Today in Elon's Radical Free Speech News

He must just be hemorrhaging users.

Twitter has banned "promotion" of other social networks, including a long list of ways that you're not allowed to link to your profiles on other sides.

And it's not just Mastodon. Facebook! Instagram! Truth Social!

...but not Gab or Parler or Gettr. Overtly fascist sites are fine.


Links to other social media site profiles banned


In June, Elon said that when you see competing systems, the one that builds the wall to keep people in is the bad one


Four-panel comic where a Twitter bird yells at a Mastodon that the Mastodon is banned and to stop looking at his jet

working around twitter linkbans

I can confirm that Twitter linkblocking/linkbanning doesn't work on alternate-form text. I used smallcaps, but I'm confident anything would work.

When editing your profiles for Twitterexodus and Twittermigration purposes, run your text through this online text processor. It'll work until a human intervenes.

I don't even know how to start with this weekend with Musk Twitter

I genuinely don't even know how to start with this weekend.

You've seen bits of it, even if you go nowhere else. Mastodon successfully launched its first Internet Meme of the Day, proving that it's a real social network after all.

It got started when Mediaite reported on the JoinMastodon account being banned by Musk on Twitter. The reporter misread the account name as JOHN Mastodon, and made up whole cloth that John Mastodon was the founder of Mastodon, a company they made up as the operator of the Mastodon social network, named for John Mastodon. A few hours later, here we were. Also here and here and here and here and here and you get the idea it goes on a lot.

Musk Twitter responded by banning links to profiles on a list of other social media sites - calling it "promotion of other social media platforms" or some such bullshit - starting with links to Mastodon, but also Facebook, Instagram, Linktree (because those could have links to the banned sites, you see) and an assortment of others, but not to Gab, Gettr, or Parler, meaning basically that linking to explicitly fascist sites was still okay. That's since been modified and mostly wound down, but I don't know that Twitter isn't still tagging links to major Mastodon sites as unsafe/malware.

Which they were doing, if you missed that.

We know also that Musk went to Saudi Arabia for the world cup finale, was photographed with Jared Kushner in the Saudi box, and it's being reported his Saudi investors are not amused and have insisted he install a proper CEO and stop being a clown. He's currently running a poll about whether he should step down as CEO. Last I saw, he was losing badly.

Also banned from Twitter were several more reporters, another assortment of left-leaning people (usual suspects and all that), and a bunch of other people who dared link off-site such as Paul Graham of Y Combinator, one of the most important if not the most important venture capital groups in Silicon Valley. Parts 1 and 2 are funny, but it's part 3 which is the real "life comes at you fast sometimes" story.

Meanwhile, Tesla investors are getting pretty angry, though I don't have a convenient link and I need to get this posted, sorry. I may edit later if I come across one.

And all hilarity aside, it's very important to note that Twitter absolutely is becoming a deadly serious disinformation hub throughout all of this, with a particular emphasis on anti-vaccination conspiracy theories. See also. So get off Twitter, stay away from Twitter. For reals.

Meanwhile, Mastodon is currently dealing with another mass influx of new users, with the largest instances putting a temporary stop to accepting additional accounts. With so many nodes, however, this hasn't really affected the uptake rate yet. It's not quite up to the terrifying numbers of the Great Day of Layoffs, but it's close. The largest instances are a bit slow at the moment, but staying up. Smaller instances are generally doing fine.

I'm genuinely kind of stunned at how well Mastodon-the-software has scaled so far. This is an absolutely brutal stress test, and it's holding up - as yet, anyway. Fingers crossed.

And that's the news.