By "social media" we mean any large computer network that allows people to interact in shared communities. The big ones of course are Facebook, Twitter (X), and Instagram, but we can't forget newer platforms like Discord and Slack.
Dedicated video sites are off-topic here and YouTube has its own separate thread
.
What we should discuss in this OTC topic are news items, business operations, and activities by the networks themselves, not specific things posted by users. Those should go into threads appropriate to the subjects of those posts. For example, if an actor tweets about a film, we'd discuss that in the Media forum topic for the film, not here. If Facebook changes its policies, that could be discussed here.
The politics, motives, competency and wider business activities of the owners and leaders of social media companies (e.g. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg) are also off-topic — except in situations where they are directly making specific policy for the platform.
Talking about a particular Instagram policy change (or a high-profile ban on a specific user) directly announced by Mark Zuckerberg would be acceptable in this thread, speculating about Zuckerberg's wider motivations wouldn't be.
One exception is Truth Social, due to its connection to Donald Trump. As there is a forum ban on US Politics, all discussion of Truth Social is off-topic and posts about the platform may be thumped.
The thread's also not about "dumb thing [public figure] said on [social media platform]". If there isn't a specific thread related to the subject of the statement, then it's probably gossip and not worth talking about.
The hot topic of the day is Elon Musk's bid to acquire Twitter. We first discussed it in the Computer Thread, starting roughly here
, and I am not going to rehash the entire discussion. Instead, I am going to resume from the last post
:
CNBC: Twitter is reportedly taking another look at Musk takeover bid
Twitter's board is reportedly meeting with Elon Musk and may seek to negotiate on his buyout offer. Musk claims to have secured $46 billion in funding to buy the company at a valuation of $43 billion and is preparing to make a tender offer to its shareholders.
While the board has passed a poison pill, it could be facing resistance to that from groups of shareholders and will want to talk things out rather than face a hostile takeover. It's also possible that Twitter's stock could crash if the offer fails to go through.
Another possible topic was originally posted here
.
Ars Technica: EU to unveil landmark law to force Big Tech to police illegal content
Following on from the recently passed Digital Markets Act, which requires large tech companies to unbundle first-party software from hardware platforms, the proposed Digital Services Act will require medium and large social media platforms and search engines to police hate speech and disinformation while adding additional protections for children against targeted marketing.
It also bans "dark patterns", which manipulate or trick people into clicking on ads or other content. The article doesn't explicitly say what that means, but I assume it includes things like disguising ads to look like parts of a site's user interface, hiding "close" buttons, and such.
For large companies, the requirements would go into effect immediately. For medium companies, they would have a grace period to implement the changes.
Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner, has warned that Big Tech has become “too big to care.”
This phrase, "too big to care", intrigues me. It's an indictment of the idea that these companies have decided that growth and engagement metrics overwhelm any sense of social responsibility.
In my opinion, a law like this would be impossible in the United States, since it would be challenged (likely successfully) on First Amendment grounds.
Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 8th 2024 at 5:16:31 PM
Right now, high on the checklist is a banned topic, followed by another couple of banned topics.
To stay on-topic, further privacy laws for social media sites, especially by taking AI into account, are being drafted at both national and European levels.
Blue Sky has updated its policies
and fans are none too happy about its vagueness.
No.
EDIT: OK, let's talk about structures and protocols. This is how I understand things to work, and I am more familiar with Mastodon than BlueSky.
The Fediverse uses ActivityPub.
At the basic level, an instance is a full-fledged social media site with accounts, posts, and some subset of of boosts, upvotes, downvotes, follows, hashtags, content warnings, and groups. For example, Mastodon by default allows plain-text¹ posts of up to 500² characters, to which images files (including animated gifs) and polls of up to 4 options can be attached. Lemmy allows up to 5000 characters but does not allow attached files. Sharkey by default allows up to 3000 characters per post, Markdown, polls with unlimited options, and any kind of file can be attached. Pixelfed, PeerTube, and Castopod posts consist respectively of images, videos, and audio files, to which text may optionally be attached.
ActivityPub defines how different instances talk to each other. So, for example I can use my account on mastodon.ie to follow someone on cultofshiv.wtf. When that person makes a post on cultofshiv.wtf, I see it on mastodon.ie as a normal post in my timeline. If that person uses Markdown to format their post, I will see bold, italics, and inline links, even though I can't do such things with a Mastodon account. And then I can boost that post to my own followers, and also reply to it; my response, sent from mastodon.ie, will show up as a post under the one on cultofshiv.wtf. And then somebody using pixelfed.scot can reply to my response, and it builds up into a whole thread of people using accounts from different websites running different software to talk to each other.
ActivityPub is designed to scale upwards and downwards well. This means it's entirely possible, if you're a nerd, to run an instance on a Raspberry Pi plugged into your house modem. A fair number of people do exactly that to have their very own instance, such as atomicpoet.org
, which only has the one user
.
BlueSky uses ATProtocol, not ActivityPub. Thus, it is not part of the Fediverse; it is part of the ATmosphere.
The ATmosphere does accounts in a manner completely different to that of the Fediverse, and doesn't really have instances. From my perspective, what ATproto accomplishes is making "Sign in with Facebook" a decentralised standard that does not in principle depend on one company (though Bluesky Social PBC made sure to be the hegemon of the network). It was originally designed for the website formerly known as Twitter, with the aim of allowing posts from users not on twitter.com; as such, it's built around large-scale networks with millions of users, but it is impractically expensive and resource-intensive to run a relay for yourself and a few friends.
A relay is a social media website, like bsky.app. You can have an account on bsky.social, or you can make your own account on what is called a personal data server (PDS), which is your own website where your account lives. The important thing here is that while your account might live on your PDS, you aren't running a BlueSky instance; when you make a BlueSky post from your PDS, it is posted to bsky.app. bksy.app thus contains everything posted to the BlueSky network, unlike a Fediverse instance, where every post lives on the originating instance.
One cool thing about PDSes is that you can move your account from one to another seamlessly, and your posts all come with you. Nobody you follow notices anything different. This contrasts with the Fediverse, where moving accounts is possible on some but not all software, and when it is possible, it's difficult and fiddly, and your previous posts stay on your original instance. With ATproto, your posts are associated with an identity rather than a specific account on a specific website.
Relays use lexicons to build App Views. An App View is an interface and user experience defined by the lexicon, used by a specific relay. So basically bsky.app is the relay, and BlueSky is the App View, which is what you actually interact with on the site. The lexicon is how it works under the hood. One could, in principle, copy bsky.app's lexicon and App View to make RedAir, which would work the same as BlueSky and even show the same posts, because it would crawl the same set of PDSes. Indeed, this is what the Free Our Feeds campaign attempted, but they quickly found it was porhibitively expensive to run their own relay. I've heard that BlackSky has managed to crack the problem, but googling indicates it's a problem they're still working on.
People have built other social networks on top of ATproto, with their own lexicons and App Views. One example I found on Wikipedia is [[https://whtwnd.com/
White Wind=], a long-form blogging platform.
This is the big difference between the Fediverse and the ATmosphere. You can post to BlueSky, and it will show up to other users of the BlueSky App View. Likewise, you can make a post to WhiteWind, and it will show up to other users of the WhiteWind App View. But your WhiteWind post won't be visible to BlueSky users, nor will your BlueSky post be visible to WhiteWind users, because BlueSky and WhiteWind use different lexicons. I believe that a PDS can make both types of post if configured correctly, but they will still only show up on one or the other network, rather than both App Views being integrated into a wider network.
¹ mathstodon.xyz
supports LATEX notation, but this is a nonstandard customisation, and doesn't render properly on other instances
² Some, like hachyderm.io, allow for longer posts, but 500 characters is the default.
Edited by VampireBuddha on Aug 15th 2025 at 9:05:20 AM
Ukrainian Red CrossIn other news.
Brazilian Social Media Influencer Hytalo Santos and his husband
, which ran a Big Brother style "reality show" involving minors along multiple videos of minors dancing with revealing clothes, were arrested over child abuse charges.
The charges resulted from a video from Felipe Bressanim Pereira, known as Felca, exposing the adultification on children on Social Media and how Influencers use children to create content, engagement and revenue.
Felca's video on the subject inflamed discussions over the use and exposition of children in social media, their exploitation from promoting business, cults and up to sexual or sexualized content involving minors. Including the issues on Social Media on how sexual predators openly use Social Media networks to sell or exchange CSAM on the comment sections of sexualized videos involving minors, with the famous "link in bio" comments.
On top of the arrest of the Hytalo Santos, talks over regulating social media, court order take downs of videos from Hytalo and similar creators to Social Media and video channels not limited to Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and Instagram have been issue, are being a hot topic in Brazil as of now.
Felca's video is above and it has English subtitles via youtube.
Edited by AngelusNox on Aug 15th 2025 at 4:31:34 PM
Inter arma enim silent leges
Speaking of adultification of minors, this isn't just limited to influencers exploiting minors for clicks, revenue, and content. It can bizarrely be inverted, as shown from what Lil Tay's been doing.
It should be noted that her socials prior to OF are also filled with risqué images when she was 14-17 and it's shown that she's teasing the possibility of releasing even more risqué ones. Whenever this is done by her parents or herself is up in speculation, but it can say even more about the increasing number of users who are more comfortable expressing their darkest and sickest impulses in the internet.
You have a good heart. Don't lose it.I figure that live streamers count as Social Media now...?
Anyways, here's the news: streamer Raphaël Graven, also known as Jeanpormanove or JP, has died aged 46
.
Said like this it sounds like a simple "oh, sad".
Thing is, he wasn't any streamer. He was a very lonely, vulnerable man, with several health issues, who rose to "fame" with livestreams when his...let's say "crew" repeatedly abused him while he played video games.
And "abuse" is not too strong a word: he was punched, shot at with airsoft or paintball guns, choked, and forcibly sleep-deprived among (many, many) other things. But as said above, he was vulnerable, and on top of the physical abuse, his "crew" kept reminding him that he was nobody without them (his "first and only friends") so that he wouldn't leave even when they went way too far to the point it broke him.
He died during a 10-day streaming marathon where they kept finding new ways to brutally wake him up every time he tried to stream. 50 minutes passed between him passing out and his "crew" calling for an ambulance, while the chat was laughing about him really dying.
Did I mention that his mother tried to tell him to get out, but that some "crew" members kept calling her during the livestreams to humiliate her? And that they moved Raphael from his parent's home (where he was a bit safer) to one of their homes where he wasn't even on the loan papers, meaning they pretty much ensure he was trapped with them?
Now, the investigation is just beginning, but I'm 200% sure that we'll learn that his "crew" pocketed all the streaming money (and there was a lot of streaming money - this 10-day marathon already had made more than €30k when he died) and that Raphaël never even saw any of it.
I applaud Facebook for their anti-troll "only those who have followed this Page for at least 24 hours are allowed to comment" restriction. If only it would be implemented automatically for certain types of posts (political posts, LGBTQ+ posts, religious posts, etc.)
Edited by Theatre_Maven_3695 on Aug 26th 2025 at 8:57:59 AM
It's worth everything. That's how disinformation and propaganda spread: quickly. That's why is so hard to debunk anything. Hate is an emotion, and if emotion doesn't spread quickly, there is a very good chance it won't spread at all—the kind of people who boost such things have very short attention spans. Frankly, a 24 hour delay between clicking "share" and it actually being shared would do wonders.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.I am always wondering... if an adult video actress notices one of her works is being shared in free adult sites or social networks, would she be able to accuse the one who shares the video of sharing sexual content without consent?
I mean, she made sexual content consensually, but she does not expect to see her work being shared for free...

The EU, no. Member states, yes, almost everybody is working on one, whilst France has straight up temporarily banned porn sites who they felt weren't taking sufficient measures to make sure minors did not use their services.
''There's no magic in tuning; yet, it's something that tends to escape from any logic."