I'm pretty sure far more Japanese illustrators have flocked to Misskey instances, like Misskey.io, actually. I've even seen Crepu come up. Weibo? Not once.
Misskey.io has been suffering from downtime and struggling amidst it's massive growth in users. It's now one of the largest instances in the Fediverse I believe.
Yep, far more japanese illustrators are on misskey or pawoo (a mastodon server), in part because pixiv - a popular japanese image hosting site - used to run pawoo and has some integration with it.
Nowadays misskey.io may be gaining some more popularity than pawoo, in part due to the interface and in part because pawoo is a bit of a mess in terms of moderation, lots of creeps there openly expressing their illegal sexual interests.
Part of Pawoo's problem is that it has been defederated and blacklisted a lot because of the early prevalence of lolicon and shotacon content on it: I'm pretty sure Pawoo was originally the reason why Mastodon added the ability to block media proxying to a given instance. Misskey for some reason hasn't really experienced as much backlash despite as far as I know having similarly relaxed content restrictions.
I don't really know exactly what makes Misskey more popular now: I doubt Japanese users are that concerned about the content moderation on Pawoo, though I could be wrong. It may help that Misskey was developed by a Japanese developer and is prevalently Japanese-first.
Misskey does have some neat features, though personally I find the interface to be dizzying and very busy.
I'm not referring to lolicon or shotacon, most of fedi has a chip on their shoulder even about much less controversial things (see: preemptively defederating threads.net) while it's far less of an issue in japanese artist communities - pixiv for example, gets by fine with it as long as it follows japanese laws.
I'm referring to creeps announcing in their bios that they're into real children (with them emphasizing the "real" part) and talking about what they want to do with them.
My japanese isn't good enough to tell if the situation with that sort of thing is bad on Misskey.io, but with Pawoo I think it gained enough of a reputation for it that there are a lot of english speaking creeps like that there.
Sorry, I understood what you meant. I was trying to say something a bit more subtle, which is to say, I think the reason why Pawoo has lost relevance over time is partly because of the fact that it got defederated a lot early on, and this has probably caused a bit of a downward spiral, broken window theory style. It discourages some legitimate usage of the platform, which inherently increases the ratio of unwanted usage to legitimate usage, which discourages legitimate usage further.
There are other things, too. Pawoo is still somewhat integrated with Pixiv, but I believe they sold it to Russel in 2018 or so (can't recall) off the news of new Japanese regulation regarding social media that they did not want to be involved in. This seemed to be a huge blow as well.
Then there's the fact that for Japanese sites, moderating English-language comments is very hard. The rules and moderation standards would ideally be kept consistent between languages, but this requires somehow both good communication with moderators and also moderators that speak fluent English. I doubt there is much proactive moderation of English content on Pixiv/Pawoo/Misskey/etc., and the majority of it is probably mostly ignored by Japanese users of the platform anyway. It's not like Twitter isn't full of a lot of the same stuff, especially since Twitter suspensions are treated as a joke or at worst annoyance by the majority of the userbase. (And honestly, it is also unclear to me that Japanese users would overwhelmingly be in favor of moderating text comments that express illicit interests anyway, so as long as the text itself isn't somehow illicit. This could be a blatant mischaracterization but they seem to err on the side of less restrictions to speech in general when it's in the gray area.)
This reads like an advertisement copy, either by their parent company Sina or by CCP (which I guess doesn't really matter). No, I don't know any illustrators migrate to Weibo BECAUSE OF the recent Twitter troubles. The whole Japanese community is still quite reliant on Twitter, and Weibo is a completely different beast.
There are indeed some Japanese illustrator getting an Weibo account because:
1) They want to tackle the Chinese market and serve Chinese fans. Getting an Weibo account is a pretty legitimate way to do this, but I don't see they abandoning their original Twitter, Pawoo, Pixiv things; that doesn't make sense. Also... the Chinese market is quite sensitive. Once someone—anyone—finds out something you drew several years ago can remotely be interpreted as insulting China[1], or someone doesn't like what you're doing today in Japan and interprets that as insulting China[2], you're done there.
2) Pirate account opened by Chinese fans, used for storing unlicensed contents of the original illustrators. Although this seems to be against Chinese laws, in practice, the original author/illustrator can't do anything about it.
[1] The most famous example must be Winnie the Pooh...
This actually is happening, though the scale at which this is happening is unclear(read: very well could be overblown and actually trivial).
What is alarming, at least to me, is that the motive of users jumping is better freedom of speech offered in Weibo compared to Facebook/Instagram or Twitter - users are fleeing into the last communist regime on Earth, for FREEDOM! There is something completely wrong about current Web.
This article reads like an opportunistic advertisement for Weibo, using the Twitter turmoil to say "Come to Weibo and you'll get more followers and also money maybe?". As another user commented, "Sixth Tone" is a state-owned English language media outlet. It reminds me of TikTok where people would join and suddenly 'go viral' with tons of views. Real or not, that mechanism acts to hook new users.
On a side note, I've never been able to access content on Weibo at all (including those mentioned in the article). Links go to some looping Sina Visitor System.
The person mentioned in the article, comori22, is still on Twitter and is not a professional illustrator. The Chinese are only interested in the derivative works of famous IPs that he draws, and he himself is not well-known at all.
In my experience (Japanese, only have local phone numbers), registering Weibo was really difficult (maybe in 2022 IIRC). They refused registering by error for unknown "security" reason on website and mobile app. It's same for other Chinese services like WeChat. I don't see many Japanese moving for them.
I’ve been on Twitter for 16 years now. I’m not a fan of Elon, but I have to admit my experience on the platform is better than it has been in years.
For example, muted terms stay muted and the “For you” TL is actually relevant. I think these gains are structural improvements gained by slimming down and removing advertiser-driven garbage.
Seems pretty good for a first step but the core problems moderation and curation remain. I’m not sure I see a good path forward on these points given the current posture of the company. That’s probably why exodus events like this one will continue to build over time.
All of the bluecheckmark replies that get sorted to the top of every post are a form of "advertiser" driven garbage. Those garbage tweets are being put in front of you because someone paid $8 /month for it.
It's such a funny way to destroy your own business; I mostly follow somewhat niche military / geopolitical discussion, and the top ~10 replies are usually from OnlyFans creators jumping in with...whatever, the content of the Tweets is clearly not their point. I still find it funny enough to not care but it is a comically bad experience.
> I mostly follow somewhat niche military / geopolitical discussion, and the top ~10 replies are usually from OnlyFans creators jumping in with...whatever, the content of the Tweets is clearly not their point
Is it OF people replying specifically to military/geopolitical threads (and if so, in ways that at least act relevant or just off-topic spamming?), or is it just their posts getting shoved to the top of the feed because they paid?
They respond with relevant (if naive) content; I'm not sure if it's GPT-4 or genuine opinions and comments.
Even in the improbable non-spam explanation that they are sincerely interested and responding to the content, it is hilarious how they are consistently the featured content in an area that they clearly have no expertise in.
The threads, in order, are typically like:
- post by professional military analyst with 30 years of experience
- 10 replies by OF creators that pay for Blue
- 100 replies by other analysts and military hobbyists that didn't pay for Blue
I can't agree: Twitter was never great but now it's a complete mess. The ads are worse than they've ever been— almost always some "As Seen on TV"-tier of plastic garbage or dumb crypto scams, features are breaking left and right (DMs aren't getting delivered, and notifications are sporadic at best) and the people paying to be at the top of my replies are inevitably the most insipid shitheads the web can produce. While I dislike "Block the Blue" on philosophical grounds, the fact is it's the only way to keep the site barely usable.
Even though Elon may not have had typical private equity goals in mind when buying Twitter, it does feel like a classic PE purchase where it has already been decided that the target is not worth investing in, and the new game is to wring as much value as possible from its walking corpse before tossing it in the trash.
Almost every 2 days I get put into a spam "BTC giveaway" promoted with the face of Elon and I guess that says a lot about the level of disrepair of the site
No, my experience has been pretty much the worse of my time on that platform (a bit less than your period) including tweets that I follow only showing on the 'For You' tabs (because the site is obviously overloaded)
The ads have gotten bad, that’s for sure. But then again, they have on every platform. Apple (and by extension GDPR) won the privacy wars, but the cost is that only the worst advertisers live on.
Because aside from large brands executing eyeball campaigns most DTC companies are gone from the ecosystem. Loss of tracking data killed the ROI and all that’s left are casinos and absolute bullshit.
I feel the exact opposite and have been a Twitter user for about as long, starting when it was SMS-based.
Most posts I see now are flooded with replies from Only Fans girls. There are constantly tweets in my feed from guys I don't follow with greek or roman statue profile pics, posting about how western civilisation is in decline with 20-photo threads of European architecture or other really silly examples. Half of the promoted tweets I see (a significant portion of my feed now) are for "10 ways you need to us AI or be left behind!" or similar.
It's really low signal to noise for me, but I guess if you're looking for listicles on why western culture has been ruined by "cultural marxism" it's never been a better time to be on Twitter.
> There are constantly tweets in my feed from guys I don't follow with greek or roman statue profile pics, posting about how western civilisation is in decline
I've noticed that and I wonder what their agenda is. To radicalize western men?
I think that’s probably overthinking it. I think most of these accounts are just chasing engagement, and they’ve figured out a solid formula: post something really stupid (the tweets by statue PFPs inevitably contain basic factual mistakes), get QRT’d by people dunking on how stupid it was, boom: instant viral spread and engagement. It’s the utterly standard griefer playbook that’s been on forums since the internet began, just with new contemporary culture war material.
Fwiw, I found that zero engagement led to a really bad experience. As soon as I began contributing content on a couple of specific topics, the TL skewed hard towards things I actually liked.
Every single day on my Twitter TL is someone having account issues, recreating or locked or hacked or combinations of. My DMs are full of "he|p us in sqam dropshiqqing sceme" messages. That state of affairs is not what I expect of a working platform.
I've used Twitter for a while also. I'm more neutral on the changes. Twitter feels a bit more fresh, but the For You page for me feels more like the Trump Election style FB algo where most posts are either:
1. Edgy flame bait hot takes on an issue that will get people worked up
2. Someone saying something slightly wrong because they'll get more comments from people rushing to correct them
3. Professional quote-tweeters who will post a maybe witty take on #1 or #2
(maybe this is 99% of social media in general?)
There's still some alpha in the posts and I love the random accounts which drop info and niche insights faster than you can find anywhere else.
Outside of that, it feels more like I'm wasting time on nonsense. I'm not much of a fan of the alternatives, though and mainly use them to track a few people who moved off of Twitter.
Interesting. My flame bait noise has dropped to near zero, but then my engagement also ticked up (more posting). I have a sense that this activity may have moved the needle a bit too.
Sixth Tone is a state-owned English-language online magazine published by Shanghai United Media Group.
...
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian of Foreign Policy stated that Sixth Tone has a less staid and "saccharine" tone compared to many other English-language publications from China. She stated, "If webby U.S. media startup Vox were acquired by the Chinese Communist Party, it might resemble Sixth Tone".
If the owner of a news site has a stake or likely interest in inflating the importance of a specific platform, would you trust that their reporting is entirely accurate? The story looks legitimate, but as others have pointed out, maybe there was a bigger migration to other platforms? All I can say is that if The Times owned entirely or in part something they reported on, I would not mind having this at least mentioned in the comments as a form of public disclosure.
Went digging a bit, and there seem to be at least some state ownership of Weibo through the China Internet Investment Fund [1]. Corporate structure and ownership in the PRC is far outside my area of expertise though.
If the facts are accurate and these identified people did in fact migrate to Weibo, does it matter?
> maybe there was a bigger migration to other platforms?
The article isn't at any point making the claim that all users are moving to Weibo.
It specifically mentions an identifiable set of artists, and then speaks about their experiences having migrated.
That's it
Are you claiming those facts or the reporting around them are in some way inaccurate?
Frankly, you seem to be looking for controversy where there is none. I'm as concerned about the behaviour of the CCP as anyone (and as an aside, the total disappearance of the Uighur story in the media is extremely concerning to me) but there's a point where it starts to veer into sinophobia.
> Frankly, you seem to be looking for controversy where there is none. […] there's a point where it starts to veer into sinophobia.
If that is the level of conversation you seek, I will stay out of your conversations. I was happy to learn something about state-owned news outlets, thought the article was perhaps overstating things a bit by using “flocking” for ~20 illustrators, and also found the overall tone of the article to be oddly celebrant as opposed to factual. Make of that what you will and I will try stay clear of you from now on.
It is like twitter doesn't even want you to read and follow along people's tweets anymore, barring access, moving things out of order...
Twitter went from free rss feeds available for every microblog(twitter account) to paywalling access if you'd like to see whats new at a glance on several microblogs at once.
Fediverse's mastadon and tootdeck have no problem with allowing to browse and follow along multiple people's accounts and many fediverse instances have rss feeds as well, they have been doing it right for years.
The new tweetdeck is an inferior experience with even more frontend bloat, the old tweetdeck even worked on old and lightweight browers.
I pretty much haven't visited twitter once since the rate limits, and unless access to tweets change drastically, probably will never come back. While I'm using rssbridges as a stopgap, I'll be migrating to other ways to follow people's work where ever possible. It was nice seeing progress and updates on twitter, and I am hoping more people will move to other methods to post statuses.
I used to use Tweetbot as the official client is and continues to be a dumpster fire.
I then switched to Ivory and it is very much like having twitter of old back - a single chronological feed of people I follow without the involvement of any algorithms. I know that the federated bits are there, but they have very little obvious impact on my experience.
I've been trying to use Mastodon more, but the fact is it just doesn't have the same kind of traffic that twitter does. It seems to get dominated by earnest, long-form threads... which are nice, but the chaos of twitter was one of its selling points and their absence is loud.
If you look at your "federated" feed on most instances it definitely resembles some of the chaotic nature with posts from the entire network.
I thing only killer feature is a more controlled way to feed actually active posts into my home feed. Instances already have enough information to do this, it's just a matter of figuring out a good scheme for it.
For someone who is not caught up with the timeline of things, can someone explain why this is happening and was there anything recent that Elon or Twitter did that triggered this?
Pretty much. It was rather shocking to me that Twitter was so thoroughly broken by rate-limits and the login gate that it was easier to get updates about Twitter on Mastodon than on Twitter itself.
I was on holidays that week and I didn't even noticed the drama. Is Twitter then doing just fine?
Looks like Twitter is just easy to bash nowadays, I'm not that a big user but I see, especially in the OSS / computer related profiles a lot of people putting their Mastodon address in the nickname and yet still tweeting, retweeting, liking in the same compulsory manner as they did before.
I was also never that big of a Twitter user, and it's my observation that my former Twitter-using acquaintances bemoan that Twitter's use as a social space has pretty much died. They still use it, but only as a glorified RSS feed.
Most of them don't like Mastodon either due to not liking defederation drama, but instead they moved their socializing to Discord and Instagram, with a few chomping at the bit to get into BlueSky.
For what it's worth, this is a trend I observed long before Twitter introduced rate-limiting and the login gate, it just made it much worse. Ironically, clicking through on Twitter links other people posted was the one use case I ever visited the site for, and now that that doesn't work I simply rely on the vxtwitter summary or a screenshot.
I'm on Mastodon (et al) and I did often go back to Twitter to check on things.
But now they blocked checking things when not logged in, inertia has set in and I cannot even bothered to make the effort and don't feel like I've lost anything. Even for those accounts I followed.
I just think of paid blue checks spouting off nonsense while paying to do so and think to myself: "No ... that's not the bullshit I want to consume. I preferred the relatively democratic bullshit from before"
... and then I think: "Let's just cut the bullshit"
I think that bullshitting is just part of human nature (or at least of the current global society/ies). You just need a critical mass to see it properly. When a community/social network is small, it's either bullshit free or completely full of bullshit. When it's big enough, the bullshit quantity will converge regardless the initial value.
To what should I answer? To what people you know do on Twitter? I stand by my opinion: the platform doesn't have a word in the bullshitting level, unless it strictly moderates the content in a way that would be basically dictatorial.
Whatever idea of free speech that you have in your head, Twitter is not helping, as the site still regularly engages in "censorship" in every sense that the old ownership did.
The Biden administration colluded with social media and traditional media platforms to censor anything they branded misinformation. In practice this was anything damaging to their official narratives. This is not about revenge porn.
Maybe for you, but for many of us it’s almost as if it was just released. A censored platform was of little use, but now you can see all kinds of ideas there. I know I use it more now.
What censorship was bothering you? The censorship against transphobia? Because that's the only thing I'm seeing censored less. Other forms of bigotry are still getting accounts locked, and we're far enough from 2020 now that nobody really seems to be bothering with election denial anymore.
Meanwhile, besides its stability issues, there's the new problem that the top replies to every popular tweet are... well, pretty awful, because they're chosen by blue-check instead of popularity. That's a huge downturn in reading enjoyment.
I don’t like any censorship, but COVID as a topic was bonkers while it was all propaganda. The problem with a platform you know is censored is that you can never know what is missing - that’s the nature of censorship.
Adam Schiff putting his fingers on the scale is something I’m not interested in either.
As far as I know, only COVID misinformation was filtered out on Twitter. The GOP is suing on the basis that they went too far, but the GOP has not been acting in good faith in years.
You've replied to this, but not to anyone mentioning that the platform is still censored, just in new and silly ways (e.g. the Tesla critic who got shafted). Perhaps we're skewed ... you're just skewed in a different way. It's useful to recognise this.
The only mentions in my replies about current censorship are about a petty beef between Elon and some Tesla critics and one about Elon not wanting cis used on the platform. I'm not a fan of Elon and I wouldn't have done either of these things, but their impact seems inconsequential compared to the number of people affected by censoring a topic like COVID. Seems more like evidence of a spoiled rich baby used to getting his way behaving exactly like I'd expect him to, which I don't think is nearly as threatening as the previous pattern of elected government officials spanning multiple administrations and parties and an entire department of people at Twitter working together (standing meetings!) to spin a yarn for us plebes. Maybe this is the skew you speak of - I tend to judge things from a utilitarian perspective of how many people are impacted.
An interesting thought, considering the barometer which Musk used to measure his commitment to free speech, shows he is not committed to free speech, and "censorship" is still rampant. Literally, using Musk as the context here, Twitter is literally more censored now than it was before.
When the Japanese user base goes down 20% it won't be news anymore.
I also find it interesting that they are turning to Weibo, as this was a pending question. A lot of other mainstream artists started or repromoted their official Instagram account (I don't think there's serious surveys out there. Out of the 100+ I follow about half had comments on thinking of it as a backup plan), but for the artists that don't match Meta's rules the only other obvious choice was mastodon, and in Japan they already got burned a first time with Pawoo and the earlier mastodon boom.
Just like 7 months ago, Twitter's network effect was constantly tested and many alternatives have tried to challenge it, but instead its users will still run back to using Twitter again, especially accounts with lots of followers.
This alleged 'exodus' will be no different.
Even if Twitter goes down, it's users would rather wait for it to get back up than to 'leave' Twitter for something worse. The same is also true with Instagram.
Centralized platforms are much stickier with user retention. Significantly smaller sized or federated networks? Not so much. Which is why you always see an initial spike but retention always drops sharply.
"Just like 7 months ago, Twitter's network effect was constantly tested and many alternatives have tried to challenge it, but instead its users will still run back to using Twitter again, especially accounts with lots of followers."
Twitter is dramatically less relevant today than it was 7 months ago. Musk can post made-up stats claiming the most engagement ever [1], but across multiple industries the importance of Twitter has completely collapsed. In many cases it isn't being replaced by anything similar.
You are absolutely correct that there is a huge amount of stickiness. That's why Elon paid $44B for it. It would take some catastrophic mismanagement to truly kill the site, and Elon seems to be committed to doing that.
[1] Which will be intermixed with complaints about the bot problem, DDOS crawling, etc.
> In many cases it isn't being replaced by anything similar.
Which is more or less what you'd expect; that's what normally happens to dying social networks. Most people leaving LiveJournal didn't go to Dreamwidth or similar (ie Livejournal clones); they went to Twitter or Tumblr or other not particularly LiveJournal-like things. I think it's actually fairly plausible now that Threads acts as a drop-in replacement for Twitter, but it's also plausible that it's Twitter's Dreamwidth, and most users go to different sorts of social networks entirely.
You know, I don't want to agree with you but I don't think you're wrong either. I personally saw a couple of more notable Twitter personalities briefly engage with Mastodon back during the November wave, then go back to Twitter only to reappear during the latest drama. The lure of follower counts is strong.
They created an account on a social networking site called plurk in Taiwan a few years ago because they were upset that Twitter's terms had changed and they would no longer be able to post pornographic illustrations, but in the end they clung to Twitter because there was no guilt to be attached to them, and this time will be no different.
This is like groundhog day on HN of 5yrs+ ago when everyone said FB was going to die because some programmers and millennial were closing their accounts over the poor state of the site/privacy concerns/Zuck hate.
Most of the people talking about Mastodon and other alternatives tweeting always seem to keep tweeting though. At least when I deleted my FB account I never went back. I didn't stick around to post on FB about how much I hated FB.
I still use Facebook for the family connections and the pet cat/dog/rabbit accounts I follow, but I'm essentially done with Twitter now. I was already not posting there basically at all, and the rate limiting means I won't be reading it, either. Threads couldn't be released at a better time for Meta.
Misskey.io has been suffering from downtime and struggling amidst it's massive growth in users. It's now one of the largest instances in the Fediverse I believe.