This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Musky is probably wondering how to charge search engines indexing his site for free
I feel like Google is going to have to find a way to effectively index federated content at some point. The only way to really get human information is from sites like Reddit and Twitter. And both of those platforms seem to be dedicated to completely imploding at the moment.
There's nothing about the content being federated that makes it hard or impossible to index. Each instance is just a website with a public webpage that a bot can read. That all a search engine needs to index it. The worst case scenario is the bot will find the same content on multiple instances.
I did read that the website is loaded entirely through JavaScript and that maybe the Google bot doesn't execute JavaScript so can't see the text. I don't know if that's still a problem in 2023, though.
This article says it's not a problem, but I didn't read past the tl;dr, so maybe there's a caveat. Like maybe it has to use a popular framework like React or something to work.
https://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls-javascript-heres-learned-220157
One of my coworkers absolutely loves Musk and I can't understand why... The guy's a joke. I feel like people think Musk is smart just because he's eccentric and has money, I hope eventually everyone comes to see just how normally intelligent he actually is
I have a friend who defended Musk when I called him (Musk) an asshole. I choose not to bring up anything related to Musk to protect the friendship. Same friend has been showing other signs that he's being pulled to the far-right. Makes me sad.
All it takes is a lack of critical thinking skills to get headed down that road. I've seen a few family and friends get sucked into the far right ideology, but they were already not so bright people to begin with
Very good. An evil corporation doing evil things to an evil agenda.
Blocking users who are not logged in has farther reaching consequences that aren't readily apparent. For example, there was an AMBER Alert a few days ago with a short link to see more info. The link goes back to a Twitter account/tweet. All that time sensitive, useful information was behind a wall where you can't see it unless you log in. Most people aren't going to create an account just to do that.
This is exactly why we should be encouraging local libraries, universities, law enforcement, city, and county governments how to set up Mastodon servers.
On the one hand, when you have a duty to inform the public, it no longer makes sense to suffer at the whims of tech billionaires. There was a time, for a decade or two, when these sites prioritized access and predictability, but no more. When you have information that you need to have accessible, the only guarantee is to control it yourself. They can still use corporate social media to get the message out to their network, but link it back to their mastodon account. Roll it into their IT departments just like their email server.
On the other hand, it's a critical step for the success of the fediverse. Universal email adoption came about because it was used by government and universities. What you could call the original social network is still an open protocol, it's not owned by any single corporation or government, and still the primary form of communication online. About 2 billion emails have been sent since you started reading this.
This is such an incredible and incompetent failure for the amber alert system too though to be fair
Yeah. Moronic to use Twitter for anything even remotely important like emergency alerts
I disagree.
Twitter was one of the largest social media platforms on the planet, and was especially huge in the US. Before Musk bought it it didn't show any signs of failure. It lasted over a decade, and had enough reach that I think it made a lot of sense for things like emergency alerts, government officials, etc. to use it as one means, even a main means, of disseminating information. It was really effective at that until what, a year ago?
I don't think anyone really predicted Elon Musk buying Twitter and running it into the ground within a year. Yes, it was hypothetically possible in our capitalist system, but there was no indication that it would until Elon made a joking tweet.
Because of how the modern internet has organized itself, it was inevitable that critical systems would utilize Twitter for it's reach.
I think you're applying hindsight and expecting people to have made decisions based on events that hadn't happened yet. Before musk bought Twitter it wasn't at all unreasonable for people to rely on it for information from government officials because it was the format millions of people were accustomed to receiving that information in every day.
Can someone please ELI5 what his end game is? I refuse to pay attention to twitter, but Elon, he's crazy.
You are assuming he has one. Before he overpaid for Twitter, he probably thought he would turn it into a successful version of TruthSocial. Then reality came knocking. Now, he may have no idea what he's going to do.
When you were a kid, did you ever take apart an old vacuum cleaner or power tool, thinking "I'm going to make something great out of this"? Then, when you had all the pieces lying around you, you wondered why you even started because you have no idea what you are going to do now? That may be Elon at the moment. He's looking at the parts of his mom's treasured vacuum cleaner, and wondering how he can blame it on the brother his parents never gave him.
Elon's goal is to destroy twitter, per his wife.
Wait what
Probably some sort of rich person scheme that he can do whereby if his multi-billion dollar mistake ends up being a failure he can write it off and no longer be on the hook for it or something.
Like bankruptcy, but only for twitter and not himself.
People with power shouldn't be allowed any control over platforms that give power to "the people". I believe this is all intentional. If it was just Twitter, or just Reddit, or just 1 TV network, I wouldn't think that but they're sabotaging all the mainstream platforms at once and making it incredibly obvious. They're trying to collapse our means of communication ahead of 2024.
There's no way to prove or disprove this idea
#BoycottGoogle #BoycottMusk #BoycottBillionaires
If only that did anything
It does. People need to band together to hold these deranged billionaires to account.
