 Welcome to DTNS Experiment Week. All this week, DTNS is on summer vacation, but in its place is Experiment Week where our producers and contributors are trying out new show ideas and releasing them right here on the DTNS feed. Enjoy. I'm Nicole Lee and this is a perpetually online show about life on the internet. That includes memes, beefs, viral videos and everything in between. My co-host today is Carissa Bell. Hello Carissa. Hello. And just a little bit about ourselves. My name is Nicole, like I said, and I've been a tech journalist for almost 20 years now. But more than that, I'm always online. I was on Twitter day dot, it seems like. And Carissa, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you do for a living and how you feel about being online all the time? Well, I'm also a tech reporter, surprise, surprise. Been doing it probably about at least 10 years at this point. Try not to think about it. And I've spent most of that time covering social media. So I am also always online. Got in a little bit better lately about trying to consciously unplug at certain times. Yeah. But it's basically my job to be online all the time. Would you be online all the time if it wasn't your job? I think I would. Yeah, yeah. It's hard to know because I started doing this. I wanna say around the time when Twitter started to get really big and social media as we know it now was kind of starting to blow up. And so, and that was around the time I became a journalist. So the two have always been very intermixed for me. But yeah, I think I probably would anyway. Yeah, it's interesting because when I first started using Twitter and all the other social media stuff that wasn't my job. I mean, I covered tech but it was more in the gadget space. It wasn't so much in the social media online space. And but I just started using it just to use it really. I think honestly, to be completely honest, one of the reasons I was on all the social media things to begin with just was just to reserve my name. It was just like to book my name so that I would be like Nicole or Nicole or whatever just till I have my name parked and reserved that no one else could use it really. And that was like my driving reason, my driving force to use all these things to begin with. But yeah, very serious similarly. That was one of my things. But yeah, I think the reason why I wanted to do this podcast is because like I feel like very similarly my life is so like plugged in, not just Twitter, but like Instagram, TikTok, like I'm on those these things all the time. And it seems like it's, it's so dynamic, especially lately. And it seems like everything's changing all the time, not just like in terms of the companies themselves changing and we'll get to that today, but just in terms of the kind of news that breaks like online only the kind of trends and news events that emanate from TikTok. You know, TikTok is such a huge trendsetter in this space to like it doesn't just change online, it doesn't just dictate our online lives, but like offline lives. It sort of sort of trickles down to like every aspect of our lives it seems. So yeah, let's just get started. By the way, I should actually say that this podcast is gonna be, it's gonna air on Daily Tech News shows, Experimental Week and this podcast, if we're recording it on August 1st, everything that comes out in this podcast might be old news but at the time this podcast comes out on the week of August 14th, but just a little disclaimer that just in case we're talking about like old news at this point, but we'll try to keep it as evergreen as possible in our discussions here, but this was recorded on August 1st, 2023. Okay, so the biggest newsmaker in the online space for the past week and possibly for the past year has been Twitter, specifically Elon Musk's Twitter. Ever since Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion last year, I'm gonna say last April, it seems like Twitter HQ has been nothing but chaos. That is especially the case last week as Musk has decided to rename the company to X. He even went so far as to place a giant metal X structure on the rooftop of 1355 Market Street, aka Twitter HQ. It's since been taken down after neighbor and city complaints but the company's name remains unchanged, at least for now. Carissa, you wrote the initial story for Engadget about how the real situation is running on Twitter to X. What the heck is happening? Well, there's a few things. You know, I think Musk has always kind of had this fascination or attachment to the letter X for whatever reason. You know, back in the late 90s when he first came up had a banking startup that he later sold to PayPal. It was called x.com. He later bought that domain back from PayPal a few years ago before he got involved with Twitter. So that was only a few years ago, right? Yeah, I wanna say it was 2017. Okay, relatively recent-ish. Yeah, and you know, obviously Tesla has a model X. One of his children, he is named- That's right! He has a variation of the name X. He calls him Little X. You know, I forget how you actually say like X, a whatever the official name is, but you know, they call him Little X, so. Musk Junior X. Yeah, so he has this personal thing for the letter. You know, I think more broadly speaking, this is kind of, he really wants, I think he really wants to make sure that like this is his vision of what the company that you speak of the old Twitter is. It's no longer birds and tweets and Jack Dorsey and all that stuff. I think this is really him trying to create separation saying like this is my company now. This is my vision for it. It's this future-looking new brand. You know, the old Twitter has a lot of baggage. So I think he's trying to really make a statement with what he sees as the future of the company. I think my question, so I think that's correct. I mean, that's, as you say, Musk has this obsession with X for a while now, but I think we can go on from that. It seems like he wants to, I mean, he's always had this obsession, not just with the letter X, but like having an app, like an X app, or like an app that does everything. Can you speak more as to like what that means? What does he mean by having an app that does everything? Yeah, so that's one of the other things that he said that when he, I mean, he said this very early on from when he acquired Twitter, that he thought this is kind of the first step in a vision for Twitter, not just being a place where you can tweet and maybe find out about what's going on in the world, but this kind of everything app. And the kind of model for this is WeChat in China, which there, WeChat is basically used for pretty much everything that you do in everyday life. It's social media, it's also payments, shopping, booking appointments. My understanding of it is that it's basically every kind of service or need that you would use day to day kind of all rolled into one. And I think Musk really thinks that Twitter can be a version of that where it can be payments and baking and video streaming and creators and shopping and I think he kind of has the similar vision. Whether he can actually accomplish that, I think it's something else. I think a lot of other companies have kind of tried to be in everything app. And I think it's very hard to do that outside of somewhere like China where the internet is very tightly and centrally controlled. And that's part of why WeChat has been so successful there. Is there, like what do you think, is there even, what's the closest equivalent there is to that in the US? I can't even think of anything that, I mean maybe Facebook-ish back in the day, but even now I can't really think of something that is that close to that vision, you know? I mean, honestly, yeah, it is Facebook. It is Facebook, isn't it? There's social network, there's shopping, you can pay people, you can message people, you can sell your couch to your neighbor, it has a dating service, which a lot of people forget. So Facebook has stuck its fingers on a lot of things, but even if you look at Facebook where they've had their success, it's not at doing everything. Yes, they have done a lot of things, but it's basically at doing one thing really well, which is kind of their core social networking features, which are very easy to monetize. And then all the other stuff is sort of around that. But we don't think of Facebook as a kind of WeChat equivalent. Not really, well, Facebook is, there are a lot of other things under Facebook, I guess that's the kind of thing with Facebook. But calling it X, there have been some issues with that, I think we've mentioned already, but one of the things that was surprising, I mean, first of all, it was someone's username, and then they got someone, and then they were just like, it was just unceremoniously taken from them. So that was that particular, I can't remember his name, like Jean Huang, I think is his name, I can't remember exactly. And then so that happened, which is I guess per Musk's desire to change the name. And then also like, I guess legally speaking, the X, it was owned by Facebook or something. Did you know anything about that? Yeah, so it's the trademark. So X is a very kind of common name. It's used by a lot of different companies in various ways. And one thing that people pointed out very quickly was that Metta actually owns a trademark for X in the context of social networking. It's kind of unclear whether that Metta's kind of potential claim will actually be an issue for Twitter because the logos look kind of different. It doesn't seem like Metta's actually using that trademark right now. So, but at the same time, there are hundreds of other companies that do use some version X. And I think just the fact that it's now Twitter, it's Elon Musk, he's so high profile. You know, he's been involved in so many lawsuits. I think it just, what a lot of trademark attorneys say is it just kind of opens you up to potential lawsuits, even if they're frivolous, not credible. You know, companies may come out of the world, would work and try to sue X corp now and see if they can get a settlement or get a piece of Twitter for it. You know, it's interesting you mentioned like how Elon, he's always wanted this X app. He wants to change Twitter to X. And that sounds as if there's been some forethought, but from where I'm sitting, it just seemed kind of ramshackle, because you know, as we know, the X logo isn't really a logo. It's a Unicode thing, like a Unicode character, I mean. And this whole structure that was put on the Twitter building, doesn't seem to have any permits or nothing. It just seemed kind of, even though I totally understand he's had this vision for a long time, but this whole decision to make it into an X, just on the surface seemed like a very slap dash decision. And does that ring true to you at all? Or do you think this has been in the works for like a year? I mean, it probably was, you know, this is kind of how Musk operates. He makes decisions on the fly. He doesn't necessarily consult with a lot of people. If he does consult with them, he doesn't necessarily listen to their advice, you know. And let's not forget that there was, Twitter was not in the greatest news cycle at the time. There was a lot of conversations about hate speech on Twitter and kind of the rise of this. There was some reporting out there that really upset Elon Musk and other executives at the company. And so, you know, what's a really great way to change the media narrative about your company's like, rename it X, you know. But I mean, yeah, he announced it on a, he started talking about this on a Saturday night. You know, pretty late in the night while he was playing Diablo and joined the Twitter Spaces conversation and was like, yeah, I think I'm gonna rename it X. So, yeah, but this is how he operates. I mean, it sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous, really. Like, so the other thing is that I read on platformer, Casey Newton's platformer on how he posits that, you know, because this was the question I had all along. Like, why did Elon Musk buy Twitter? Like, why did he buy it? Was it to make Twitter into the accent or was it something else? And Casey was saying that it was just kind of a thing he did to like make Twitter his own platform and kind of shut the quote unquote liberals up and make it into his own playground. And that kind of seems to be what he did, right? Yeah, I mean, I think, let's not forget, before he bought Twitter, he was Twitter's highest profile, most popular user by a lot of metrics. And a lot of people have made this point, but when you think about what happens when Elon Musk tweets, he instantly is getting millions and millions of people liking, retweeting, replying, telling him he's a genius, you know, instantly. And whatever random thought he has, whatever random meme he posts or stolen joke tweets, like it's his own. Like he gets a lot of instant gratification, a lot of feedback. So I think, you know, and this is the same loop like that we all kind of have a social media, but at that kind of scale, it's just so amplified. I think it's very easy to get kind of like wrapped up in your own presence. Like have you ever had a tweet go like really viral and you're just watching it like rack up retweets and replies and it's like, yeah, but it's kind of addictive, right? Like you can't stop waiting to like see like what people are saying and you're checking it. And it's like this, this weird dynamic. And like that happens every single time you tweet without fail, regardless of what you have to say. And whether it's actually smart or actually funny, like I can see how that becomes like a big part of your personality. Yeah, exactly. That's just, yeah, yeah. And it's so crazy to me too that, you know, he bought it for, well, he bought it for $44 billion, but then he tried to get out of it. That was his whole back and forth I remember on how like he was like, I don't really want to get it. Or like, there's this whole bunch of reasons of how Twitter was lagging about his numbers. Therefore, you know, I don't need to buy it anymore or something, but he ended up having to buy it anyway. I don't know. And we are where we are, I suppose. So Twitter being the state that it is, the fact that, you know, it's now X, I guess. It's called X now. The logo has changed to X and it changed its Twitter blue profile so that all the verified, there's no more such thing as like actual verification. It's like you have to pay to be verified, right? Isn't that the case now? Yeah. You have to pay to be verified. You have to pay to have the blue check. So there's all these things, all these changes. Any kind of makes sense why people don't like Twitter anymore. There's this huge contingent of people who are like, you know what, I just can't stand this anymore. And because of that, and as a result of that, well, there are lots of other reasons, but as a result of that, there are all these Twitter alternatives. I'm just gonna name a few. I'm sure there's more, but these are the few that I can think of right now. The first and perhaps earliest one I can think of is Mastodon, and that's like a federation. We'll get to what federation means in a little bit. That's Mastodon, it's like a federation thing. And then there's Blue Sky, which is another kind of a federation thing, not quite the same, but ish, similar. And then the most recent entrance into the Twitter alternative game is Threads. And Threads is part of Instagram slash meta, I'm not really sure which umbrella that falls under, but it seems to be sort of Instagram-ish in its execution at least. And then I'm sure there's others that exist or will exist in the coming future. But I think the first question that comes, well, firstly, I think we should address, let's go through them. So Mastodon, and that's operates in a Fediverse, like a federation type thing. And from what I understand, you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but it operates in the way email would operate. So you have your own server that you would join, like Mastodon.social or Mastodon.xyz or whatever. And then you have your username on there. But it's a little complicated to me. So why don't you explain what Mastodon is and what the whole federation thing is? So Mastodon is a decentralized platform that runs on an open source protocol called Activity Pub. And there's a whole collection of services that run on Activity Pub. And that sort of collection is what's kind of known as the Fediverse. Mastodon is definitely the highest profile, the one with the most users that's in the Fediverse. And it's sort of a very Twitter-like service where you can post and reply to people and follow and it kind of looks similar. If you just look at the feed, it has kind of a similar interface to Twitter in some ways. What's interesting about the Fediverse is that because it's decentralized, it's not controlled by one company. So like the standards, the moderation policies are sort of up to whoever's controlling the server. And then also one of the benefits of being in the Fediverse is that because it's on Activity Pub, any other service that also uses that protocol has interoperability, so you can kind of see their posts, share content, kind of interact across this loose sort of network of services. So that's kind of the core difference between something like Twitter or other kind of like centrally controlled platform is that no one person, no one company actually is centrally controlling the whole service. It's only at the server level. I've heard it compared to email. And the reason why I say that is because email itself is a protocol, but like a Gmail, it's like someone with a Gmail address can still talk to someone with a Hotmail address, can still talk to someone with a Yahoo address. They can still all talk to each other even though they use different email servers, but it's still just email. And the same thing with Macedon, I guess, or sorry, the protocol is specific, Activity Pub, I mean, in the sense of like it doesn't matter which server you're on or which server you use, you can still talk to each other on the same sort of platform. And the interesting thing for me with Macedon using, but Macedon being one of the main sort of people, main companies, organizations using the Activity Pub protocol is that threads, I think, as we mentioned, also uses the Activity Pub protocol. Is that correct? So it doesn't right now, but they said when they launched threads, they intend to support Activity Pub. And I agree. I think that's like one of the most interesting things about it is that they say that they want people to be able to take their audience on threads to another server. They want developers to be able to build their own sort of experiences that will work with threads and sort of like embracing this vision of like federated decentralized social media. I think we still have a lot of questions about exactly how they're going to implement this and when it will happen. But it's really interesting to see from a company like Meta, which is all about centrally controlled platforms with a lot of restrictions. Well, that's definitely correct. I think it's very interesting in the sense of like the fact that you could theoretically sort of swap your threads account to like, I don't know, another method on account theoretically and it should all kind of port over at least theoretically anyway and your followers would be the same or your following accounts should theoretically be the same. But I think some of the issues with that, and I've heard this from various people speaking, is that they're concerned that with this federation model, moderation kind of gets de-emphasized in the sense of like, it's harder to like, you might say that the idea of moderating from a trust and safety perspective might not be as much of a priority or something. And or maybe they're saying like, oh, because it's, because they have this federated model, they leave it up to you. They leave it up to users to moderate and whereas that might not always be a good thing to leave it up to the users to moderate. So what do you think of that in general, like the whole moderation argument? I think it's definitely probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest issues I think facing these platforms because you can have, depending on what server you're on, if you have, maybe you have people who are really active in running it, you can think of it as like forum moderators who maybe are really strict about enforcing their rules and standards and kind of upholding these community norms. But at the same time, there's no obligation for people to do that. So you can have all kinds of bad content or even illegal content in some cases appearing on these platforms. I think there are people really thinking about these problems. And I think there are some like interesting solutions that are being talked about that people have come up with. You talked about Blue Sky, they have a kind of interesting approach to moderation where it's kind of, right now, it's some sort of central enforcement but also leaving a lot up to users to kind of control what level of, basically like content filtering they wanna see. And I think that's one of the things that's probably gonna take me a while is that they're going to have to figure out how to make sure that, even though they are compatible with Activity Pub, they still, they don't want anyone to post anything on the Fed-Averse somewhere to be able to just like put something on, get something onto threads that would go against their community standards. So I think- Well, that's the thing, right? Yeah, totally. Because you know, threads, they follow under like Facebook slash midas guidelines and they're very famously, they don't allow certain, not say for work images for example, whereas like an other method on service, that's fine, you can do whatever you want, say whatever you want, you know? So it's a kind of an unusual or strange, I know it's kind of an awkward thing where like one server has different standards than another server, even though they're the same universe or whatever you wanna call it, you know? But yeah, I think, for example, that there was this whole thing recently on how I think Macedon got criticized for having CSAM images and this child sexual abuse images. And one of the reasons I've heard is because this particular server is just like one guy running it. So it's literally like one guy doing most of the moderation and he just couldn't, you know, he didn't have the power to like catch it or at least that's what I'm getting from this particular article. And, you know, like you mentioned, it's hard because moderation, it's either you pay for the moderation or you rely on volunteers and volunteers don't have the man hours, you don't have the people power to like do everything and cover everything. And in that sense, you would have to rely on what's the technology called photo? What they scan photos? Photo DNA. Yeah, photo DNA. That's right. And then so like they would have to use that to sort of like implement it into the structure essentially or into the code base, I guess, and have that sort of suss out those accounts and just ban them or ban the offending server or whatever it is. But, you know, you mentioned Blue Sky. Blue Sky's the other one, but they use, they use even though they're, even though they also kind of follow the same feather first principle, but they use a completely different protocol. Is that correct? Yeah, so Blue Sky is decentralized as well. And they use a different protocol. It's called the AT protocol. And the creators say that the plan is eventually that they'll federate so that people will be able to host other instances, you know, of Blue Sky and kind of have this federation model. But right now it is just kind of one sort of centrally control place that looks a lot like Twitter. But the vision is that it will be more kind of like what we think of as like the fediverse. But it's not, is it compatible with activity pop? So that's an interesting question. The two, the protocol, you know, there's various like factions if you want to like go deep into like the forms of people arguing about like protocol supremacy. I think my sense is that eventually they, there will be some connections between them. Like there's already a few people kind of working on these sort of like bridges between, there's one called Sky Bridge, I believe that, you know, it will sort of make Blue Sky posts available within the broader fediverse. So like I suspect if Blue Sky kind of keeps growing and becomes bigger, we'll see sort of ways that they can like interact with each other, but they are technically separate protocols. You know, the main difference that the Blue Sky developers talk about is that they think account portability is a little bit easier with the way that they've set things up. You know, there's a few other like structural differences and lots of other stuff that's like way more than the weeds that's beyond my technical abilities to understand. So I think, so I mean, so just in case we're a little too fast for you, for our listeners, I think that that's, so Mastodon has, it's made up of all these different servers. And in order to join a Mastodon, you have to like pick your server, you know, Mastodon.social, whatever it is. And then you will sign up using the Mastodon interface. With Threads, you can just like, it's an app that you download and then it'll immediately hook up to your existing Instagram account if you have one. And then it will just port all your friends and followers over from that. With Blue Sky, right now it's invitation only. So you need to have some, you need to know someone or whatever it is to give you an invitation code. And Blue Sky also like, correct me if I'm wrong, but Blue Sky was initially like a project inside Twitter or something that got just like branched off into its own thing. And I believe one of the initial like funders was Jack Dorsey. At least that's how I first heard of Blue Sky. Yeah, it started off as a project internally within Twitter while Jack Dorsey was CEO to kind of create a decentralized version of Twitter that could exist without Twitter, the company that quickly grew and they kind of spun it off into its own company. It's now led by Jay Graber, CEO and I think it has maybe a dozen employees or something. And they were still kind of linked, had some ties to Twitter, but all that kind of got severed when Elon Musk bought the company. So they're now independent. Jack Dorsey was a big backer of it. He gave them a lot of funding. I think what's interesting now is he's become, at least publicly, he's been backing more of another decentralized platform called Noster. I don't know if I'm saying that correctly. He's been a little bit critical of some of the decisions of Blue Sky, but that's Jack Dorsey for you, I guess. I wanna say for a hot minute this year, Blue Sky was the talk of the town. Like it was, at least it seemed to me, to be fair, I think also it depends on, I think a lot of that is because a lot of the initial Blue Sky users are New York media people and it got written up a lot in New York media circles and that's how we hear a lot about these things. And I think that's why for a while, Blue Sky was like the Twitter alternative for a while and because you need an invitation to get in, it seemed like very exclusive, et cetera, et cetera. And I think part of the charm of Blue Sky, at least initially, was that the developers and the CEO, as you mentioned, they were very communicative with the community. It seemed like a really interesting, even though it is a federated thing, it seemed at least tight-knit-ish in a way. As tight-knit as it could possibly get, I suppose. But now I think as more and more people are on Blue Sky, there have been some moderation issues, we mentioned moderation issues, some moderation issues have propped up. The most recent one I can think of is, there was a user on Blue Sky that had a racial slur in their username and it got called out. There was this whole kerfuffle around it and even though the user did eventually get banned and all that stuff, the Blue Sky didn't respond to it for like, I think a 10 days or something, I kind of remember exactly. And it kind of blew up in Blue Sky's face. And then they had this, there was this article on, I don't want to say fortune or Forbes, I kind of remember exactly. But, and they interviewed the CEO and how she was like, as the company is growing, we can't be as close as we used to be. We can't have this one-on-one community building things that we used to. What do you think of all that? And what do you think of Blue Sky in general? Like how it sort of evolved into what it is now, which is like a strange, it's Twitter-like, but also not in a way. Yeah, I was joking the other day that Blue Sky sort of feels like it's in its hall monitor phase, where it feels like there's a lot of people who are, have a lot of very strong opinions about what they should and shouldn't be doing and are kind of whipping up a lot of this stuff. I should also say that like, I have the privilege and benefit that I've never faced harassment on Blue Sky. I've encountered plenty of not-safe-for-work stuff, but nothing that's been really kind of ugly or directed at me in that way. So I don't wanna discount the feelings that see these things, so it is a serious problem. My impression is that I think a lot of people came to Blue Sky with this idea that it was gonna be kind of like Twitter, but better, they were gonna be able to learn from Twitter's mistakes. They really cared about community and making sure that it was a good place and wasn't gonna have Nazis and all these kind of issues that we associate with Twitter. And I think that right now they're suffering the same thing that a lot of platforms that grow really get really big, really fast before they're ready to kind of go through, which like inevitably there's going to be issues. The thing with the username was a big problem because people were saying why, that's such a simple, like easiest, lowest hanging fruit you can imagine is like, have a block list of words that can't be in usernames, right? And maybe you would include racial slurs in that list. They didn't do that. People thought it took too long to fix, too long for them to kind of explicitly address why that happened. So, and I think all those points are valid. I don't think, I don't know if it's necessarily fair to interpret that as saying these people don't care about safety, they don't care about community, they don't care about any of those issues. I think if you look at what everybody involved in this has said, I think they do care. I'm not saying they obviously have made mistakes, everyone does, but I think people should also remember that a lot of these, they did make some obvious mistakes, but there's also a lot of hard problems when it comes to how you build a community, how you enforce moderation, where you draw these lines, even the biggest and like most well-funded companies get the stuff wrong a lot. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's also like, how old, like this is a brand new thing. It hasn't been around very six months or something. It's a very young team in general. And it's a closed beta. It's a closed beta, exactly. I mean, I don't really know how many users they have right now, but it's very limited. Yeah, I think it's, I think it might be a little over 400,000 at this point. Yeah. I forget exactly where they're at, but it's very small. And I think you could make an argument that like, in a closed beta, you're sort of accepting that there's going to be some hiccups. I think it's fair for the community to push back and say like, we want this to be a better place. We don't want you guys to make the same mistakes. We want you to care about trust and safety. We want you to like really invest in these problems and not make them kind of like secondary concerns. I think that's not really valid. It can really help kind of shape the tone of the community, but I think there's also kind of a contingent of people on blue sky that are very visible and very loud about kind of trying to create their own kinds of norms that go beyond that, that like I said, just kind of made it feel very like hall monetary at some point to me. Cause like when I first joined blue sky, it was like everyone was posting like pictures of like Alf and the naked Alf jokes. I don't know if you were around for those memes. And it was like, oh, this is like very like camping and fun. And then like now it's like there was this sort of like the main character or one of the main characters of blue sky yesterday was somebody posted like a cute photo of like a fluffy dog looking out a window and said, you know, this dog protected us from a trespassing bunny. You know? And then somebody was like, oh, you're like co-opting the language of, by saying trespassing, you're like co-opting the language of law enforcement. And there was like all this like weird criticism of like, man people, you gotta, this is the internet. I have to say, and we can talk about the differences between these three, I mean, these three really do seem to be the main alternatives at this point. Mastodon, blue sky, to a certain extent. And Threads obviously the big behemoth and the big Alf in the room is Threads. So Threads has over like a billion users, was it a billion users or something? I think Threads has, it's like a huge- Not quite a billion yet. They had, they got to a hundred million. A hundred million, sorry. Very quickly, I mean, Mark Zuckerberg said he thinks that it can be the next kind of billion user app under- Sure. Met his family of app umbrella. We'll see, they had a lot of that engagement kind of fell off just quickly as they got it, so. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the reason it got picked up is because it's so tied to Instagram. It's like, you can just click a button and it'll just port all of your friends and stuff over. That's probably why it got picked up so quickly. For me, of course, when it first launched, it was like, there was only the for you, there was, it was all algorithm all the time. That was, you couldn't have a following-only feed. Well, now you can, now there is a for you algorithm, algorithm fueled stream versus a following, versus the people you follow. It's very similar to TikTok in the sense of for you slash following. I'm sure that comparison has been made already with TikTok, but it's, and of course, the other thing for, at least for me anyway, the thing that stops me from using really, from really using threads is because there is no desktop version. It's mobile only. And that's the number one reason why I haven't really used it that much, but I'm sure they'll get that eventually. It also seems to me anyway, this is just purely anecdotal, my personal experience of all these three platforms. Threads is probably the most mainstream. Mastodon seems to be, at least from what I follow, like very tech nerds, early tech adopters, kind of crowd with some local bear influences because just because I know I'm in the bear area. Blue Sky seems to be like, like I said, that New York media crowd-ish, some occasional shit posters, some internet celebrity-type people on Blue Sky. And it's almost as if there's three different crowds and I'm sat here checking all three all the time. And my brain is like social media all the time because it's literally three different apps and I'm being divided all the time. And it's because I am not one person, like I have a different interests, you know? And I don't know, like I feel like I'm personally drawn to Blue Sky because I love the interface more than the other ones, but that's now, that's for now anyway. My opinion could change tomorrow. From your personal usage of these three apps and perhaps even more Twitter alternatives to come, like where do you see this going? I mean, it seems as if Threads is the giant behemoth like in the room, I'm not sure what could be Threads at this point, but where do you stand right now? What do you prefer of the three, if any? And which do you think like, it's gonna win out if we want one to win out, if at all? I mean, it's hard. I think on one hand, you know, what we're seeing particularly with Blue Sky and Threads with all the hype is that there really is this intense desire from a lot of people for something else to be Twitter. Yeah. And to have, you know, some kind of viable alternative. But I think with both, we're seeing like how difficult that is, even with kind of sort of the best versions that exist out there that it's so hard to recreate that. I think Blue Sky, like you said, really kind of because of the invite structure, they've really benefited from kind of having a lot of high profile, really online people, you know, a lot of posters, people you know, you know, who tweet a lot. You know, Blue Sky was sort of appealing for them because you, and you know, for me, one thing that's been nice was that I joined before Twitter killed its API. So I was actually, I was able to somewhat successfully rebuild parts of my following graph because there were tools where I could kind of find people I followed from Twitter, on Blue Sky. It's not perfect, but you know, because of that I've had some success and you know, I find that I actually get, in a lot of cases, more engagement on Blue Sky than I do on Twitter now, which is crazy because I think on Blue Sky I have a few hundred followers and on Twitter I have 15,000. Mm-hmm. On the other hand, Threads is attached to my Instagram, which I mostly just use for personal use. That's something I was thinking about today, like I have a, I've had a really hard time kind of rebuilding my following graph. You know, I'm like desperately like, I've been like searching through other people's profiles to see who they're following, trying to like just build up my feed because right now it just feels weirdly empty, and the recommendations that Threads keeps giving me are like for like random celebrities and like the zoo and you know, accounts that like might be interesting to me on Instagram, like maybe I'd follow them on Instagram, but like I don't want to use Threads that way. Yeah, I think that was my initial, I mean, that's my initial negative reaction to Threads is because all of the accounts that they recommended in their algorithm feed are like Instagram, accounts, you know, like it's very image heavy, very photo heavy, very influencer heavy, I guess in the celebrity heavy. And like that's not really what I want to read. You know, I use Twitter as like kind of a news feed sometimes or like, you know, funny humorous stuff that people talk about. And that's not the same people, that Venn diagram isn't quite there, you know? I mean, I don't know, it's a different crowd. It's a different kind of people that you follow on Instagram versus Twitter. Yeah, and I can't tell if like those people are on Threads and I just can't find them or if like the only people posting on Threads are like meme accounts and you know, people that like had, exclusively people who had very large Instagram followings like I don't, like I think, I think it's a bit of both maybe. But yeah, it's just, because there's like not, they don't have good search, their recommendations are not amazing. It's just like so hard to find them. Yeah. All right, I'm gonna try to wrap this up and then we can go on to the other segments if we want to. But like, first of all, over under on whether Twitter, Twitter slash X survives the year. Do you think it's gonna like, Musk will drag it out even more or do you think it's, he's gonna give up at some point? The year, yeah, I think they survived the year. Yeah. Five years, I don't know. Okay. Five, right, the year versus five years, okay. Yeah. And which do you think, like which, while you mentioned in the rundown, you mentioned like apparently TikTok might have, might that might be a Twitter alternative to at some point? They just came out with like text posts. I think they're, I don't think TikTok really has much to worry about in terms of, you know, their user base. I don't think they need to be Twitter, but I think what we're seeing is like a lot of companies, like they're seeing like Twitter's weakness right now and they're like, well, we can, let's just have some kind of Twitter like feature, like just in case, right? Like Substack has its own thing. TikTok has text posts. I mean, we've seen this many other companies. So I think like a lot of people are just trying it cause they're like, why not? I don't think TikTok is who, the one who's keeping Musk up at night. Right. All right. So, I mean, that's a fascinating discussion. I'm sure we could talk about it forever. I'm sure we could talk about it forever. Let's move on to a couple other segments. This is just a fun thing since it's an online show. Talk about things that happen online, things that go viral. This is just one thing that I picked up today and there was this thing that happened on TikTok. I wanna say it's been a month or so now that was this video going around about this lady in Italy that just went around pointing at people, pointing out pickpockets and she was like, attentione pickpocket. And she would like, she would literally like point out pickpocketers as it was happening and this blew up as she became like this internet celebrity. People loved that she was pointing out pickpockets. Of course, and then the New York Times where the whole profile on this lady too, very like glowing profile on this lady. But of course it turns out, nobody is that same. And the woman Monica Pauley, she is like the city councilor for a very far right political party who is like very, very far right. They're very like anti LGBT, like they're very far right. And it also seems like the people that she targeted in those pickpocket videos were Romani. So it's kind of racist as well. So all these things, like for example, like in the New York Times article, they're like, how do you know they're pickpockets? And she's like, oh, I just know. And then there's this whole like racial profiling, like subtext. So yeah, that doesn't seem to be very good. Is there a better example of milkshake duck? I mean, this is the most kind of milkshake duck scenario I can think of. That was all I could think about when I read the stories about how she's actually like a far right politician who has some troubling history. Totally, totally milkshake ducked. I was like, oh no. This one lady that we thought was a good person is maybe not so much. You also entered this thing in the rundown about the Pinky Doll NPC thing. Do you wanna talk a little bit about that? Yeah, sure. So there's this trend on TikTok of these live streamers who are doing these NPC live streams which stands for non-player characters. There's this one woman in particular goes by Pinky Doll who has gained a pretty big following and if you watch the streams, honestly, they're hard to describe. You have to check it out. But she kind of just sits in her house in one position and she just sort of like says the same things kind of over and over again. And she responds. People are sending her little tips and in-app gifts. And then she kind of will say like, ice cream, yum, yum. And all these like, and like this kind of weird robot voice and it's like so strange that she streams for quite a long time and people like mesmerize it by it. Apparently Timbaland, the rapper is like a big fan. Oh my goodness. I sent her a lot of gifts and people are kind of, it kind of became this weird like panic in a way where people are saying, I can't believe, I can't believe people will watch this stuff. It's so weird. Everyone's like brains are so broken but I just think it's a really interesting trend of like it's not hurting anyone. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just like a weird thing that for whatever reason is like people find enjoyable. And you know, I think if you watch, I've watched some of these streams now and I think it's just sort of like the actual like repetitiveness and then like seeing her kind of like respond to everyone in real time. Like I, it's not my thing but I also kind of get why you kind of get hooked on it and it's a little bit addictive. Like almost like, you know, those ASMR videos where people kind of watch like just people like cutting things or like speaking a whisper. Yeah. The surprising thing is that she, they get paid a decent amount like $6,000 or something like that per, I don't know, per something but they get paid a decent amount just to like. Yeah, she's making more money than either of us by doing her pinkie at all streams so. Yeah, yeah, totally. We're almost at an hour so we have to wrap it up soon. But Kurisa, thank you so much for joining me on this inaugural podcast about things online and we spent a lot of it talking about Twitter but, you know, they've sucked up much of our lives so that makes sense. Kurisa, where can we catch you online? Yeah, so I am still on Twitter at Kurisa Bee. I'm on Blue Sky. I'm on Macedon. I'm on most of the Twitter alternatives. You can also read my work on Engadget. I'm working on a story now about decentralized social media that kind of touches on some of what we talked about. Very cool. Hey, that's it for us. If you liked listening to this show, definitely let us know of feedbacks at dailytechnewshow.com or can email me, nicoleed at gmail.com and let us know what you think.