In some of the music communities I’m in the content creators are already telling their userbase to go follow them on threads. They’re all talking about some kind of beef between Elon and Mark and the possibility of a boxing match… Mark was right to call the people he’s leaching off of fucking idiots.
Most people aren’t aware of these things, and even if they are, they don’t want privacy to hinder their normal life in any way.
I think for most people it’s “semi aware but just don’t care”.
Yeah Facebook is bad but so is the government etc etc
Hang around security professionals for a while and you’ll realize just how bad things can get. This is the only thing I really miss from Twitter, an interesting group of security professionals I followed.
Oh, just realized I should probably follow those kinds of people on Mastodon.
Lack of privacy and concerns around the government (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.) spying and private corporations essentially spying too but calling it data harvesting and whatever else has been pretty widely reported on and shared for well over a decade. I’m in my mid 30s and clearly remember the patriot act being proposed and rammed through the first time with constant outcries about the blatant human rights and privacy violations it would lead to which of course Snowden confirmed explicitly years later. This stuff has never been a secret, really, it’s just people legitimately don’t believe it matters to them. They think either “oh it just has to be this way” or “terrorism brother!” or “but why doesn’t Zuck deserve to sell my butthole pics, you commie?” That’s why it’s incumbent upon those who are experts, which I am not for the record, to always be on the look out and propose enforceable laws to prevent private corporations from doing this (with personal liability for executive level officers ie Zuck goes to prison for 50 years) and to strip back and break the reactionary spy networks which existed before 9/11 but became insanely worse post-9/11. All that spying which has resulted in zero prevention of shootings or any type of terror plot. People gave up freedom and gained no security… just a thin veil of theater of security and daily indignities of half stripping at the airport so some Neanderthal can see your junk in the radiation spinny device. Or the knowledge that every thing you say or type online (and offline with phones everywhere) is or has potential to be recorded or monitored and if you stand against some key positions and offer solutions of actual change and intent to enact it… well, it leads to self-censorship. Just ranting now, but I think most people do broadly know about this stuff they also justify it to themselves in the delusion of “well, I gotta use something like Twitter!” when you obviously do not (I’ve never had a proper real Twitter account because the platform has always been dogass and a terrible idea for any real interaction. Useful for quick news updates but worthless and just harmful imo for anything further)
I felt the same. When someone first told me about Twitter there wasn’t a web interface, you had to text message from your old school feature phone and waste multiple texts at like $0.10 a piece to send roughly 100 letters. I never really saw the point. By the time Twitter was “worth while” I still didn’t get the appeal. I made an account for a project I was working on, but I hated it, so I stopped and never signed in again. That account has been idle for so long that literal elementary kids after I last signed in came of age and are drinking in bars now.