Elon Musk's management plunged Twitter into chaos: subscribers en masse go to Mastodon

With the advent of paid ticks on Twitter, there was a boom in fake accounts: people began to copy the profiles of celebrities, including the new owner of the social network Elon Musk, and write absurd tweets. The businessman did not understand the humor and took tough measures, reports Highload.

Photo: IStock

What happened

Several tweets have been circulating on the Internet, where a Musk with a blue check mark allegedly calls for urine therapy, and another Musk with a check mark answers him. The situation pleased users and showed the absurdity of the idea with paid checkmarks.

Elon Musk reacted to the situation and introduced a new rule that all Twitter users must follow: you cannot impersonate another without a clear indication of "parody", otherwise you will be banned forever.

“We used to issue a warning before suspension, but now that we are conducting a large-scale review, there will be no warning,” Musk said in a subsequent tweet.

However, he did not abandon the idea of ​​selling checkmarks for a $8 subscription – he simply put it off until the end of the US midterm elections. So fake accounts will not be able to spoil the “karma” of running politicians and promote disinformation for some more time. Then the opening of the "Pandora's box" will still take place.

Fired and sorry

And one more news about Twitter: on Friday, November 4, there was a mass layoff of employees of the social network - almost half of the state, writes Reuters. This affected, in particular, employees of the Department of Trust and Security, who were engaged in censorship.

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However, yesterday, November 6, the company turned to dozens of fired professionals with a request to return to Twitter. As it turned out, some were fired by mistake, others lost their jobs before management realized that their experience might be needed to create new features of the social network.

The tweets from the social network staff say that among the affected teams were teams responsible for communications, content curation, human rights and machine learning ethics, as well as some development and engineering groups.

Alternative

After the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk, some users were looking for alternative platforms, one of which was Mastodon, Said with the BBC.

The social network says it now has over 655 users, with more than 230 of them joining in the last week.

On the surface, Mastodon looks like Twitter—account users write messages (called “toots”) that can be replied to, liked, and shared, and they can follow each other.
But the internal mechanism of the platform works differently.

This is one of the reasons why it attracts new users, but it also creates some confusion for new registered users.

The platform is six years old, but its current activity is unprecedented, and it has faced difficulties due to the massive influx of new members.

Here's a quick guide on how to get your bearings.

Servers

The first thing you need to do when registering is to choose a server. There are many, they are thematic - many of them depend on the country, city or interests - for example, the UK, social networks, technology, games, etc.

It doesn't really matter which one you're on because you'll still be able to follow users on all the others, but it gives you a starter community that will most likely also post questions you're interested in.

Some of the popular ones like the social server and UK are very slow right now due to demand.

Ryan Wilding, server manager for Mastodon.UK through his firm Superior Networks, said he had over 24 new members in 6000 hours and had to temporarily stop signing up.

“I wanted to understand what was going on,” he said. — I launched the server at 22:00 on November 4th in the evening, and the next morning I woke up with a thousand people. I couldn’t even imagine that they would appear in such numbers.”

How to find people?

The server you choose becomes part of your username.

If you're on the same server, you can only search by the person's name, but if they're on a different server, you'll need their full address.

Unlike Twitter, Mastodon will not offer to follow people you might be interested in.

You can also search for what interests you with hashtags.

Why servers?

Mastodon is not just one platform. It is not one “thing” and does not belong to one person or company. All these different servers connect together to form a collective network, but they belong to different people and organizations.

It's called a decentralized platform, and fans of decentralized platforms like them for that very reason - they can't be controlled at the whim of one organization, bought or sold.

However, the downside to this is that you are at the whim of the person or organization that runs your server - if they decide to give it up, you'll lose your account. Mastodon is asking server owners to give their users three months' notice if they decide to shut it down.

You may be interested in: top New York news, stories of our immigrants, and helpful tips about life in the Big Apple - read it all on ForumDaily New York.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is working on a new network called BlueSky, and he said he wants it to be decentralized too.

How is Mastodon moderated?

This is a really tough question. So far, all servers have their own moderation rules, and some do not. Some servers choose not to link to others where there are a lot of bots or where there is a lot of inappropriate content. This means that they will not be visible to users on servers where such content is blocked.

If it is hate speech or illegal content, the server owners can remove it, but this will not necessarily remove it from all servers.

This question will be a big problem if this platform continues to evolve.

There are already reports of people being targeted for hate and homophobic slurs.

Are there ads?

No. There are no ads here, although nothing will stop you from writing a post about your company or product.

Can I use the platform for free?

It depends on which server you are on. Some ask for donations as they are not getting paid, but it is basically a free network.

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