Elon Musk completes Twitter takeover, Nextcloud to ship their own social network app

One of Joe Biden's many whoppers has already been flagged with an "additional context" notice. That would have never happened under the previous leadership.

I'm pretty sure our news sources fact checking our presidents has been a thing since at least the late 18th century.

First, Twitter isn't a news organization. And second, this is, to my knowledge, the first time Twitter has "fact checked" Joe Biden despite his many, many questionable statements.

I agree that Biden makes many questionable statements. Biden usually lies the way politicians always used to lie in the old days--by omission, by half-truth, by implication. And there isn't that much a fact-checker can say about that kind of thing.

There is a contrast here with Trump, who just lies constantly by simply saying the flat out opposite of reality--simple downright factual lies. Indeed, often things that are the opposite of other things he also said. Many Republican figures seem to have decided to emulate him. It's a very different style (and volume) of falsehood. But it's also something fact-checkers can readily check: These people are claiming things are facts which are totally not facts.

(Biden does sometimes outright lie, but it's usually something the media has already popularized, the kind of lie you can't question without being unpatriotic, like "The United States has the best (X) on earth" or "US intentions in 'international leadership' are benevolent" or such like)

Yeah, I don't really buy your rationalization that old Joe is somehow a more virtuous liar than Trump.

Clearly, you're capable of buying or not buying whatever you want.

But it's also pretty clear that for sheer volume and ready verifiability of lies, Trump is way ahead of any politician in American history, if only due to social media making it easy to say far more stuff to the public. There's an odd genius in it--Trump realized that in the age of Twitter, he no longer needs to even pretend to tell the truth--that rather than say what he thinks people want to hear within the constraints of some degree of realism, he can just say absolutely whatever he thinks people want to hear, no matter how completely and obviously false and even ridiculous, and even if it both can be and is quickly fact-checked and rebutted, even if anyone who just thinks for ten seconds would know half of it can't be true, none of that matters as long as people want it to be true and some substantial online community will repeat it, creating a resource that those who want to be fooled can go to for their "truth". This lets him pander to people far more completely, spinning whatever fantasy they need, even multiple contradictory fantasies, so there's a big upside.

Given the many channels available to him to pump these fantasies up, the downside prospect of conventional media checking his facts and calling him a liar becomes less important . . . and less important still since American conventional media first created a fairly explicitly Republican wing (notably talk radio, then Fox news) which led to a polarization where nearly all American media is now either Republican or Democrat, neither willing to fact check their own side. Truth was much more important in the Walter Cronkite era, when either party could expect to be excoriated if they got too obviously far from reality in their claims.

Biden, and the Democrats in general, are not so much more honest as more traditionalist.

Right, Joe is a "traditional" liar, so that makes it okay. 🤣

So, uhh getting back to the topic at hand...

How do you guys using Mastodon feel about it? Likes? Dislikes?

I'm very torn about having social media (I don't really have/maintain any), but I looked around Matadon a bit. It seems interesting, but navigating is a little confusing for me. It seems like a chunk of what I saw was, umm headlines? Like people just yelling things into the void but not a lot of discussion? Or maybe I couldn't see the conversations as I wasn't logged in?

I feel more biased toward Discord at the moment. I get they are different, but as a chat room, for some reason, it feels more, I dunno, real?

Thoughts?

One of Joe Biden's many whoppers has already been flagged with an "additional context" notice. That would have never happened under the previous leadership.

I'm pretty sure our news sources fact checking our presidents has been a thing since at least the late 18th century.

First, Twitter isn't a news organization. And second, this is, to my knowledge, the first time Twitter has "fact checked" Joe Biden despite his many, many questionable statements.

I agree that Biden makes many questionable statements. Biden usually lies the way politicians always used to lie in the old days--by omission, by half-truth, by implication. And there isn't that much a fact-checker can say about that kind of thing.

There is a contrast here with Trump, who just lies constantly by simply saying the flat out opposite of reality--simple downright factual lies. Indeed, often things that are the opposite of other things he also said. Many Republican figures seem to have decided to emulate him. It's a very different style (and volume) of falsehood. But it's also something fact-checkers can readily check: These people are claiming things are facts which are totally not facts.

(Biden does sometimes outright lie, but it's usually something the media has already popularized, the kind of lie you can't question without being unpatriotic, like "The United States has the best (X) on earth" or "US intentions in 'international leadership' are benevolent" or such like)

Yeah, I don't really buy your rationalization that old Joe is somehow a more virtuous liar than Trump.

Clearly, you're capable of buying or not buying whatever you want.

But it's also pretty clear that for sheer volume and ready verifiability of lies, Trump is way ahead of any politician in American history, if only due to social media making it easy to say far more stuff to the public. There's an odd genius in it--Trump realized that in the age of Twitter, he no longer needs to even pretend to tell the truth--that rather than say what he thinks people want to hear within the constraints of some degree of realism, he can just say absolutely whatever he thinks people want to hear, no matter how completely and obviously false and even ridiculous, and even if it both can be and is quickly fact-checked and rebutted, even if anyone who just thinks for ten seconds would know half of it can't be true, none of that matters as long as people want it to be true and some substantial online community will repeat it, creating a resource that those who want to be fooled can go to for their "truth". This lets him pander to people far more completely, spinning whatever fantasy they need, even multiple contradictory fantasies, so there's a big upside.

Given the many channels available to him to pump these fantasies up, the downside prospect of conventional media checking his facts and calling him a liar becomes less important . . . and less important still since American conventional media first created a fairly explicitly Republican wing (notably talk radio, then Fox news) which led to a polarization where nearly all American media is now either Republican or Democrat, neither willing to fact check their own side. Truth was much more important in the Walter Cronkite era, when either party could expect to be excoriated if they got too obviously far from reality in their claims.

Biden, and the Democrats in general, are not so much more honest as more traditionalist.

Right, Joe is a "traditional" liar, so that makes it okay. 🤣

I don't believe I actually said that.

So, uhh getting back to the topic at hand...

How do you guys using Mastodon feel about it? Likes? Dislikes?

I'm very torn about having social media (I don't really have/maintain any), but I looked around Matadon a bit. It seems interesting, but navigating is a little confusing for me. It seems like a chunk of what I saw was, umm headlines? Like people just yelling things into the void but not a lot of discussion? Or maybe I couldn't see the conversations as I wasn't logged in?

I feel more biased toward Discord at the moment. I get they are different, but as a chat room, for some reason, it feels more, I dunno, real?

Thoughts?

I've been on Mastodon for years, and it's a very comfortable place. A lot more low-key than Twitter, a lot less interaction with brands and celebrities (although Liam and Cheeseness are there, so maybe there is star power!). However, I find that the amount and quality of interactions is much, much higher. There was a post the other day by the curator of the Mastodon dot Art instance where they explain that they have more engagement, and more sales, off Mastodon than Twitter, Facebook and Instagram combined, even with a much lower follower count.

There really are a lot of interesting people, although it may take some digging to find the ones you're interested in.

NextCloud Social is an unfortunate name.

So, uhh getting back to the topic at hand...

How do you guys using Mastodon feel about it? Likes? Dislikes?

I'm very torn about having social media (I don't really have/maintain any), but I looked around Matadon a bit. It seems interesting, but navigating is a little confusing for me. It seems like a chunk of what I saw was, umm headlines? Like people just yelling things into the void but not a lot of discussion? Or maybe I couldn't see the conversations as I wasn't logged in?

I feel more biased toward Discord at the moment. I get they are different, but as a chat room, for some reason, it feels more, I dunno, real?

Thoughts?

I haven't really used Mastodon either, but most of the projects I follow are on Discord. Though I suppose that is the difference? Mastodon is more like twitter where people just post 'thoughts' so to speak and Discord has discussions about projects / products? Seems like different use cases.


Last edited by slaapliedje on 8 November 2022 at 3:51 pm UTC

Nextcloud is cool, but for people with scarce time, or zero knowledge, or too lazy, etc, they should offer a subscription as a service model (similar to what thegood.cloud does, but with full on functionality for emails, photo AI for organising them, etc). Otherwise, their market share will be still in the niche.

https://github.com/nextcloud/providers

It is a very deliberate decision to separate the business of running the cloud from the development. And I am very sceptical about the feature creep of my beloved Nextcloud. First it became NC Hub with videoconf and groupware and all, now social media. I hope the core functionality does not get neglected, otherwise it's home-made extend before extinguish

The rich class now has 100% control of the biggest discussion platform ever. Disgusting

What changed? Were the previous owners of twitter middle class? What discussion platform or media has ever not been owned by rich people? Already in ancient Athens, democracy was for the 10% wealthy people with citizenship.

I should've said that better. I mean it is owned 100% by the richest guy in the world