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Ah, glad to see we're trading the platform that Jack Dorsey previously sold to a fascist for an obscene sum of money for the platform that Jack Dorsey hasn't yet sold to a fascist for an obscene sum of money.
I'm so deeply disappointed that Mastadon isn't taking a larger share of traffic.
@xmunk @mesamunefire I also dislike Jack Dorsey, but it's false to say that "he sold twitter".
He did not own 50% or more of the companies shares, so he couldn't make that decision by himself.
Additionally, as I just learned from wikipedia, he had already resigned as CEO a year before the sale
I'm fine with it. We don't need to be the most popular, we just need to be there consistently.
People continue to come over slowly and then they keep engaging. It's not fizzing out so it's been very nice.
I dint care how big we are but its still very disheartening how much critical thinking skills people lack.
Do they really believe it will be better or do they just not care?
I'd guess they don't care enough. If bsky enshittifies they will just find something else, same as now, but until then they can just ride it out with little to no hassle.
It's just more convenient it seems to not care about instances
Not for everyone. And so for now, I'm confident in the growth of the fediverse in many directions. I've been advocating for the Fediverse since I left reddit, after 12 years, because Meta products had become so toxic. I've had more people than ever before ask me about Pixelfed last week, two of them, IG refugees. Oh and one who'd been on before, and returned to Pixelfed. THREE!!!
I'm so deeply disappointed that Mastadon isn't taking a larger share of traffic.
It's got George Takei. What more do we need?
Dorsey sold it to the public, and Musk bought it from the public.
Should note that Jack Dorsey is not part of Bluesky anymore. He left a little while ago
Did he fully divest any decision making powe and financial interests? Or just the decision making power?
At least it will be really funny if Bluesky just becomes the new Twitter and Musk's 55B loses most of its value
Thats what I bet will happen. Elon is the "fellow kids" meme in a nutshell. He bought an entire platform to look cool, only to make the platform itself stale and broken. I feel bad for the employees that will have that on their resume (or laid off) but what can you do?
At least blue sky has the bridge. It kinda works. I will still be using mastodon/Gotosocial but to others they can use whatever platform they want to talk to me. Including family.
Eugen has admitted, in some ways, that he’s introverted and perhaps didn’t have the skills to create the publicity needed to have it grab general public attention. While I have concerns that the new non-profit will become a Mozilla type entity with too much overhead, hopefully some useful overhead can be put into better marketing the product.
Sorry to rain on the parade, but... it went back up 😞
Follow the philosophy of the fediverse and block early block often. From what little I've seen at bluesky, the magas get SOOOOO angry when people just block without engaging. It's to the point where some of them have dumb shit in their bio like 'a block is a win to me' to try to bugs-bunny you into not blocking them.
The pool at twitter is reaching the point where they only have other magas to argue with and they are desperate for attention by the time they get to bluesky.
Yes, this is important. Block as soon as possible, don't interact.
Bluesky also has nice user provided block-lists, so you can block lots of accounts right away as soon as you sign up.
Tipping point could be very soon.
https://theconcernedbird.substack.com/p/elon-musks-and-xs-role-in-2024-election
My hope is that with some of the very large subs banned twitter, like r/nba, that will have a noticeable effect on engagement and reporters will move to bsky or anywhere else.
I realize this is unlikely to happen, but a man can dream.
This isn't actual proof of anything though. This is a publicity stunt by someone trying to promote this Eliza project, which has nothing to do with X because actual X code used for the described nefarious purposes wouldn't be on a public GitHub repository. More importantly, someone who "can't sleep at night" due to their involvement in election interference wouldn't link to the tool they used to do it and instructions on how to use it.
Having a .json "character file" for a Trump chatbot filled with Trump rhetoric is not proof of anything the writer is claiming. Anyone could do that, including LLMs.
I'm not saying similar technologies/tactics weren't actually used over the last few years, in fact, I strongly believe they were. All I'm saying is that this article is nothing but bait. Fact-checking is more important than ever now.
If you look at the second example you’ll see Marc andreessen mentioned. He’s a follower of Curtis yarvins dark enlightenment. Also works closely with Elon.
https://www.ft.com/content/1f14799f-69a1-41cb-bf7f-6f16f9ad4a8b
That is absolutely true, but the substack post as it stands provides no proof of the events it describes. Like I said, I'm not claiming that interference didn't happen, I'm not even claiming it didn't happen almost exactly the way the post describes, but none of it is verifiable through the provided "source", which is just a public GitHub repo.
Very odd though, no? Why would they use a Trump bot as the public example?
We already have hard proof for most of the other stuff, I guess someone could’ve seen the example and fabricated the article based on our shared knowledge. But I think that falls into the ‘nothing ever happens’ box
Very odd though, no? Why would they use a Trump bot as the public example?
If I wanted to assume bad faith, and at this point I will every time a claim is made with no verifiable proof, I could very easily interpret that post and the presence of a Trump character file as an advertisement basically telling potential users "hey look, this is what he used to steal the election, it's possible, it's simple, it's relatively cheap and you can do it too." And if you look through the GitHub Issues for the project you'll see that quite a few people are already currently using it for who knows what purposes.
As someone who works in the field I also believe there are several red flags in the way the article is written and a bunch of contradictions. For example, "hiding crumbs in the code" would generally imply something slightly more sophisticated than a public file that the author himself tells you how to find in the repository with even a screenshot of it.
The main issue for me though is that it is highly unlikely that the owner of X would need to use an external tool that establishes a finicky integration with X from the outside to generate fake content when he obviously has control over the internal private code and data of X itself. It's beyond naive to think that if they wanted to create fake accounts, fake posts or manipulate the content users see, they would need this Eliza thing to do it effectively. This tool is clearly aimed at people who don't own the platforms they intend to use it on.
Ultimately though, while I don't believe this source and story are to be trusted, I still think everyone should know that tools like this actually exist and that something resembling the proposed narrative is extremely plausible regardless.
Look who is behind Eliza too. A crackpot who flipped to MAGA to accelerate us to 'network states'. More info here
As someone who works in the field I also believe there are several red flags in the way the article is written and a bunch of contradictions. For example, “hiding crumbs in the code” would generally imply something slightly more sophisticated than a public file that the author himself tells you how to find in the repository with even a screenshot of it.
Maybe there is, doesn't seem like anyone else is bothering to look.
The main issue for me though is that it is highly unlikely that the owner of X would need to use an external tool that establishes a finicky integration with X from the outside to generate fake content when he obviously has control over the internal private code and data of X itself. It’s beyond naive to think that if they wanted to create fake accounts, fake posts or manipulate the content users see, they would need this Eliza thing to do it effectively. This tool is clearly aimed at people who don’t own the platforms they intend to use it on.
Could still acces that through the API all the same? Sure there's plenty of other frameworks they use they didnt build themselves.
I hope this doesn't come off as defensive, but I'm not sure how many times I need to repeat that I'm not at all disputing or discrediting the existence and danger of Eliza, other tools like it, and generative AI in general. Like I said, I very strongly believe that this type of manipulation absolutely happened, is still happening, and was happening even way before LLMs became a thing. I absolutely believe the public should be loudly and urgently made aware of this.
If there is anything that this Substack proves regardless of its veridicity, it's that this is just the beginning. Very soon, the internet as you and I know it will entirely cease to exist and the very concept of "truth" will follow. This is the reality we are witnessing today. So trust me, I completely understand and share your discomfort at seeing that "nothing is happening" and no one is (at least publicly) looking into this.
Still, if the meaning of "truth" is what's being weaponized here, I cannot in good conscience claim that, to my honest understanding, this specific Substack is currently proof of anything. And please do not take my word for it, keep sharing it and looking into it because I'd be the first to celebrate being proven wrong about this.
To answer your question about whether they could just do it via API, I mean, it's certainly possible, but in the same way that breaking into your own house through a window when you have the front door key in your pocket is possible. And hey, again, don't take my word for it. That is just the most likely conclusion to me, but logic doesn't apply to these people and their schemes the way it does for you and me.
EDIT: forgot to say, thanks for providing that link to your thread and collecting the relevant information. I'll make sure to read it.
You mistake me as trying to convince you of it's objective truth, rather than sharing information that stands even without the whistleblower. Someone could've figured out it was super weird a org backed by Marc had a public example like that and made this all up. But why was it there in the first place? Super odd considering his MO to accelerate us at all cost. If he isn't doing it he's going to be wishing he thought of it.
Confused what you mean by the API. Eliza is a framework for agents right? Whatever they were doing they'd do it via their internal API as it already has all the methods etc for posting. So they could either write something custom like eliza to manage that bit, or just connect Eliza?
You mistake me as trying to convince you of it's objective truth, rather than sharing information that stands even without the whistleblower.
Sorry, I misunderstood your tone then, and I do appreciate the information you've shared. We are on the same page here, all I'm really arguing about is the legitimacy of the initial link.
Someone could've figured out it was super weird a org backed by Marc had a public example like that and made this all up. But why was it there in the first place?
And why is it still there? That's what really sticks out to me. That's why I called it "bait" in my original comment, because it's exactly what this feels like. There is just something undeniably off with the way this narrative is being presented, even without taking the lack of hard evidence into account. I'd be very curious to find out how and where it began circulating.
Honestly I'm still shocked some of the content of that file can apparently be made publicly available on GitHub without violating their ToS. But that's probably just me being naive at this point.
Confused what you mean by the API. Eliza is a framework for agents right? Whatever they were doing they'd do it via their internal API as it already has all the methods etc for posting. So they could either write something custom like eliza to manage that bit, or just connect Eliza?
You're correct in your understanding that it's definitely possible and I didn't say it isn't. They could've simply written their own client for it, or they could've used it regardless. It's just... Really stupid. Disappointingly so if that turned out to be the case. The complete lack of technical details in the "whistleblowing" post doesn't help, but even without going that deep into the repo you can tell it's not a particularly sophisticated piece of software, it's simply a "bridge" connecting agents (bots powered by generative models) and clients (social media and various other services). It's useless on its own, and it's not something that X (and anyone with access to its resources) couldn't have done themselves way better considering that they already own considerable stakes on both sides of the bridge, that they developed themselves.
I still stand by my initial assessment that this is most likely a group that is simply using some disturbingly creative disinformation tactics to implicitly claim affiliation with subjects like Andreessen and Musk and fundamentally "promote" their "product" without even being subtle about its potential criminal and/or disruptive uses.
This is Musk we're talking about here. The guy who requested print-outs of code to review, and doesn't even know basic commands. Could he have said 'My pal has a thing for that, use that it'll be faster' ?
I still stand by my initial assessment that this is most likely a group that is simply using some disturbingly creative disinformation tactics to implicitly claim affiliation with subjects like Andreessen and Musk and fundamentally “promote” their “product” without even being subtle about its potential criminal and/or disruptive uses.
What product?
He notes in the comments he's a junior dev btw, which would explain the lack of detail
Because I’m not even sure what the team was doing was “illegal” as much as it was unethical. I’m just a junior dev. I do grunt work. To be really honest, it is hard for me to trust the government because whistle blowers don’t fare well in this country. Elon is the richest man on the planet. My main reason for releasing this information is to make sure the rest of the world knows what is coming for them.