In my personal view it is high time both Meta and X were told by our government to clean up their acts or get banned as it has been proven time and time again they are both damaging to our society and our democracy here in UK!

#socialnetworks #meta #x

CNBC: Bluesky was launched as a Twitter rival — but it’s far less popular. Now it’s eyeing Reddit for inspiration. “Bluesky, the social media platform that originated within Twitter, rose to prominence as a rival to the network after Elon Musk acquired the company and rebranded it as X. But, two years since its launch, the site has around just 10% of X’s estimated global users. […]

Move Fast, Surveil Things

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/move-fast-surveil-things

#TechnicalAnalysis #FaceSurveillance #SocialNetworks

Yesterday, on multiple occasions, I noticed young people filming videos for TikTok, and I'm pretty sure I ended up in the background of a few.

Today, for the very first time, I decided to install the app and search for the location's hashtag. I found way more videos than I expected, though I didn't spot myself.

As I kept scrolling, driven by whatever logic fuels their algorithm, the content started to shift. In no time at all, I was flooded with videos of young girls, not all of them adults, in explicit poses and highly revealing clothes. They were performing (what they clearly thought were) sensual dances, all following the exact same trend and the same background music. Then came the boys, doing something similar but different, flexing and showing off their bodies as if they were standing in front of a mirror.

I kept scrolling without pausing, as none of this holds even the slightest interest for me.

Eventually, I stumbled upon what I assume was some kind of "challenge": young girls simulating sexual acts to entertain their male friends, all synced to the beat of the music. It was quite explicit, even if they weren't actually showing skin. The captions said something along the lines of "Can we still stay best friends?" or something similar.

For a brief moment, I felt like decades of "we are more than just bodies" and hard-fought battles for women's respect had just gone up in smoke - all reduced to cheap sexual innuendos in exchange for a few likes.

Maybe I'm just getting old. But I uninstalled the app without a second thought.

#TikTok #SocialNetworks #Trends

TechCrunch: TikTok’s road to becoming a super app. “Although TikTok is widely described as a social media giant, it’s been gradually moving beyond that category. Over time, the video app added TikTok Shop, a map for local discovery, robust search, games, and so much more. Now, it has recently added hotel booking capabilities and is pursuing a fintech license.”

Love and loyalty

It’s easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.

slip:4a1251.

Social media

We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad… all we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.

slip:4a1103.

Solving the Identity Challenge in Decentralized Social Networks

https://openchannels.fm/solving-the-identity-challenge-in-decentralized-social-networks/

A big ol’ distraction

Quit your yakkin’ and get busy. Quit wasting time obsessing about pimping your ass and checking your stats. Instead, MAKE stuff. Make AMAZING stuff. Make stuff that is so good that people have no choice but to find out about it. Otherwise, you REALLY are just wasting your time. This game is already TOO hard and TOO BIG a time suck to fritter away on what is, for the most part, a big ol’ distraction.

slip:4a947.

Nature: Instance-level community detection in the Mastodon federation: a graph- and content-based approach. “This study analyzes Mastodon, a prominent federated social network made of several interconnected instances, and investigates community detection at the instance level by integrating content-based edge weighting to enhance modularity maximization techniques.”