The Books of Bokonon

I am not surprised that the social media app Bluesky is going through some growing pains . A number of smaller alternative platforms to what was once known as Twitter had been in development for a bit, but never had much traction. Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter changed that. A lot of migration from Twitter happened, as you recall, in the aftermath of Musk's purchase of the platform. Bluesky was invitation only at that juncture. Mastodon saw an increase in users practically overnight in late 2022 and into 2023. That platform definitely faced its own growing pains. Scaling up turns out to be really difficult. You need more server space, more moderators, and so on in order to keep the platform from going off the rails.  One good thing about both Mastodon and Bluesky is that by the time I joined each platform, they had their own built-in culture and norms. That set expectations immediately and I think that has made my experience on each platform much better. Both have their plu...

    Pictured above: some useful idiots who have just lost their YouTube channels. Turns out that failing to disclose sponsors to YouTube is a big no-no and will get you banned for the platform. Sucks to be them.   The above images come from Ukraine Journal, a Telegram news channel that I trust. Here are the links if you use Telegram. And if not, no worries. Maybe subscribe to news channels on Telegram so you don't have to. The last link has this caption: Tayler Hansen, one of the MAGA influencers who (knowingly or unknowingly) was accepting money from the Russians to promote Russian propaganda and help Trump win stated that YouTube has deleted his channel and banned him for life. It is a violation of YouTube's terms of service to accept sponsorships and not disclose it to YouTube and their own audience. These "useful idiot" creators are claiming the money they got was for liscensing and it isn't undisclosed sponsorships, but it looks like YouTube isn't buy...

 Liz Dye: It's fine to laugh at JD Vance and his couch . At this juncture, the GOP is weird memes practically write themselves. You look at the policies that Vance, Trump, the right-wing think tanks (including the one that hatched Project 2025), and it becomes obvious that these folks are pushing policies and ideas that are really out of touch and just plain odd - definitely radically out of touch with what most of us as Americans want or value. That's worth mocking. Hell, we could all use a few good laughs after the events of these last few weeks, and definitely the last decade. As long as we remember to go to the polls and vote this November, let's continue to laugh. Note, image comes from link, which is credited to Getty. Also, most importantly, no couches were harmed in the composition of this post.

Dan Gillmor at Techdirt wrote a very thoughtful essay on why journalists in particular needed to abandon Twitter . I'd recommend reading the post and completely ignoring the comments. Those are a shit show. Twitter is a special case at the moment simply because it is now owned and operated by a man who displays the symptoms of several personality disorders and who will suspend accounts, including those of municipal public services , on a whim. That is just not a sustainable situation.  His primary point throughout is that Twitter's users need to exit in an orderly manner. That means having presences on platforms that are far less toxic, use those regularly, and then use Twitter more or less as a friendly reminder that a lot of their real action is elsewhere, and to go there if they don't want to miss out. Gillmor is very critical of journalists and most news media corporations. In the case of Twitter, Elon Musk is essentially naming the tune, and the media corporations and ...