This is Big Boy… though technically, his name is Tigger, but we did not know that then and can’t seem to shift gears. Big Boy doesn’t really know where he belongs, so this morning when my spouse went outside, he was on the roof of her car. We’ve seen cat prints for years on our vehicles but never really knew who it was. Part of Big Boy’s confusion is that his original family moved away and while our next-door neighbors have officially adopted him, he still spends much time in our front yard. He is a sweet baby and will headbutt your hand, but he can also be a bit of a bully to the other outdoor cats so I’m not nearly as fond of him as I used to be. He still has a home, but it just isn’t the same home… and he still comes and goes as he pleases which I question if that is the best idea. However, there are times when he acts like he wants us to be his family.
In other Cat-related breaking news… Gracie has learned a new thing. When she figures out how to do something, she obsesses over that new thing until she gets bored and moves on. This particular new thing is that she has learned that she can easily jump up on top of the fridge in the kitchen, and since yesterday has just spent a decent amount of time up there chilling. She of course figured out she could knock magnets off the fridge door from this vantage point… so they have all been redistributed to a position slightly lower than her paws can reach. She is terribly proud of herself and feels like you should be proud of her too. I am dreading when she figures out how to get on top of the entertainment center, as we have tended to use that as a “Gracie-free zone” for anything she needs not to play with.
In Path of Exile news they have buffed the Trial of the Ancestors significantly. For example in the above image, that shows my opening round rewards and there is one opponent who would give me nine raw Chaos Orbs for winning that round. Unfortunately, the stacking seems to be that the best rewards offer the least favor with the various opponents, so you can take some short-term gains… but at the cost of overall progress in the tournament as a whole. If you are playing to win, you would take the 19 Jewelers Orbs as that option gives you the most favor with the individual factions, which would in turn allow you to buy more units. I’ve won enough matches that I have pushed up my ranking over 200, which in theory means I should start seeing even better rewards… but also the combat has become rather brutal.
There had been a degenerate strategy centered around Empire’s Grasp and Quill Rain, and involved creating totems that would indefinitely knock back the guards allowing you to just walk around and capture the totems. This briefly saw the price of Empire’s Grasp shoot up from a 1 Chaos Orb item to over 50 Chaos Orbs. I managed to monopolize on this and sold the pair I had sitting in my vault for 50 Chaos Orbs yesterday before the price started to come back down… and thanks to the emergency patch fixing this interaction has plummeted back down to the expected 1 Chaos Orb territory. If you are curious about what this looked like, Zizaran released a video explaining the strategy yesterday that has now been fixed. GGG has come out and said that they are not going to claw back any of the loot that was gained through this exploitative interaction, so as is often the case… the answer is to exploit early and exploit often. I opted not to chase this because I figured it would get patched out quickly, and would prefer to learn how to do the tournament correctly.
Most of my effort has been towards trying to set up and prepare my Righteous Fire Juggernaut for the endgame. I’m now in Act 9 and should wrap up the character today. I had been holding onto a reasonable Opal Sceptre base and performed some quick essence crafting and landed a +1 to all fire spell skill gems which will benefit both my Righteous Fire main link and my Fire Trap helmet link. As for helmets I held onto a good fractured base and then threw some essences at it until I wound up with something that had some decent resistances. The other interesting item that I am using currently, and will likely need to toss aside is a Pyre ring that I picked up on my journeys. I am not really using much in the way of cold damage other than Frost Blink, and mostly I am using it for the bonus burning damage and pretty solid resistances. Honestly, I will likely end up using this Sceptre for quite a while given that I am just realizing while writing this that I can bench-craft on Minion damage to get even more of a boost.
I did have to spend a bit of time running maps yesterday in order to gain some more currency, as I bankrupted myself trying to help Thalen get the same items I talked about picking up yesterday for his Righteous Fire build. In my travels, I managed to pick up my first Divine Orb of the league so that was exciting. My happy place I think is going to be using my Lightning Arrow Raider for mapping and then swapping over to my Righteous Fire Juggernaut to spend all that sweet sweet sulphite to Delve up some goodies. I’ve probably missed Delve the most and while technically the Lightning Arrow Raider can do some of that… the second a mob down there looks at me crosswise I evaporate. The Raider is amazing for brute forcing a lot of AOE damage all over the place… but not that great at anything that requires survival or scenarios where I can’t leech a lot of life and mana. However, occasionally swapping in a totem support for my Lighting Arrow has opened up the ability to run reflection maps with impunity which is nice.
Anyways! Time to wrap this up. I had a power outage in the middle of writing this which caused me to have to re-write quite a bit after the “blink” was over. I hope you all are having a wonderful week and I am hoping to wrap up my Juggernaut today.
Good Morning Friends! Today is the first day of the new school year for my wife, and as a result, much of the weekend was centered around preparing her for that. However, I did manage to get a bunch of gaming in around the margins. I’ve been playing an RF Inquisitor as a test character to decide if I want to go down that path or stick with my Juggernaut shenanigans. In truth, the final decisions will be made when the patch notes drop in Friday and we see if Juggernaut and Righteous Fire spring forth unscathed. One of the things I am playing with as I level this character is relying on Scorching Ray instead of Fire Trap for single-target damage. There are definitely some positives being that I can burn through rare and unique monsters much faster. The glaring negative however is that I have to remain stationary while channeling it, which means there are going to be times when I cannot realistically stop to cast it. I wonder if I can create a linkage that could support both Fire Trap and Scorching Ray without greatly hampering either of them… because it sure would be nice to have both available.
Sir Gog released a video talking about the spoilers that are being released this week for Patch 3.22, and of them, I am greatly interested in Unending Nightmare. Essentially I have always wanted the ability to just not have Delirium Fog clear on its own. I get that for Delirium farmers this is a bad thing, but for me who only ever dabbles in most of the league mechanics it would be pretty great to have the option of simply clearing the entire map before it ends. Similarly, the Expedition node that gives you one big explosion has been something I have often wished existed. If this new Atlas Passive Tree gives me a node that just turns every Alva into the Inverse Incursions from the Memory maps… I would be in heaven. So far it feels like I am getting a lot of the things that I have wanted to exist, so maybe just maybe there are going to be a few more of them.
Most of my weekend gaming was spent playing Baldur’s Gate 3, which is likely no shock to anyone. The game as a whole has had a peak concurrency on Steam of over 800,000 players and it has yet to release on Consoles. I thought I had screwed up my current playthrough because I missed a key character when I could first talk to them. However last night I managed to sort out a sequence of events that had them come to seek me out in my camp, so I have now picked up Karlach and Wyll and shuffled my party around to allow room for both so I can give them a shot. I can already tell that I am going to love running around with Karlach. BG3 is one of those games where you think you are playing for thirty minutes but have wound up playing for four hours. It has been a while since a game has caused this much time dilation for me, but I am enjoying it.
There is a cute web-based game called “Code: Action” going on in Honkai Star Rail where you retell the stories of Blade, Kafka, and to some extent Silver Wolf. The end result is you create these cute movie posters based on the characters. It is largely fluff, but each of the six posters gives you a chunk of currency in the game so if you have fifteen minutes it is well worth doing. I am slowly chipping away at leveling some more characters. I think I have unlocked enough on my Luocha to where he is undeniably the correct choice for party healing over Natasha. Next up I am probably going to start working on kitting out Himeko because I really like her follow-up attacks. Still enjoying myself but this game is very much in maintenance mode for me where I play thirty minutes a day and feel happy doing so.
I did not really get into Palia much more over the weekend, but I did test a theory. The first chest that you place gives you 400 storage capacity, and if you place additional storage chests on your property it just keeps giving you an additional 400 capacity in one large shared bank. Given that I gathered a ton of resources clearing my plot I decided to go ahead and craft a few spares. The grid view is really nice and allows you to align things much more cleanly than you can while placing things in the third person. I sorta wish housing systems like FFXIV had an over-the-top grid view like this for placing objects and aligning them to grid lines.
I also finished Season Three of the Netflix Witcher series. I had been avoiding it because the first half of this season was pretty awful, and I was afraid it would go even further off the rails. I’ve chosen to use an image of happier times when the series was more closely following the actual source material. Essentially The Witcher is a wobbly cart, and the first season had a few rough moments but largely lifted scenes directly from the novels or short stories. In the second season… the cart began to shake itself violently with the mischaracterization and subsequent murder of the beloved Eskel. In Season Three… the wheels have fallen off and the series has been drug along the path on the backs of the still rather excellent character actors. I’ve come to really like the actors playing most of the roles, but instead of doing justice to original property be it the novels or the games… we are just sort of in David Hasselhoff Nick Fury movie territory.
Lastly, to end on a positive note, I spent some time last night hanging out with our community cat Greybie. He has pretty much moved to our backyard permanently along with Tripod. I’ve been going out and loving on him each day when I put down food and water, but he has been mournfully meowing at me for not sticking around and staying a bit. He likes to hop up in my lap while I am sitting in my chair, and it has just been too hot to do this lately. However given that yesterday was the first sub-hundred-degree day in over a week, I figured I needed to go out and indulge the sweet baby. Sadly Tripod is still completely skittish, but at least hangs out… from afar… when I am out there.
I hope that you all had a great weekend. I hope my wife has a great start to the new school year today. I look forward to playing a lot more Baldur’s Gate 3 this week and getting a bit further in my RF Inquisitor test build.
Yesterday Threads came out which is the Meta/Facebook/Instagram equivalent to Twitter. I tried it so you don’t have to… but let’s be honest I also sort of sign up for every social network that comes out. Someone might view this as me being fickle or indecisive, but it is just in my personal mindset to want to get in and poke around with a lot of different things. While I was a WoW Tourist for years, it did not stop me from playing every new MMORPG that came out even though I had no real intentions (until Rift that is) of actually leaving that game. Threads is not exactly what I would consider good, but it does seem like there are people who love the damned thing. My spouse is a teacher, and apparently among her friends… they are completely enamored with it. It also seems to be a big hit amongst the celeberatti types.
At its core… Threads is essentially “what if Instagram was Twitter”. My core complaint with Instagram and part of why I only use it for idly scrolling… is that most of the posts that I end up seeing are not from people that I followed, and even then nothing is in chronological order. Twitter for me was very much an “in the moment” experience, and focused entirely on the people that I followed and the things that they might have been retweeting. There was a sense of immediacy to the platform and if something was more than a few hours old… you might as well not respond to it because it was already “old news”. Instagram and Threads are applications decided to have some algorithm feeding you content, in the order in which it deems most relevant. On the day Threads opened… most of my feed was made up of completely random people that I did not know at all. On day two it started to feed me more of the people I was following… but also still a lot of randomness. None of this is conducive to a reasonable replacement for Twitter.
I feel like it is VERY important to understand that I have never used official apps with Twitter. Algorithmic fucking about and promoted Tweets were never part of my user experience. Instead, I had a very user-crafted experience and I was able to tweak the site and my TweetDeck layout to match my interests. This is also why I use Mastodon and what I expect out of a social media experience. Coming from that background… Threads is a completely unusable mess of an application. There is also the problem that it is mobile-only… and I really don’t use social media that much on a mobile device. Sure it is great for idly browsing while laying in bed waiting for sleep to claim me… but during the day I am almost always using it on a computer through a web browser. I didn’t start using Instagram at all until I could access it and upload through a browser… which I did by tricking the browser to think I was on an Android phone. I am not willing to jump through those sorts of hoops for Threads, because it just doesn’t add anything of value to my life. In fact, I had uninstalled it from my phone until this morning when I decided I wanted some screenshots… and now have uninstalled it again.
Blue Sky on the other hand… is charming. There is something about that platform. It has a vibe not unlike what those heady early days of Mastodon felt in 2018. Granted it is a different type of user that is hanging out on the platform than the deeply FOSS/Anarchist vibe that was on early Mastodon, but still it has a unique thing going on. Right now I am mostly there because the handful of friends that were unwilling to convert to Mastodon seem to have taken up residence there. It is still feature-limited, and I still think the At Protocol is the Betamax to ActivityPub’s VHS and will ultimately lose… but it is interesting enough to keep me logging in periodically. There is still an awful lot of “talking about other social media networks” going on regardless of your platform. Things are in a state of flux and I guess it is natural… but I also was sort of happy to have reached a point on the Fediverse where it was coming up less and less.
I think my core problem with Blue Sky or BSky as most users seem to call it… is the interface. I hate the default Twitter interface and BSky seems to be a carbon copy of it. I never understood how people could use that interface… or the default Twitter app… and was always shocked at how few people used TweetDeck or any of the third-party apps like Fenix or even HootSuite. Among the options I have found so far with Blue Sky, I think TokiMeki is maybe the best. It essentially allows you to create a multi-column view like you would it tweet deck. Some of the layout of the site bugs me a bit but I have gotten used to it. What I don’t love however is the lag involved with using any of the third-party options.
Another option is something called SkyFeed, and thus far I do not love it. I might learn to love it eventually though if I ever figure out how to make my own custom feeds. Part of the claim to fame with this interface and Blue Sky, in general, is you can roll your own feeds and assign some pretty detailed filtering parameters to them. You can then either publish your feed globally or simply use it privately. I’ve subscribed to a GameDev one and a Cat Pics one and they both work pretty well. Skyfeed has a helper tool for generating feeds so even if I don’t end up using this as my final multi-column UI, I might use it to help build some feeds.
I think the biggest challenge for me personally with Blue Sky as a whole though… is that I don’t really feel like I belong there. I mean I am sure this is partially just a me thing, but as a platform goes it seems to be dominated by the most charming shitposters. All I really want to do on social media is spout off my random nonsense about the video games I am playing, and comment on other people’s random nonsense. While I can in fact do this thing, it also doesn’t really feel like that is the vibe of the platform as a whole. There is a certain oily sheen of Twitter clout that I recognized when stepping aboard and does not really fit what I want anymore. I kinda want a bunch of unabashed geeks talking about their super grognard and arcane exploits. I have no interest in appearing cool anymore, and I am just not sure I fit into the community that is gathering there.
Part of that is absolutely on me though, because I am not sure if I want to fit in. I found a home and it is a delightful one, and while I keep poking around looking at other things because it is my nature… I am always happy to return to the blue-grey interface of the default advanced mode Mastodon client. I think what I daydream about is a future where maybe my sticking around on Gamepad.club doesn’t mean not being able to hang out with the friends that didn’t connect with the Fediverse as a whole. My hope with the focus on federation among the current crop of platforms… means at some point they will all standardize on a single federation method, or at least that there will be gateways and bridges that are built between them. I dream of an era when we all get to settle into whatever social platform feels the most comfortable to us… and also still get to share conversations freely.
I would love to say just create an account on Gamepad.club and hang out there with me. I’ve helped with this instance in order to have a comfy place for my friends to land, but I also am tired of being the guy who is constantly trying to recruit folks away from whatever platform they are enjoying. I had come to realize that I was just going to lose access to a number of friends, and I had been okay with that… but the last few weeks and the continued dumpster fire that is Twitter sorta ripped open some old wounds. However, I am sorry to say… I won’t be coming to Threads and while I am lurking there… I won’t be adopting Blue Sky as my new home. My home is and will continue to be Gamepad.club. That is where I feel most comfortable and honestly feel most loved. I’ve tried almost every social platform that has come out over the last few years save for the more toxic ones like Gab or of course Truth.Social… and none of them have done it for me. On Gamepad we have a little over 100 users and most of them are active, and it just feels comfy.
The Fediverse can be a wild place, but it also feels like home. I love gamepad and I love all of the other bright little hubs out there that folks have coalesced. I love how open and free folks seem to be in their discussions. I love that folks seem to be genuine with each other and are willing to tear down the layers of defense that we threw up while using Twitter. I don’t want to be cool anymore, and I am not sure if I ever wanted to be. I don’t have to even give the slightest fuck about what my follow count looks like as compared to someone else. I just want to be me, sitting on my virtual porch waving at other delightful geeks and nerds as they pass by. Maybe that is a weirdly utopian viewpoint of the Fediverse, but it represents how I feel about it most of the time. Sure there are little wars that get waged between instance admins that are diametrically opposed on a given issue… but being on our small little island we are often insulated from a lot of that. I trust Gazimoff, Aywren, and Scopique who I share admin/mod duties and I am always happy to welcome a new face that shows up on our shores.
It isn’t perfect, and I realize our little corner of the internet won’t be for everyone. However it is where I live now, and while I might visit other places… it is the only place where you can always find me. I still hope for a day when a bridge gets built between my home and wherever you call home, but I’m not willing to abandon my peace of mind to keep looking for a mythical realm that everyone will simultaneously decide to call home. Like I said the other day… there is no new Twitter, that time is over and you have to figure out where it is that you call your home.
Good Morning Friends! While technically a vacation day for me, I guess I am here opting to write a blog post because I have had some thoughts kicking around in my head. It has been a bit of a wild ride since the first of this month for a lot of folks on the internet. If you have not been impacted then gratz… you are not terminally online. For the rest of us, however, there has been a bit of strife even for those who abandoned that site last year. Essentially a sequence of events has led to Twitter largely being unusable for the average user that has refused to pay for the $8 per month badge of shame. Firstly on June 30th, Twitter shut off access for anyone viewing the site without logging in first… which also killed access to any links that have been shortened with T.Co. Next came the above tweet which announced that all Twitter users would be dealing with “rate limits”.
What this means in practice is that simply by leaving your Twitter client or web browser running, you would begin to lose access to new tweets when your account on any platform had cached 600 messages. New accounts are restricted to 300 I am assuming so folks don’t simply create alt accounts to bypass the quota. The rumor is that this is all being brought on by the fact that Elon Musk yet again failed to pay one of his bills… this time for hosting in the Google Cloud. There has supposedly been a mad dash within Twitter to migrate elsewhere, and the impossible task was not completed in time… leading to the entire service being severely throttled instead of fessing up to this… it is being played as more of Elon’s crusade against bots and data scraping.
This is not the first time we have decreed that Twitter was burning. However, this is maybe the first time that it has truly adversely impacted the average user. 600 Tweets is not a lot given how spammy some users are, and given that promoted tweets and the things that the algorithm crams in your feed also count towards that number… most everyone ends up being rate limited before long. There is actually a weird sub-community that has sprung up around trying to speed-run the rate limit. The end result of this is that folks who never considered leaving… are not desperately seeking a solution. Essentially everyone seems to be looking for the next Twitter.
The latest greatest home seems to be Blue Sky. For those who are completely unaware of what this nonsense is, essentially Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame… has gone off and attempted to create his own corporate version of Mastodon that looks and feels like Twitter did circa 2008. The problem with Blue Sky is threefold… firstly it is very much a “minimum viable product” at the moment and is missing a bunch of features that one expects from a Twitter-Clone like some measure of private messaging. Secondly, they are using the Gmail model for growth, where every so often users are given one or two invites for them to ration out to their friends. Thirdly you are jumping from the arms of one corporation that had no clue how to make enough money to sustain its service to the arms of another company with seemingly no viable business plan.
At some point, it seemed that Blue Sky was universally declared the new Twitter, and folks desperately tried to get invites to the platform. This caused so much churn that by the afternoon of the first, Blue Sky had to completely turn off invites… even for pre-existing codes that had been sent out. There was a period of time when neither Twitter nor Blue Sky was loading at all. They have since turned back on the trickle of outstanding invites, but no new ones are being sent out. Essentially there is no room in the inn for new users, and the site is not ready for public launch. The folks who are there seem to like it, and I personally think it is a reasonable place to visit… but doesn’t really feel like home. The platform as a whole is missing so many features that it really does not make sense for them to attempt to rush into production. So as a result of just not being able to accept the masses, Blue Sky will in theory fail to be the new Twitter.
Now Meta is attempting to toss their hat into the ring with Threads. I am uncertain if this is the ActivityPub option that has caused so much drama recently within the Fediverse, or if this is something entirely different that they had been working on. Whatever the case this will give folks who are already bought into Instagram an option to make Twitter-like text-based posts on that platform. While I use Instagram occasionally I don’t really love it. Instagram is a site about beautiful people posting beautiful things about their beautiful lives. I am not a beautiful person, and I am also not extremely visually motivated when it comes to expressing myself. I write walls of text broken up by screenshots, and when I am not doing that… I write dumbassed quips. Instagram has never really felt like home, and I doubt adding Twitter posts to it will make it more embracing either.
Then there are the living dead… the locations that attempted to be Twitter or at least give an alternate landing spot that failed to gain any real traction. These include Spoutible shown above, Post, CoHost, and countless others trying to be the next new place for folks to talk with each other. All of these have their own communities but they are also extremely narrow in their scope and have lacked the mass adoption required to be the next Twitter. Spoutible seems to be a carbon copy version of Twitter, and others like CoHost are leaning more on the past social networks and creating an almost Live Journal-style experience. Then there are things like Tumblr that are still alive and kicking and apparently working on federating over ActivityPub.
Then there is the Fediverse, or as most folks seem to refer to it… Mastodon. This is more the Anti-Twitter than a Twitter replacement because it was created by folks looking for an alternative to social media as it existed at the time… and was forged in the fires of folks who abandoned Twitter for various sundry reasons. There are many articles out there that will tell you that the Twitter Migration failed and that Mastodon will not be the next Twitter… and I agree with them for the most part. I think the key to understanding this is the fact that the folks running most Fediverse servers would not consider replacing Twitter as a laudable goal. It sorta just wants to exist as its own thing, which is there if folks want to partake but also… fine if folks don’t.
While I have been dabbling with Mastodon, particularly since 2018, I truly made it my home late last year and made what I hope was my final migration to Gamepad.club a server that I help administrate. I chided Blue Sky for not really having a viable business model, but the truth is… the Fediverse isn’t really out to make money either. Most servers like ours run on a patronage system where folks donate time and money to help keep the site running. This doesn’t really work at scale, but I feel like the Fediverse works when it is a bunch of smaller communities rather than attempting to be a single flagship mono-site like Mastodon.social or even honestly Mstdn.social. Because the network is so distributed… the smaller servers felt almost no impact from the crush of new user sign-ups. While we had quite a few new faces show up over the weekend… the server remained happily trucking along without missing a beat.
While there are absolutely a bunch of different options out there who do want to be the next Twitter… I don’t really think any of them will succeed at that goal. Twitter is a thing that evolved over time as the lowest common denominator, the network that everyone simultaneously agreed was tolerable enough to maintain a presence on. That began to change when Elon Musk took over, and it is a landslide that can’t really be stopped now. However once that dam truly breaks… folks are going to spread out to ALL of the options that I mentioned and many more that I didn’t… and not a single one of them will become the new ubersite. Folks have way too many options and once you realize you don’t really need Twitter or its clout, you start to focus instead on what actually brings meaning to your personal experience.
I found my new home, and while I realize most people ended up turning their noses up at the Fediverse/Mastodon experience… I found a community there. I would say maybe 30% of the total #TwitterMigration stuck around, but those who did found communities and started adding to the tapestry that is what makes that place special. While I will probably dabble in lots of different networks as they evolve into specific niche cases, my home base is always going to be Gamepad. Sure it meant that I lost a lot of friends through the transition, but I made so many brand new friends… and it isn’t like my path probably won’t cross the folks I missed along the way. It is not like I am terribly hard to find when someone decides to pay me a visit years down the line.
There won’t be a new Twitter, because you just can’t even have back a specific moment in time. For me, the final straw was Elon’s antics. For others, it will be the rate-limiting that started this week. For yet more it will be the fact that they will be losing TweetDeck in roughly 30 days if they don’t pay the $8 per month ransom to keep access. Much like there was never another World of Warcraft, because no other game really captured the moment that crafted that game… there will never be another Twitter. There will be larger communities and smaller communities… but there will be no one place where everyone has to be. I know personally… I am looking to move away from as many corporate services as I can and begin hosting my own infrastructure where possible. This blog has been around for almost fifteen years at this point, and has migrated between multiple providers… and because I own it… I know it will keep existing as my landmark on the internet for as long as I need it.
I’ve gone so far as to host my own Linktree because I did not like being beholden to that service. Sure it took a modicum of effort for me to configure Link Stack on my web host, but once done I now have a permanent way to keep my various links up to date and give someone a simple link to find pretty much everything I do. At some point… I probably want to go down the path of migrating away from Gmail. It isn’t like Google is known for keeping things around for long… so I figure at some point in the not-so-distant future the axe will come for it as well. Moving away from Twitter was more of an evolution than I realized it would be. I want to own my place on the internet, or at least trust the people who run the resources I am consuming. However… this will not be something that everyone is even interested in doing and as a result, someone will need to keep maintaining the “AOL” for those users.
I think the volume of what is available on Twitter will likely land in three different places. There will be about a third of people who do eventually migrate over to the fediverse in one form or another, even if it is corporate variants like the ActivityPub federation that Tumblr is looking at. Then there will be folks who stay loyal to Blue Sky and keep betting on Jack to make things right again out of some sense of misplaced trust that he can build a new Twitter. There will be another third that land on whatever the Meta offering ends up looking like because they are already comfortable with Instagram or Facebook and just want a turnkey solution that asks absolutely nothing of them and could not give a fuck about what that might mean for their data in the long run. The monoculture of Twitter, if there ever was such a thing… will cease to exist. Elon has done irreparable harm, and all that is left is for folks to wake up and realize that particular party is over.
There will be no new Twitter because that era is over.
[UPDATE – 14:00 CDT]
When I wrote this post earlier in the day… I was apparently super dense. I knew that Meta had been working on what is effectively their own Mastodon Client (technically just interops with ActivityPub), but I had no clue it was launching this fast. Threads is essentially a corporate storefront on the Fediverse. It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out.
