[Air-L] Twitter Revisited - Briefly

[Robert W Gehl]

Thanks for this, Stu. On the flipside, for any of you considering 
Mastodon: things are finally calm, at least in my corner of it. Just 
last week my timeline was erupting -- new follows, people asking 
questions, people sharing advice to folks fleeing Twitter. I was hearing 
from admins that they were overloaded, doing 12 hour days of onboarding 
new people, blocking trolls, and investigating how to expand the 
capacity of their servers. Last week, I was hearing from new members who 
were having trouble finding each other.

This week, most of the new instances have spun up, old ones have 
expanded capacity, and more importantly, new moderators are being hired 
-- yes, hired, with money -- to deal with reports of harassment and 
trolling. New members have found their friends, and I imagine they are 
starting to make new ones. Developers have shared blocklists to keep the 
spammy or "freeze peach" instances at bay. People have a better 
understanding of things like CWs and silencing. Longstanding BIPOC 
members are explaining (unfortunately, as they have many times before) 
how to recognize microaggressions and either deal with them, or, for 
non-BIPOC members, how not to commit them. For better or worse, 
celebrities are setting up accounts.

It's not a Twitter replacement, nor does it promise to be, but it could 
be a place for folks to be social online in new and gratifying ways.

- Rob

On 11/18/22 07:16, Shulman, Stu via Air-L wrote:
> I just got home from a canceled Twitter developers conference. I was given
> some advice about where to get a beer near Twitter and here is a brief
> report. The Beer Garden, 1 Polk St. SF, is a place you can go to get really
> excellent beer and bump into some of the remaining Twitter personnel.
> Yesterday, they were processing the whole 5 PM deadline to check the box
> for yes on "extreme" working conditions. Conversations were animated at 6
> PM. The streams of Tweets bidding farewell by Tweeps after six to ten years
> of work were rebounding through phones and animated conversations. Now the
> building is in another lockdown, critical infrastructure posts formerly
> staffed by large teams have two, one, or zero engineers in place. Trust &
> Safety and content moderation teams are crippled and probably beyond short
> term repair. Despite all that, I was told that an academic got a quick turn
> around an application for academic credentials, so I'm not sure what to
> expect in the days ahead. Part of me wants and expects the bird to crash.
> The other part loves Twitter.
>
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