The specific social climate I'm referring to is that you could talk with alt right anon e-celebs, scientists, various health and fitness figures, even to some extent irl famous people, all without fear of doxxing/reporting/some other kind of vexatious and unreasonable intervention. That has never been the case ever since. The feel on all the centralized apps is therefore much more segmented and ghettoized. Now some of those sites were conceived as walled gardens, but Twittee originally was wide open by design, and that was its strength, but now even though outwardly the design has not changed, it is for all practical purposes a walled garden. View quoted note →

Social media under the centralized model have been declining since 2017. Taking Twitter as a case study: I do miss the social climate of Twitter from 2013 when I started up until the end of 2016 - it was an "anything goes" situation and that was before the network went through multiple massacres, so intelligent people were still sharing freely. That situation continued in reduced form right up until Covid. During this time was when I mostly developed my philosophy on health and fitness that I still use and which helped me achieve the best condition of my life from ~2019-2022 (to give an example of what it was good for in practical terms). Sadly it has been in steady decline since then and no interventions have been able to arrest the decline. There just isn't the social scene that would enable very good discourses even though such are still possible in much reduced form. On X, your posts will not even surface most of the time, even when you have 1000+ followers. It just isn't set up for discussion; it has become a personality cult app (which arguably was its purpose all along). I take X-Twitter as a case study for a larger trend because it has represented both the best and the worst that the centralized social media model had to offer. I would love to see something similar to the 2010s era, pre censorship Twitter appear, but there is no place that has both the unrestricted speech and the huge network that fits the description. And I don't think there will be one either.

Whereas my gripe about Nostr so far is that you all are mostly averse to conversation. I guess that's what happens when the platform is dominated by shut-in software engineers. Only Dissident Sound (usually) replies because he takes any opportunity to get into philosophical discourses. The rest, you are hit and miss. Of course, so am I - often because I am sometimes browsing when I am in a hurry.

I actually use Bluesky more than X now because it has more organic engagement and is not as manipulated by algorithm. The caveat is that Bluesky is more leftist, but you can also create your own feeds as well and mostly avoid all that. Only the "discover" feed seems to get fed a lot of politicized slop. But it is like old days Twitter in that you are actually interacting with humans, not bots. I would say the thing that made my frustration with X boil over is how artificial ALL the engagement is now.

Oh, and in addition to my reply, women are broke too. I literally had a young girl say "I am broke" in public. Millennials would have never admitted this even if they obviously were. View quoted note →