I remember waiting a month at a time hoping to see a hint for whatever game I was stuck on, only for it not to be featured - or perhaps even worse; to see a hint for that very game but one I’d already figured out myself! Urgh! Gaming in the 80s / 90s was a challenging affair!

This article also skips over the other option we had back then - premium rate phone numbers that…slowly… read …out …some …barely …relevant …facts …about …the … game …at …£1 …a …minute …with …maybe …the …hint …you …wanted …after …costing …your …parents …a …£12 …phonebill.

Well there’s one obvious answer to all these - the dead awoke and left the graveyard en-masse. I’ve seen that happen in films.

Sweet Emotion - Aerosmith. Get some of those Dazed & Confused vibes.

All the advances in toothcare seems to be around fancier electric brushes or other gadgets, but regardless we’ve never been able to move away from ‘brush for 2 minutes’. I want some fancy device I just bite down on and it zaps my whole mouth clean in 5 seconds.

No, you get automatically issues them. About 1 invite every 2 weeks once you’ve been on there for a few weeks.

Interesting. I might give it a go, thanks.

Yeah I know, but it’s such an ‘all or nothing’ approach. I don’t dislike the idea of boosting. I like to be exposed to other people’s content. I just wish it wasn’t so constant. Kind of feels like people do 1 post of their own and then 10 boosts.

I have both but drifted away from Mastodon. It seems to lack the anarchic wild humour I want. Plus the culture of excessive boosting was too much and just meant my timeline was full of posts from people I don’t follow because they’d been boosted by the people I do follow. I follow folks because I want to hear what they have to say, not what the people they follow have to say.

Also all the servers had too strict rules. Having to post content-warnings if you mention food or other innocuous stuff.

I far prefer Bluesky. It’s a lot more liberal and far more more chill. Plus there’s lots of nonsense that keeps things fun. The feeds are a great way to find new people (you don’t need to beg for followers, just find people you dig and things will grow organically anyway). It takes the good things about Mastodon (decentralisation and open) and the parts of Twitter that were fun (people over brands, weird humour). I hope it keeps growing and opens up to more people, but I don’t mind it taking its time while it stabilises and adds features.

After reading the Jon Ronson book “So you’ve been publicly shamed” where he interviewed a load of people that were outed for both bigger and smaller ‘crimes’, no, I don’t agree with it. Doxxing and other public shaming can have consequences you could not expect.

Plus, what if you get the ID wrong and dox someone innocent? That happens all the time too.

Rocky. Because it’s a Roborock and we’re unimaginative.

I honestly doubt he’ll do something this stupid - spend a year making everyone hate a service they used to like and then charge them to use it.

But then again I didn’t think he’d rename Twitter to X, so who knows what that boner will do.

I swapped over to https://www.themoviedb.org years ago and have never looked back.

It was invite-only for quite a long time, if memory serves.

Early numbers aren’t everything.

How would they know that because you mentioned a thing, that it means you’re then worth targeting a ad for? “I wish i could find my fork”, or “I saw someone eating a Mars Bar” or “My mate Phil just got the new Lego Batmobile” or all sorts of conversations that just mention a product in passing. What, do they have a secret set of phrases that they’re listening out for that is linked to an intent to want to buy it?

It’s just so far-fetched that I’m baffled that people truly believe this is actually happening.

Just because technically something might be possible, doesn’t mean that there’s actually a valid reason for anyone to actually do it. What is actually in it for Google to do this? Their regular, not unethical or illegal advertising processes already work so spectacularly well that they’ve killed off entire advertising industries already.

While a tech solution to replace Twitter is possible, the tech is only about 5% of what makes Twitter Twitter - the other 95% is the userbase. Which again counts in Threads favour because they already have a huge Instagram userbase. They could release any old hastily put together system and still get 30m users… Hmm.

Ok, heavily fined then.

Regardless, there are multiple reasons why they wouldn’t / aren’t listening in, and maybe 1 reason they would - to target you with ads? Why would they bother? Hell, my Google Home can’t even understand me when I explicitly talk to it to ask it something. Even if they could listen in to everything, they wouldn’t get any accuracy.

People just find it a fun conspiracy theory. But if you sit back and think about it for longer then 10 seconds you realise how ludicrously unlikely it is

Yeah, people who believe that Google is listening in to their conversations just to sell ads really don’t understand a) how pointless that is considering how much they already know about you from the stuff you voluntarily give them, and b) why it’s legally not even something they’d consider. If they were doing it and someone discovered proof then the company would be sued out of business. Why would they risk the damage to their rep and finances just to sell ads, when they can already sell ads accurately based on data they’ve legally acquired

And not to mention the amount of storage and processing power it would take to record everyone’s conversations, 24/7.

It’s more different than people expect it do be, I think. So once people have gotten past the ‘what is an instance/ server, how do I actually join Mastodon…’ stuff that puts people off, they’re then in the infrastructure that kind of looks and acts like Twitter but in different ways that you don’t realise until you’ve delved into things. It’s just more barriers really.

There is Bluesky as an alternative, but that’s not ActivityPub, it’s it’s own protocol. Personally I think that’s the best option - it’s open source and decentralised - but I think some people have reservations because Jack Dorsey is / was involved. Plus it’s still on beta so is invite-only for the time being.

Mastodon is very good for following topics. But it’s a pain trying to find and follow people. And even when you do have a good selection of people, the culture there is very Boost-heavy (because that’s how you discover people, not really via search) so your timeline ends up being full of boosted posts written by people you don’t follow, often about things you aren’t interested in.

Yeah, the privacy, tech, scalability etc is great. But it’s not a direct replacement for Twitter. And that’s what a lot of folks are looking for. Which is sadly why Threads will do so well.