Elon Musk’s latest changes for X are driving more users away – not exactly a surprise, granted – and many of them are flocking to rival social media outlet Bluesky. So many made the switch, in fact, it led to Bluesky briefly going down due to the volume of incoming new users.
The central move initiated by X that made the headlines for driving migration away from Musk’s platform is a change to the way the ‘Block’ button works. This was actually announced back in September, but is officially being implemented now (well, it’ll be in place ‘soon’ we’re told).
It means that going forward, X users who you have blocked will still be able to view your (public) posts – though they won’t be able to engage with them in any way (from replies to liking and so forth).
This is problematic for obvious reasons, in terms of enabling stalkers and trolls who will still be able to view the posts of an account that has blocked them, when previously this wasn’t the case. In the past, blocking meant that the blocked user couldn’t see any posts (or anything at all, save for a message telling them that they’ve been blocked), but soon, this will change.
Bluesky posted to say it had in excess of 100,000 new users inside 12 hours following the announcement by X, after the rival network highlighted the fact that its block function stops those who are blocked from viewing any posts.
In an update, Bluesky noted that it has now gained half a million new users in the past day.
There’s another reason that some folks are rapidly exiting from X stage left (and right, and indeed center, clambering over the audience, it would seem), and that’s a change to X’s privacy policy.
As TechCrunch reports, the new policy includes an update that allows third-party collaborators to use content on X to train their AI models – unless the user opts out. This is a notable extension of the reach of AI training on X, which has so far only been used to train Musk’s own Grok AI (unless users opt out, again).
That’s how blocking and banning on the internet has always worked. When you block someone they just can’t reply to you. The way it was until now is just weird. Why would blocking an account prevent them from viewing your public posts!? “Stalkers” can always just make another account. I am glad they are actually fixing blocking on Twitter. g
I’m wondering the same thing. I never really used Twitter, couldn’t people just stalk without being logged in? Or was this to weed out the least motivated stalkers?
You used to. Not anymore. Musk made it so that if you try to view somebody’s profile, and you aren’t logged in, you don’t see anything except for a big box asking you to log in.
Also, it’s not so much about stalking per se, but being able to reshare posts (and thus bully) their targets. The way X is right now, they’d have to have a direct link to the post in question and then screenshot it.
I see. Guess that explains why back when reddit changed their blocking to this way people complained
Yes, you can. That’s why it was even dumber. It’s super weird to me that anyone could be mad about this.
There a lot of reasons to hate Elon. He’s making new reasons every day lately.
A lot of people hate him for completely bs reasons like this though and then come off as hating anything he does just for the sake of hating him.
No one on Lemmy is upset about this. It only provides them an opportunity to increase their hate boner for Musk.
I created a filter to block all posts with “Elon Musk” in the title. It appears I have some updates to make.