The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

In the past few months alone I’ve seen:

  • A birthrate obsessed substacker who wants to ban car seats to increase minivan sales
  • Two people off HN who went on thinly race-iq rants only to say that race and iq doesn’t even matter because ChatGPT is going to lift the non-whites into sapience and end racism. Neither substacker seemed to know each other, yet came to the same ridiculous conclusion.
  • A former femboy, turned reply-guy who tweets about how the hidden figures woman was actually white like once a week
  • Another xitter user who’s made 10 posts a day insisting that Ethiopians are actually mostly white, which is why they had castle and shit

And honestly there’s a lot more of these guys that are crazy than they are racist; I just so happened to remember the most offensive posters. Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

    • self@awful.systemsMEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      I’m imagining something like that too — a lot of these would generally fit in with TechTakes’ mission statement, but could be a good fit for more of a weekly thread format. my only concern is lemmy seems to be absolutely terrible at surfacing slightly older threads that still have activity, which makes any kind of megathread unfortunately more difficult to sustain (and I wonder if that’s intentional on the part of the devs — some folks just get weirdly angry about slightly older threads getting new posts). I’m definitely willing to give the format a try though, and we can see how well it works for this

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        9 months ago

        I’d say that’s ok as I browse by Comments-New anyway, but that reminds me that the “Next” button is broken in that view, so the surfacing issue is still pertinent.

          • skillissuerEnglish
            3·
            9 months ago

            matrix has e2ee, threaded discussion, you can put images there directly and there’s already nice button in lemmy where you can put your matrix handle

            • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
              3·
              9 months ago

              is it like discord threaded discussion? that works suprrisingly well, but also its discord and fundamentally ephemeral on too short a timescale for my taste

              • skillissuerEnglish
                4·
                9 months ago

                i don’t use discord a lot but in general matrix looks a bit like discord, threads on matrix are a separate chat that opens in a sidebar. all of these threads are accessible from single place

                i think that this ephemeral nature of matrix fits well with news and low effort content, and if anyone wants to elaborate then it’s a start of a post here

              • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
                4·
                9 months ago

                Tangent: I keep wondering whether discord sells enough hats[0] to gamer whales to sit stably on the product side, esp. with shit like midjourney and others that must cause ridiculous amounts of useless data over time. Certainly they could drop those or charge for them or whatever, but renting computers from hyperscalers does add up over time…

                [0] - I cannot see their nitro pitches as anything but the TF hats model

        • self@awful.systemsMEnglish
          3·
          9 months ago

          shit, I like that too — and it’d work to coordinate some things for this instance I’ve been wanting to try

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            4·
            9 months ago

            I’d try that, although I imagine some initial cursing might apply while figuring out a decent client option

            • skillissuerEnglish
              2·
              9 months ago

              matrix comes in package with figuring your own cryptography, admittedly less of an issue in public rooms, but other than that you have to back up keys always

              Element is decent

              • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
                3·
                9 months ago

                Element was the thing I tried previously and my opinion of it from then is anything but decent

                I’ll see if they fixed the stupid shit from last time yet, it’s been 2y

                  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
                    4·
                    9 months ago

                    so uh, element. still seems a bit ungood

                    first 3 minutes:

                    it starts out in eye-stabbing bright login screen at start (even with system in dark mode), and then followed this up by taking nearly a minute (???) to open Notifications under settings. seems it still defaults to dings and popups, and there seems to be even more possible sources for those now? madness

                    props: it has an analytics consent prompt, yay, good. but: I was already clicking around in settings and didn’t see anything for that, only noticed that prompt after exiting settings. clicked no. and now… I still don’t see that setting? lolwat

                    at least account and such work, so I guess I’ll see how this goes for a few days. I’m on matrix.org, if someone wants to poke a thing

          • skillissuerEnglish
            2·
            9 months ago

            you don’t even have to self host in order for it to work

            • self@awful.systemsMEnglish
              2·
              9 months ago

              some things will actually work better with a matrix server that isn’t hosted here, in particular outage announcements and disaster continuity. plus I’ve hosted matrix before and I remember it takes up a fuckton of storage, which our current deployment can’t really sustain without expansion

              what’s a good matrix homeserver these days?

              • skillissuerEnglish
                3·
                9 months ago

                i’m using tchncs.de and it Mostly Works™ the only recurring issues being with telegram and signal bridges

                Notably there’s little to none crypto spammers and conspiracy weirdos there

    • skillissuerEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      in a community i mod there is now a matrix room as a replacement of weekly low effort/news thread and so far it works pretty well