered if they banned my account or just locked out nerdsin.space for reasons unknown. It seems that from the perspective of other users, they want to keep bans as quiet as possible.

When they finally kill someone’s account, it just says that they changed their user name to whatever the raw name of their matrix.org account is and that they left the server and that the account “will no longer be active”. It doesn’t say anything about who banned them.

(As I’m writing this, Matrix.org is refusing to federate, AGAIN. I couldn’t even get through writing this post and had to come back here to say this.)

Since the coup d’état on Freenode, Techrights has been wondering about whether it’s time to move elsewhere (seems like “strongly leaning towards not moving” considering the opportunists who are engaged in the current crisis, in order to start a new network and control what goes on there more thoroughly), but the situation on Matrix.org is much more unstable, in my opinion.

Oddly, they’re pitching themselves as a communications platform that’s business-ready while in fact they’re tossing out everyone except Chromebook kids (one of which told me that they found out that the E2E encryption confuses the firewall filter at their schools) and LGBT rooms. Anything out of the realm of left-wing SJW politics is verboten.

One false move (meaning anything that doesn’t fly past whatever mood two people are in that day) by any of your users will results in “Abuse Management” taking over your room, making it read-only, renaming it to “Content Violation”, and then everyone leaves. It wasn’t this bad before, but in the last several months, I’ve seen it happen to dozens of rooms and many users.

The federation between servers eventually came back up, this time, but it’s not guaranteed that this will always be the case. So, in the end, IRC is probably still superior. It’s sad that a protocol from 1989 is, in many ways, superior.

While Matrix.org outflanks IRC technologically, the mentality of the userbase and the moderators is very soft.

The “hacker culture” that used to facilitate open debate and meritocracy has been declared illegal by Matthew and Travis (the mods), who have set up a Code of Conduct that, if applied in the real world, would be like something out of the movie Demolition Man. Everything offensively non-offensive. In fact, this new ethos is percolating in the software development world to the point that to even have a relative comparison on the merits of two or more different approaches to a problem is a microaggression.

It’s possible to ruin a social community without a Code of Conduct, but it’s sure a lot harder to do.

The folks urging Debian and other projects to abandon freenode will get more and more vocal because crisis fades quickly and crisis and opportunity go hand in hand.

People who are truly toxic always need all kinds of stupid drama going on, but they call other people toxic as a form of projection.

Bonus: It’s not a terrific idea to use the internet out in the open anymore, regardless.

In 2007, my ISP at the time, AT&T, decided that because Windows malware often happened to use IRC as a means to an end (contacting a “Command & Control” server to receive marching orders from a person managing the botnet), that _any_ secure connection to IRC must have meant you had a botnet malware program installed.

Back then, Virtual Private Networking services were not as robust and widely available as they are today (Mozilla runs one through Mullvad….which I might look into further after my Private Internet Access subscription is over.)

Corporations don’t like to entertain the idea of communities that they can’t easily control, and when you get an open protocol where you could talk to anyone, they have their reasons to want it to die.

Hell, even closed ones with sketchy EULAs, like Parler, can’t even last until they make agreements with Apple to silence their users and come back with all the same problems as Facebook, and more.

Don’t think that just because most governments in Western Europe or North America haven’t threatened to shoot down a passenger plane to get at one critic (at least not so brazenly), like Lukashenko did in Belarus this week, that they don’t keep an eye on things.

Many Western politicians want to make encryption itself illegal after their new laws made VPNs a high demand commodity, while people who associate with criminal sexual deviates (such as Epstein…and may be one themselves), like Bill Gates, cheer this on.

Naturally, they’ll exempt themselves. British PM Boris Johnson uses Signal, which makes it impossible for the British government to later comply with open records requests as they pertain to himself. Meanwhile, insecure options like Zoom which can easily be intercepted and monitored have been pushed on Americans for tasks ranging from university activities to meeting with therapists and attorneys, using the pandemic as an excuse.

While Americans were cheering on the second Coronavirus stimulus where they got $600 (which isn’t much, especially with the hyperinflation currently spilling out into the real economy), the Democrats and Republicans got together to pass a Kangaroo Copyright Court law in the same legislation, where any American can be sued for copyright for up to $30,000 each claim.

The EU Meme Law was scandalous, and Americans were just so broke that they accepted a one time payoff, while the price of one order of french fries at McDonalds is now $3.75.

The rise of VPNs should come as no surprise to lawfakers in both parties, as they do the MAFIAA‘s bidding for it. Unfortunately, this does make life easier for actual criminals, because as more people go to ground to commit mostly benign copyright violations without being sued into bankruptcy and to enjoy their constitutional right to freedom of speech and association, the selection of VPNs goes up while the price comes down. There will also be more users of the Tor Browser, which means that law enforcement will need to search bigger haystacks for the needle.

What alarmed me 14 years ago about AT&T complaining about my IRC usage and what alarms me now about “Comcast Constant Guard” and “network protection” is that they slip it in as if they protect you from viruses, but they make sure that it’s very loud and that you know that you’re under surveillance.

The implications of this are that you’re supposed to self-censor out of fear of what ramifications will spring from your online activities.

And spring, they do. Already, at least one company that does “background checks” printed out several hundred pages of Twitter likes and comments of one of Jamie Zawinski’s friends and sent them to his HR.

Richard Stallman warned about Facebook’s real name policy years ago, and I suspect that there’s no end to the amount of abuse this can lead to. With employers, it makes all the sense in the world. They don’t want employees who think too much, are opinionated, and have the “wrong political opinions” especially. What’s the first thing that people do when they get on “Social” media? They often wear their politics on their sleeves.

Cynically, Facebook also has every reason (other than the engagement advertising dollars that Stallman pointed out) to destabilize the American government. If they’re too busy worried about internal security after events like the Capital Insurrection, then they might not investigate Facebook for wide ranging antitrust abuses and not paying their tax.

I’ve been using a VPN for some time now because I’m just tired of feeding into everything my ISP knows about me.

If you look at the way courts demand information, it also becomes immediately clear that they want positive identification about the user of a service. Comcast hands that over 100% of the time, and for sure if a court has compelled them to. Even though no law requires them to retain data about their users, they do so for their own reasons (advertising, to hand to law enforcement to make themselves invaluable to the government and negotiate to pay less in taxes, etc.)

To date, PIA hasn’t turned over data about anyone that I’m aware of.

They recently implemented support for the Wireguard VPN protocol. I had been using OpenVPN protocol, previously, and Wireguard was designed to be simpler and much easier to audit for security issues, but the network throughput is better while overall drag on the computer is much lower.

Oddly, it was also big tech that enabled VPNs to work well.

Chip companies like Intel, AMD, and now Apple (with the M1) put encryption acceleration helper instructions in their CPUs, hoping to make Digital Restrictions Malware work “better”, but the byproduct is that encryption in general just has negligible overhead these days, and the user should be employing it everywhere they get a chance to. Including using HTTPS-only inside the browser, inside the VPN, with the kill switch on.

Leave the gun, take the cannoli.