Ars Technica: “As Elon Musk’s Category 5 tweetstorm continues, the once-obscure Mastodon social network has been gaining over 1,000 new refugees per hour, every hour, bringing its user count to about eight million. Joining as a user is pretty easy. More than enough ex-Twitterers are happy finding a Mastodon instance via joinmastodon.org, getting a list… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Social Media
What’s gone at Twitter? A data center, janitors, some toilet paper
The New York Times: “Twitter is said to have stopped paying rent at its Seattle office, leading it to face eviction. Janitorial and security services have been cut, and in some cases employees have resorted to bringing their own toilet paper to the office…Elon Musk has reduced the company to a bare-bones operation, and employees… Continue Reading
The best books of 2022 according to BookTok
Mashable: “BookTok is revolutionizing the literature world. For the past two years, books have been climbing the charts not on the backs of movie and TV deals or some miraculous PR stunt, but because users on TikTok deemed it worthy. Kristen McLean, the executive director of business development at NPD Books, told the New York… Continue Reading
Social media may prevent users from reaping creative rewards of profound boredom
University of Bath – “People who turn to social media to escape from superficial boredom are unwittingly preventing themselves from progressing to a state of profound boredom, which may open the door to more creative and meaningful activity, a new study of the Covid pandemic shows. Researchers from the University of Bath School of Management… Continue Reading
Mastodon 101: how to follow (and unfollow) other accounts
The Verge – You can follow whoever you want, no matter which Mastodon ‘instance’ they hang out in. “The torrent of former tweeters streaming toward alternative social networks seems to be ongoing, and the social network that is probably gaining the most attention is Mastodon. This open-source network of independent servers (called “instances”) had jumped… Continue Reading
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, December 24, 2022
Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, December 24, 2022 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly… Continue Reading
Fediscope
“FediScope lets you find fediverse accounts for people in a field using Wikidata. You can then compile a custom CSV and import it into Mastodon. It was made by @[email protected] (code | toggle dark mode). Privacy: This tool directly interacts with Wikidata from your browser and does not log your queries. Wikidata creates records for… Continue Reading
Twitter now shows how many people view your tweets
TechCrunch: “Twitter is rolling out a feature that shows how many people view your tweets, similar to features on platforms like YouTube that show how many times a video has been viewed. “Twitter is rolling out View Count, so you can see how many times a tweet has been seen! This is normal for video,”… Continue Reading
Gone But Not Forgotten (Yet): The Tech That Died in 2022
PC Mag: “This year saw the usual introduction of next-gen smartphones, laptops, operating systems, and smart home devices, with a few unique offerings thrown in there, too. But for all the innovative tech that made headlines or passed through our labs in 2022, there were just as many products and services that powered down for… Continue Reading
Fake job postings are stealing applicants’ money and identities
Washington Post: “…Job sites such as ZipRecruiter, LinkedIn and Indeed say they try to weed out fake job listings and employers, though scammers are getting more sophisticated. These websites also offer tools to flag suspicious content in case a scam gets past their screening. Still, many job seekers are airing their horror stories across social… Continue Reading
User Generated Content and the Fediverse: A Legal Primer
EFF: “A growing number of people are experimenting with federated alternatives to social media like Mastodon, either by joining an “instance” hosted by someone else or creating their own instance by running the free, open-source software on a server they control. (See more about this movement and joining the fediverse here). The fediverse isn’t a… Continue Reading
22 findings from the Reuters Institute’s research in 2022 still relevant in 2023
From news avoidance to audience trust and newsroom diversity, our researchers have covered key issues in the past 12 months – “2022 has been a challenging year for journalism. While reporting on Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and on the last stages of a global pandemic, news organisations struggled with loss of interest, news avoidance… Continue Reading
