Stephen King leaves X, describing atmosphere as ‘too toxic’
Stephen King leaves X, describing atmosphere as ‘too toxic’
Author denies Elon Musk kicked him off platform and says he is joining rival Threads
Summary
Stephen King announced his departure from X (formerly Twitter), calling the platform “too toxic” and urging followers to join him on Threads.
King has frequently clashed with X owner Elon Musk over verification charges and political disputes, including Musk’s support for Donald Trump.
Other entities, including The Guardian, German football club St Pauli, and actor Jamie Lee Curtis, have also left the platform, citing concerns over toxic content, misinformation, and hate speech.
Rival platforms like Threads and Bluesky are gaining traction, with Bluesky reporting nearly 15 million users globally.
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Anything but Mastodon/Activitypub, eh? These fellas rlly love sucking on corporate dicks, don't they
Mastodon is a far worse experience than Twitter and Bluesky, it's not a 1:1 transition.
Attitudes like yours certainly isn't attracting any new users...
Sure, but he's not wrong. I'll never get why people love to rail again corporations and enshittification while using those sites.
Why wouldn't they want to join this place and be called bootlickers for moderate policy take by some screaming communist from a .ml? Sounds like a great time to me! Getting yelled at by flying squid twice a day is a joy!
This place is primarily made up of a ton anarchist and communists screaming and spreading their own bullshit. Centrist and and less progressive folks are commonly shouted at, called bootlickers, or Nazis for relatively centrrist views.
Mods and admins are far less balanced than reddit or pre x Twitter as well. LWis about to as close to center as you can get and it's quite obvious.
StarTrek.website recently defederated from hexbear and we got called names too. I'd say our instance is pretty well balanced and small.
I'll check it out!
What do you mean when you say "this place"? Because Lemmy is decentralized, and it can vary wildly by instance and community.
LW. The only instance really even close to supporting commercial needs. I may be missing a few snale ones but LWis the most "normal" for lack of a better description.
It's still small, so the whole platform still feels like one of the larger reddit subs. The same people show up everywhere, and if you want to create a niche community, you'll go months without seeing any posts.
It really boggles my mind the cognitive dissonance of everybody constantly complaining about corporations screwing them over, then refusing to use the obvious solution to their problems.
I can absolutely believe that an old guy like Stephen King has never even heard of Mastodon. It's not like there's a big Mastodon PR team being paid to advertise its existence.
Good point. Does anyone know an animator? I'll write some promotional material.
Lemmy is definitely its own little bubble. People here really misestimate the average person’s exposure to tech news or how much they can understand or care about operating systems and distributed protocols.
You’re all in here shouting about this to eachother and nobody hears you.
Yeah like the average person has never heard of enshitification. It's not even an established concept in their mind.
They may have a vague sense that things are getting shittier on the big platforms, but probably don't even consider smaller platforms or decentralization as solutions
Do you think people on Lemmy talking about Linux are trying to court non-tech people? It's a discussion board, and it has communities for discussion of Linux. What do you think you'll find when you go there?
That's right, people discussing Linux. Wild.
I dont think that at all. I think when people ask “why not mastodon” it’s coming from a place of misconception. Their own exposure to this knowledge and information is disproportionately higher than the world average, but it’s so much higher they can’t really comprehend how low the average is.
Much like a billionaire thinks a banana costs $10, a lemmy user thinks people know about mastodon at all.
I can totally believe that he didn't know about mastodon, but even Bluesky is like a reasonable platform. Threads... I see literally no upside to using threads. It's on a timer from the beginning to turn into another X. Just look at how long Facebook has been a cesspool of Nazi propaganda.
I've been using Bluesky for a couple of days and I honestly think it's okay. I'm not big on microblogging in general, but I can follow just my long-distance friends and no one else and only have to see other people's crap if one of my friends shares it. So that's nice. My only issue with Mastodon was one of the same ones I had with Twitter- if I followed people I was interested in but didn't know, my feed just got too busy for me.
But that seems to work for a lot of people?
Mastodon is like Costco. They don’t advertise much.
Someone should tell him
We're here for fun. Celebs are on social media as part of their brand. It's them doing business, and they're going to use what the feel will reach the largest audience with the least effort on their part, and something with corporate backing likely has customer support for moderation, hacking, and whatever else. They're not here for a digital revolution, they're here to keep their name and income stream out there.
I imagine it's the same reasoning why a business will pay for Red Hat when they could run Linux for free. It may or may not be the best option, but they feel it offers tangible benefits.
This is absolutely correct. And these businesses are typically paying employees to manage these social accounts so there is financial risk with choosing one that's not going to result in revenue. Why market on a platform with no audience or backing?
I'm not saying I like it, but that is indeed how things work.
Yup, I just replied to another comment, what's so bad about having a place that's just regular people? I enjoy having my comments actually read here and getting to know some of you to some level. I'd lose interest in this place if it turned into new Twitter. I can't compete with Taylor or Beyonce or whoever the flavor of the week is. We can have both platforms if we so choose, so why wreck one for the sake of another?
Couldn't one person just copy/paste each thing they post on one platform, to the others? At least until it's clear which platform will be twitter's successor? They're all free, so why not hedge? Do you really need to hire another person if you want to have another social media account on a different platform?
Although federated social media has the "chicken or egg" problem with content and attracting users, I'm content with places like Lemmy and Mastodon staying the small size they are right now for a little longer.
Sure, I definitely miss content from other platforms from time to time. But I think your comment about businesses and celebrities rings true. I'm happy to be clear of the grifters and influencers for as long as possible.
Exactly. For all the things that typically get complained about: one product trying to do everything, people coming in to monetize things, feeling like your voice gets lost in oceans of comments, it seems like people forget that when it comes to the Fediverse.
The same guys that spent all that time being mad about potential federation with Threads are mad that this place isn't going to be Twitter 2.0? It doesn't make sense to me. If you want ads and celebs, go see them at their place. Keeping this just place us regular people doesn't need to be a negative. There's room for both.
Well, if the corporatized platforms all went to federated instances, it'd be a lot easier to pack up and move to a different platform, or fix the existing platform by choosing different instances. It would make those platforms better and we would probably still have our own spaces either using different protocols, or different clusters of instances who only federate with each other.
Threads being federated is not them actually trying to be federated, but trying to EEE the open competition, and I think that is more of a threat to us than people joining mastodon.
Edit: I'm realizing that I'm kind of contradicting myself here lol
That was my initial gripe with the other commenters. Nobody ever likes the one-size-fits-all software platforms. It's always got too much of what you dont want and not enough what you do. All these social platforms are free., why mix them when we can use the ones we want. Installing Lemmy and Bluesky apps is easy, but if you later decide you dont want Bluesky, you just uninstall. If all those people would come here, you'd have to get people to defederate or you have to pack up and leave for another instance. That seems a lot more hassle to me than just using a second app.
Lemmy is great as-is. Let's be proud of it. It gives me a day's worth of content as it stands now....probably more than I actually should use it already!
Look, this time Leopards Multiglobal, Inc will not eat our faces!
There is a slight learning curve to Mastodon. Is there a method for verifying accounts? Honest question there. I signed up for Mastodon years ago but I used it as often as I used Twitter which is to say never.