The band Muse has surrendered its Instagram and X handles to Meta after the release of its new AI agent, Muse.
The English rock band Muse has been renamed on Instagram and X from “Muse” to “museband.”
Despite the band Muse having had its Instagram account since 2012 and its X account since 2008, it has seemingly surrendered the handle to Mark Zuckerberg’s newest AI agent.
Absolutely insane. If the account was inactive, sure or it was some no name band, ok. But really sucks to see it. I don’t see anything about it, but i hope they were at least compensated.
I managed to grab a nice 3 letter twitter name that ended up being the name of a company who just had twitter support (before twitter sucked) send me a message and they offered to buy it from me - reasonable price too. I wasn’t holding it for ransom, it also happens to be my initals too, and I just posted family shit, small links, activities, boring shit for friends. I didn’t care and it was still early enough I could get the same 3 letters with 2 numbers after. Walked away with a nice 5k pocket change. Had I declined it might have ended up in court, but this shit looks like the billionaires club just commanded it.
I didn’t know about meta new AI agent before reading this X post. You idiots you are advertising AI
Get off of X already, as though there wasn’t reason enough before.
Even @metamuse or @musebymeta would’ve been fine…
@Metamucil breathes a sigh of relief
This means war with your creators
No it doesn’t. Idiots will still stay because tHeSe PlAtFoRmS hAvE bEtTeR rEaCh.
Dude…
They’re referencing muse lyrics……….
Rise up and take the power back.
It’s time the fat cat’s had a heart attack.
You know their time’s coming to an end…we have to unify and watch our flag ascend.
Open letter to everyone here, who’s tired of these corporate bullshits and wanna take action: Let’s start discussing the solid/concrete steps that we can start taking rather than screaming into the void:
I was personally going after big corporations (To name a few: PayPal, Patreon, Microsoft, Google, anything that Epic Games own, Bandcamp, Artstation, etc.), any state organs who do receive my complaints but hide behind institutional shields, deploying administrative silence, concealing their full name and title during official correspondence and I did and am still getting results through judicial/consumer protection law oriented bodies such as CFPB, DFPI, Federal Trade Commission, and even going after some German judges who refused to initiate a court case when they’re informed that the criminals were German police officers. Doesn’t matter if it’s a company or a judge, you do can go after them. It all boils down to whether you wanna take action or just complain about it online. The latter as we all know doesn’t fruit to anything.
I can create a detailed guideline on how to go after these motherfuckers legally for free, which laws they’re blatantly breaking, how to contact these regulatory bodies, what to cite in your legal complaints and so on. We can even start a god damn funding pool to take these motherfuckers to court.
I’m open to hear anyone’s opinion on what else we can do, what steps we can take. If I can get results, imagine the fuss we can create with an unified voice.
I might be out of the loop - what did Patreon and Bandcamp do?
Bandcamp hides their support email addresses inside of terms and uses policy. There isn’t a single contact method displayed on any of their index pages. If you confront them with this, they do not acknowledge it, by simply not responding to your legal question.
In my personal experience, my account was hijacked, so I tried to contact them to unlink my associated Gmail and PayPal accounts, no reply whatsoever.
If you send a legal notice to Patreon’s legal department, it returns this channel is not monitored error, and in the very same email, they claim they have no responsibility to address legal concerns sent to them through this channel.
No company or state organs are legally allowed to limit communication methods to a single method. In addition to that, if you lose access to your email address, even with the correct credentials, Patreon sends a verification code to the very same email address, to which you have no access to. Instead of deploying ownership authentication methods such as cross referencing government issued IDs with the data in their system and the payout methods you provided (In my case it was PayPal), they claim there’s no 2FA activated on your account, and they give you bullshit solutions like change your browser and stuff. All of these are illegal, directly violating consumer protection laws. Also, they hide their support personnel names and titles to avoid individual liabilities. I can keep going.
Rise up and take the power back.
It’s time the fat cat’s had a heart attack.
F yeah MUSE lyric drop
Muse should join the fediverse.
Everyone should use the fediverse. Governments in particular should host their own instances, rather than post to Twitter or Instantgran or some corporate instance.
But, it shows how unafraid of competition Zuckerberg is that he’d do something like this.
Makes me really sad. I used to listen to a lot of their music.
Used to? Check out their latest album. It is pretty great I’ve been listening to it on repeat. I wouldn’t call myself a huge Muse fanatic (no tattoos, I don’t know every single lyric, etc.) but I think they’re great. Plus their concert performances are out of this world. To the point where I’m literally disappointed by any other concert. They’re so good they’ve ruined me.
If you’re going to listen to ONE song off the new album try Cryogen or Hush.
It is so odd that everybody seems to dump on facebook (and rightly so), but everybody is still using instagram, perhaps even more than ever.
Isn’t that where the scantily clad ladies are? I feel like I see Instagram linked with all sorts of shady stuff like that.
Nope, never used it, never will.
99 probs but IG aint one
And WhatsApp.
I had to open an Instagram this year after never having to use it. It has become so popular that government agencies, cultural events, and company’s information is only published there. It’s also become increasingly difficult to scrap information from there or even visit it from a website.
My wife sometimes sends me Instagram links, and half the time they don’t even open to the post she was sending me. Most of the time it’s obvious (such as if I get sent to the main feed), but sometimes it takes me to a completely different post. WHAT THE HELL WAS I SUPPOSED TO SEE?!
I’ve tried to follow some artists on Instagram, but it never seems to show me their most recent posts. I have to go into each one and look individually. It prioritizes random other people over the people I’ve specifically followed. If I click on someone’s profile circle at the top of the page, I get …a video? It doesn’t take me to their page where I can fucking see what they’ve posted lately.
What a pain in the ass. I rarely use it. It’s just not worth the headache. Too bad, because I really like things like the thrillhousecycling account, which is cycling memes using Simpsons screen shots.
We all know Facebook, et al, have algorithms to prioritize certain content, but Instagram’s seems to be far, far worse. I only follow ~3 accounts, and I see dozens of other things, but not the ones I actually follow.
Here’s an idea, stop using Instagram and it will die.
Come at me.
Sure if hundreds of millions stop using it. But convincing the uncritical masses to stop using it is a fruitless endeavour. Not to mention all the racists and homophobes and attention seekers it seems to attract.
And for me it’s my only way of communicating with many of my friends
only way of communicating with many of my friends
A big joke around here is you can send me a carrier pigeon. But aside from this, do yall not have phone numbers? Your main form of communication with your friends is through instagram and it’s the only way?
Yes of course I have a phone number, I also have an email address and a PO box and a slack account etc. but I’m not going to be the guy expecting people to go out of their way to use a different messaging system just to message me, because what would just happen is my friends just bother to talk to me less. Especially if it’s someone I’ve just met who doesn’t have an existing relationship to me.
Do you really think your friends and family don’t like/love you enough to install an app for you, like Signal, or wouldn’t bother to open any other messenger? Just think about it for a moment. That would be very sad and is probably not true.
If it’s just you? Yeah, you’re just going to be forgotten and left out.
LMAO Those arnt good fucking friends then eh?
People who only talk to you because it is convenient are not friends. Also, group chat from your number is a thing. Very odd someone would pick instagram of all places to communicate with people as a main.
people have no idea that there is a world outside the meta cage
Right?! Nothing good for one’s humanity happens on Instagram.
I live in a “developing” country where most local businesses don’t have the funds to maintain a dedicated website, so they have their online presence through Instagram or Facebook and offer ordering via WhatsApp.
I don’t love how Meta’s sites are baked into our informal infrastructure here, but it’s the way of things. My refusal to participate is not going to change the system; it’s just going to affect my ability to find information.
I use Instagram for checking business hours and looking at menus. (I’m not even connected with my actual friends who use it.) I don’t think the content I seek out is bad for my humanity, but I also understand that my feed looks very different from most.
It’s possible to build a more affirming experience for yourself, but you’ll still be shown clickbait trash because the algorithm seeks to drive engagement.
But how else am I to feed my depression without a constant barrage of random information?
This is hilarious.
I bet Muse got paid. If I were in the band I’d say absolutely sell the thing- the Muse AI thing is going to crash and burn anyway so might as well get paid especially if they’re too dumb to realize MuseAI would be a better handle anyway.
museband should have taken museNotAI
RealMuseic
Congratulations Zuck! You locked down the rights to another metaverse! Everyone knows how crucial the metaverse is in their daily lives.
I’m starting to see the benefits of these federated services
“Surrendered” is only applicable if the band had a choice.
Remember folks, calling out shitty wording is necessary to defeat propoganda.
I bet they got paid, but don’t want to disclose that. I hope it was enough to be worth it, and would be hilarious if they announced leaving the platform after the checks clear, but they probably won’t.
They had a choice. They chose to advertise themselves on the “Grandma’s Racist Rants And Old White Guys With Sunglasses Who Hate Poor People” platform. Color me shocked that it’s turning out to have been a bad choice.
I absolutely hate that so many people still use these shit platforms run my the worst people on the planet. That said, if you are famous, there is a dilemma where, if you refuse to use these platforms, someone will make a fake account that purports to be you.
At the same time, these people would have the pull to really promote the alternatives. Imagine if a channel with tens of millions of followers announces they are leaving for the Fediverse. Thing is, they are most likely getting a metric fuck-ton of money on Instagram and the like, so I’m not counting on that to happen anytime soon.
They’ll do that whether you have an account or not.
Not just famous. There are impersonators everywhere, low effort and cost and you probably won’t be punished for it. It’s the next level of spam.
They chose to advertise themselves on the “Grandma’s Racist Rants And Old White Guys With Sunglasses Who Hate Poor People” platform.
While true, they also advertised themselves on a platform most Americans use.
Say what you want about someone’s ability to not use a social media platform in the first place, but if you’re a band that depends on… people, it’s hard to just decide not to put yourself out there on a platform where so many people are.
The network effect is real. It’s where people’s friends, family, celebrities, bands, etc all are. Leaving means leaving people who are important to you.
A lot of people find it easier to leave platforms like Twitter now, because the platform is such a shell of its former self that it doesn’t even provide what many people originally came there for, but if you’re on Instagram, Facebook, etc, it still often provides people with easy communication to/from family and friends, and organizations like bands with access to an audience, promotion, visibility, etc.
Leaving the platform means leaving fans, and giving up visibility. I wish everyone could just quit Meta’s platforms and crush the company, but there’s a very simple collective action problem at play here that makes it very difficult, don’t discount that.
I think it applies differently to famous, rich, figures who already have an audience. They could loudly announce they’re leaving facebook. A chunk of their fans would follow. They’re already rich, they can tank losing some fans. It would be better for everyone to get people off Facebook platforms and onto open ones.
Some local band that’s struggling to get their first EP out I could maybe cut some slack on going to where the people are.
That’s fair. Still, I do think it’s a tad unreasonable to expect of people, when it can significantly impact their popularity and thus their income, when the actual effect of them leaving is usually that… essentially nothing happens to the company they’re leaving from.
Unfortunately, Facebook and its users likely won’t care much if someone leaves the platform, as long as they can keep scrolling. It’s gotta be on a very large scale, with a lot of people giving up portions of their audience before more people start genuinely moving to alternatives.
significantly impact their popularity and thus their income,
The person referenced successful bands that don’t need more money. That’s really no different than saying, “You can’t expect billionaires to stop being evil when it would significantly impact their income.”
essentially nothing happens to the company they’re leaving from.
The network effect works both ways. See Myspace and Friendster.
That’s really no different than saying, “You can’t expect billionaires to stop being evil when it would significantly impact their income.”
Not really, I don’t consider bands to be as parasitic as billionaires, because they at least do something to earn their money. If you’re a billionaire, you can just hire someone to take your place, leave, and profit forever, but if all the members of a band step aside to let a whole different crew of people take over, that band probably isn’t gonna have anywhere near the same following or quality as it did before.
Still, I do kind of understand the point.
The network effect works both ways. See Myspace and Friendster.
MySpace is actually a great example of this, because Facebook found a way to remove switching costs for users moving to Facebook, which is why Facebook succeeded.
Facebook made a bot that would automatically scrape all your MySpace activity from friends, and forward it to Facebook.
Moving to Facebook meant not having to leave anyone behind, because you could still see everything from them and respond to them, but you got a better experience, so that’s what many people did. Eventually, the people they were getting forwarded messages from on MySpace just switched to Facebook too.
Leaving Facebook now does not carry these same benefits. There is no other app that allows you to do this without Facebook cracking down on it and severing your access. Hence, switching costs are very high.
Facebook opened the door to themselves, and then locked the door shut, leaving you only the fire escape as an exit.
Sure, like King Gizzard left spotify and put their music on bandcamp. They got some press about it. Some of my friends went to bandcamp to get their music, even. But the vast majority of people still just use spotify. People don’t care about things, especially if it would be inconvenient.
It’s still good to get people off private platforms.
tl;dr fascist bootlicker apologia
I’d hardly call explaining the network effect and collective action problem fascist apologia, but you do you.
All I’m saying is you can’t expect someone to leave behind most of their audience’s primary way of communicating with them scot-free. There are always consequences.
Let’s say they stop posting on Instagram. Out of those 2.7 million followers, only a fraction will find them on another platform, and thus they simply lose their ability to message to all the people they left behind. That hurts them.
You can still think it’s a net good for society for them to leave, or that it would meaningfully hurt Facebook (it wouldn’t unless most people also left, but again, collective action problem), but you can’t act like they don’t face consequences by doing it. It’s not “fascist bootlicker apologia” to say that leaving some of your audience behind on a platform reduces your audience.
I understand what you are writing, but I also see a very valid point of OP.
Participating on those platforms is endorsing what they stand for. This is especially bad because celebrities still using those platforms keeping other people attached to them.
Bands existed long before Facebook and people still were able to find information about them.
Today they also have their websites and can have users subscribe to their mailing lists with updates, and they would have full control of that platform so there would be no Zuckebergs changing their account name for example.
Another wall of text excusing bad behavior. Hey yo I am not gonna read entire essays about this shit in a comments thread. Pare it down a bit.
If you can’t spend a minute and a half reading, you don’t have any ground to stand on in calling my point “fascist apologia”.
Either be willing to actually assess what I’m saying on its merits, or keep just going with your gut instinct and instantly responding to anything that’s even remotely contradictory to your opinion by calling it fascist, but that doesn’t change the point being made.
If you don’t care to even read my point in the first place, I don’t care to respond further, since you’re clearly not interested in anything other than feeling self-righteous without thinking about it.
That’s strike three bud. Byebye.
Have you considered not being a lazy and low effort asshole?
Have you considered not making excuses for rich people who support fascists?
Skill Issue
Reading that took my wife (unbiased/unprompted observer) roughly 11 seconds, and she just got home after 36 hours in the ER in massive pain and on as much IV morphine as the hospital was allowed to administer until about 10pm last night.
Why would you make her read anything after that?
They’ve had their accounts since 08 and 12. Its harder for a band of their size and fame to just leave these platforms than it is for a regular person, and most regular people still go on Instagram at least if not Twitter as well.
Bullshit. They are the ones that can trailblaze that is exactly what Reznor and Bowie among many many others did. They don’t want to, that’s fine. This is what happens though, subjected to the whims of the platform owner.
You say “hard” like it’s a thing they are in some way bein restrained from doing. I mean, by anything other than their own greed.
I squat my name on Twitter because I don’t want it taken. I don’t use the platform except to log in periodically to keep it active.
I would be pissed if it were taken from me.
Does that make me greedy?
I squat my name on Twitter because I don’t want it taken. I don’t use the platform except to log in periodically to keep it active.
Sounds reasonable if you give a shit about what people who still use Xitter think. Doesn’t sound anything like what Muse and artists like them do though.
Does that make me greedy?
No, but what you describe doesn’t generalize to the real situation we’re talking about here.
It’s not that I care what people on that platform think. It’s that I care what shows up in search engines and whether my brand is diluted by people other than me.
And that is exactly the same thing at stake for bands and the like.
Headlines don’t get unprinted. If Muse quit Facebook or Instagram, especially after already having a presence there, it would be trivial for someone to swipe their brand identity and start posting horrible shit to generate headlines. And that is a bell that can’t be unrung, in addition to having material cost to address if and when it happens.
And I haven’t even mentioned the network effect.
Brand management is really difficult and even more delicate. Maintaining a token presence on some of the most popular platforms in the world is a no-brainer for anyone who cares about their brand.
I think it’s fair to ask extremely popular, highly visible bands and such to take a stand and loudly quit these platforms.
I don’t think it’s fair to expect it of them.
It’s not that I care what people on that platform think. It’s that I care what shows up in search engines and whether my brand is diluted by people other than me.
So get an actually original brand name and sue people who fuck with you.
Headlines don’t get unprinted. If Muse quit Facebook or Instagram, especially after already having a presence there, it would be trivial for someone to swipe their brand identity and start posting horrible shit to generate headlines.
And it would be equally trivial for anyone to communicate to the world that they do not use facebook or insta, and that if anyone shows up there under the brand name they’re a fake. It’s not a parking lot. They’re not in your space. If they impersonate you that’s, again, something you could take them to court over. At no point are you required to support a pro-fascist platform by showing up to make sure nobody pretends to be you in a place nobody who cares about you should ever go. Holy shit, how is this hard to grasp.
after being in the industry for a quartercentury, they prolly belong to that grandma old guy w sunglasses group themselves haha.
“Your personal AI agent that gets things done” must be this year’s most uttered phrase.
I’ve yet to see it amount to much.It, uh, like, can reserve a table for you in some restaurant? Maybe?
My work said last month that we need to use more AI. This week, they said to use the cheapest model and be more conservative. They also say to not trust the output without verifying it. Okay, then, wouldn’t it be faster if I just did the work myself? And more accurate.
ikr?
All the big tech companies are pushing AI into everything to pump their “growth” story, but it’s mostly shit.
Still useful, granted; for example, yesterday I needed a complex spill formula in Excel to de-aggregate a delineated list of data (in one column) while preserving (repeating) all other key data in the rows. I could have figured it out manually, but I used AI. It got it completely wrong, multiple times, but I was eventually able to parse out three Excel functions I’d never used before to make it happen, mostly with my own code since the AI fucked it up so badly.
But I doubt I could do it again by hand today, let alone in a few weeks/months. So, it saved me some time but at the cost of my learning new skills.
I think my use case yesterday is very indicative of the economic value of AI; it can help experts do small tasks faster, at the cost of long term learning. It has some value, but only like 1% of the value relative to its market valuation.
I can’t wait for it to crash and burn. The longer this house of cards keeps growing, the worse the crash is going to be.
Fortune favors the fools.
You know who else gets things done? Me. I do them for myself, because I’m a functioning adult.
But if you do everything yourself then how will they steal your data? :(
i have issues with getting things done, called executive dysfunction. i tried AI for programming and felt myself getting dumber very quickly. nope, that’s not it. better do it myself.
Maybe, but you have to hand over the keys to your entire digital life in order to let it try. What kind of idiot would give Fuckerburg access to every part of their life to make scheduling appointments a tiny bit easier?
But theyre also less accurate!
The (not) secret is that the thing they’re getting done is mining you for data. :D
I dunno, my buddy just set up cameras on his property and use Claude to write code to help them identify things (animals, his lawn mower, people), and then had Claude help him write a mobile app. I’m as anti-AI as it gets, but people absolutely use it and get value out of it.
Wow good thing he used Claude to do that because that definitely doesn’t exist in any free and open source capacity already lol
I was more talking about the OpenClaw / This new Meta thing vertent of “Personal Agent” were you log all your accounts into it and it just “does things for you” on its own versus using AI to create an app.
My coworker was bragging about his AI agent automating a very tedious task for him… I’ve automated this task as well…with a python script. Works instantly, consistently, and doesn’t need to connect to the Internet…
Does your coworker know python?
Nope, but guess what? Neither do I.
You can call me a hypocrite but I’m not totally anti-AI. I use VS Code (free through work) once in awhile as a tool to…make tools. Nothing is particularly advanced but neither are the things his AI agent does for him.
I work in AutoCAD so they’re mostly one-off LISP routines but part of my job is submitting the information in the drawing sets separately (device lists, bulk wire requirements, etc). I vibe coded a script that pulls that info and puts it in an Excel template. I have a similar one that does the reverse, pulling the parts list into AutoCAD from a bill of materials.
Both took under 30 minutes and I’ve used them consistently for a year.
