Still annoyed that Twitter / X remains so popular with some groups, like AI developers and NBA fans. New teasing post “NS41” from the OpenAI devs account this morning is “5.5” base64-encoded. Presumably GPT-5.5 is almost ready.

@manton While not contained to the US, Americans do have a wonderful [sic] talent for ignoring the ugliness festering around us. Racism. Homelessness. Poverty. Hunger. Violence. Mental health. Crapitalism. Crime. The list is endless. We see it and just keep going, either because we find it annoying or we feel powerless to fix it. Xitter is simply one of the most blatant examples of this, unfortunately.

@manton I think you could find a good NBA community on Threads given that they often use the NBA convo as a testing ground for new features (i.e. their new “community chat”)

@iChris I think you’re right. I don’t use Threads anymore, though.

@manton Fully understand why. It’s too bad it’s Meta because the experience these days is the closest to the fun days of Twitter back in the day.

@manton does that include not syndicating to it ?

@JohnPhilpin Yeah, I personally turned off syndication a while ago. I’d rather focus on Micro.blog, the fediverse, and Bluesky.

@manton I just got back from AI Engineer Miami and… every presenter but one shared a Twitter handle. It is what it is. Despite the seriously degrading app experience, X remains the internet’s general breaking pulse.

I had hoped that Bluesky’s open ecosystem would win, but it has seemingly only managed to foment what might be the most toxic user base of them all? Users only seem to continue declining.

The only viable AI alternative to X is probably Hacker News, or maybe some Mastodon instance I’m unaware of. Ironically if I could just have Tweetbot back, I’d probably pay for X as much as I’d like to divorce my brain from it.

@manton For me, it’s the NFL and Ruby communities. While there is a good-sized NFL community on Bluesky, it seems the teams are still prohibited from creating accounts there, despite already having accounts on Instagram and, presumably, Facebook. I suspect there is still a sizable Ruby community on X. I don’t see much of a Ruby community elsewhere, aside from the ruby.social Mastodon instance.

@matthewlang X still far better for sports and other stuff. I’ve been able to ignore most of the right-wing crap by liberally blocking. My feed is actually pretty good there now.

@bax I agree on Bluesky. It’s just a left-wing version of X’s right-wing. And oddly enough because of “the algorithm” I’ve been able to avoid most of the BS on X! I follow a few artists on Bluesky but that’s about it these days.