While I'm not against people not-using Twitter/X (or any other platform): would it have been better to keep the account as a 'placeholder' so no one else can grab it? Have a post saying "We do not monitor this account." or some such?
You only need a placeholder if you think the platform matters enough to hold space for. For example: they don't have a placeholder on MySpace.
But if your goal is to prevent other people from having the name altogether, the move I personally enjoyed engaging in was getting my account blocked. That forces them to hold your account only to prevent anyone from using it, lest you might sneak back in and say something "harmful" like "stonetoss is hans kristian graebener".
Stonetoss is a well known comic by an alt-Right Neo-Nazi. He kept his identity secret for years (for obvious reasons), but was outed a few years back. He received a lot of hate over this, and got fired from his tech job over it.
The comic was antitrans, antisemitic (with full-on Holocaust denial), racist, and sexist... but Graebener himself is a Latino, so he gets hated on by both the Left and the Right.
Websites that cater to the alt-Right ban users for saying his real name and ban people who make Stonetoss memes that shit on Graebener for being a Nazi.
And you know why HN is actually a great place? dang isn't going to ban me for repeating verifiable facts.
I agree. Park the handle with a polite "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy" note and a suggested list of other places for more fruitful discussion.
I made and follow my own "lists" and that blocks just about anything (including most ads). Also, having just under 10,000 block and mute words helps a bit.
From my experience, Twitter/X is doing just fine. I don't even see politics on my feed.
Compare that to Reddit, where my 'Home' is flooded with far-left politics.
As for content moderation, I am not convinced X is especially bad. Content glorifying terrorist groups such as the Al Qassam brigades can stay up for many days on Reddit, for example. I had to personally fill the special form for content illegal in the EU, and even then it took a long time to be removed.
Personally, I am not convinced the complaints against X are fair and unbiased. I suspect a lot of it is politically motivated, coming from liberals who typically hate Musk and would like to see conservatives banned from online discussions.
I never visit twitter/X “for you” or homepage, but instead just use the timeline and see only people I follow. This is mostly interesting people in tech or hobbies. It is great for that!
Every platform has their extremists and if you let the algorithm suggest content to you it will be stuff designed to fester hated and rage. However twitter is one of the few platforms that let you curate your feed, and I couldn’t use it without that.
I don't even know what this means today. What things are "non-political"? Saying "there are no politics" seems like the same thing as "the status quo is the only possibility" - exactly the stagnation from which I want to move away on socials.
The usual hodgepodge of policy and constituent packages that evolve election to election, pasted onto semi-tribal partisan affiliations. Politics is rarely ideologically coherent because the data pull the model, not vice versa.
Like, we can describe the illiberal wings of the right and left, MAGA and academic progressivism, respectively, and it will get readership in the New Yorker and Atlantic, but it’s not going to tell you much about who’s in power and why.
More specifically, complaining about “liberals who typically hate Musk” misses that most of Musk’s antagonism in the last 1 year has come from a different cohort than that which has soured on him since he bought Twitter which is again quite different from the crowd that never liked him at all. There is no “typical” Musk hater, even if we just focus on those who vote blue.
I'm sure you're the sort of person who's perfectly fine with the sort of ideas that the algorithm and its owner widely disperse such as "white replacement theory", "no Palestinian child is innocent", and "let's invade Venezuela".
To be fair, that's what it shows by default. I recently created an account just for a short-term purpose, after years of not using it, and the starting algorithmic TL was just right-wing rage-bait about either my country or the US; nothing else. I chose to experiment, and it took days of active curation and follows for the algorithmic TL to stop trying and just show me game/anime stuff for example.
I can see people which open an account without a specific purpose just letting themselves fall into the first rabbit hole Twitter shows them.
it is naive to think that twitter/x is a neutral platform when the owner of the site created a bot that called itself "mecha hitler". do you really think he isn't affecting everyone's feed as well?
Why does everybody I see complaining about modern Twitter say the exact phrase "Nobody should be on that platform."? I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with your point, just curious if there was some manifesto going around or if everybody suddenly started using the same phrase.
Is it just me or have people started using the same phrases more often and faster than before? Reminds me of when everybody started saying "God forbid" a few months ago.
I don't know about the phrase, but I share the sentiment. The owner is a racist promoting racist things. It's not a 'public square' because he controls the algorithm, so it'll never be a 'fair fight' for those who disagree with him.
Paying users are also explicitly given priority in the reply section, which naturally hands a megaphone to the type of user that is more willing to give money to Elon Musk and wear the "I gave money to Elon Musk" badge.
I did some searches for “nobody should be on that platform” and found:
- one hit on a Lana del Rey message board
- one bluesky post from 8 months ago with no likes, reposts, or replies.
If you widen the search to “should be on that platform” then you get more hits, but many are references to Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, TikTok etc. It seems that people are reaching for a noun that can refer to these social media properties that are not just “sites” and not just “apps.” It would appear that ”platform” is the word we’ve landed on.
It's mostly been on comments on various Reddit posts over the last few months. I unfortunately don't have any examples saved. I'm not accusing anybody of anything, just personally curious and remarking on a pattern I've perceived and was wondering if it was just a "me" thing.
Like pareidolia humans are great at seeing patterns that don't exist. Nobody should on that platform is an extremely common phrase. So you'll probably hear it more than once. However that doesn't mean there is a conspiracy.
The best time to leave Twitter was when Elon made it a yahtzee pron site. The next best time is now. Kudos to the FSFE, it's never too late to do the right thing.
Generally speaking, both using and not using X seem like reasonable choices for the FSFE, in my opinion. But deciding to leave it right now over changes in 'direction and climate' seems… odd.
The FSFE's mission, as I understand it, is to support and promote free software. But as far as I know, Twitter has never been a friend of free software, nor has it been supportive of other related values the article mentions, like 'privacy', 'transparency', 'autonomy', 'data protection', etc. It has always been a non-free, centralised network which cared about profit more than user rights, and engagement more than fostering civil discourse.
I don't see FSFE's presence on a platform as endorsement of its values, but rather as a way to leverage its popularity to better promote their mission. That hasn't changed; X is still a popular platform. It's attitude to Free Software and related ideas doesn't seem to have changed, either. So why leave now? I get 'misinformation, harassment, and hate speech' are never a good thing, but I don't recall the FSFE opposing them so vehemently before (more like just ignoring them), so why now, out of the blue? Unless there's been a change in their internal priorities, which they don't communicate, it doesn't really add up for me.
In the end, this just reads like them taking a political stance and trying to rationalise it in more neutral language. And I can understand and respect that decision, but the fuzzy phrasing still rubs me the wrong way.
> The FSFE's mission, as I understand it, is to support and promote free software. But as far as I know, Twitter has never been a friend of free software, nor has it been supportive of other related values the article mentions, like 'privacy', 'transparency', 'autonomy', 'data protection', etc. It has always been a non-free, centralised network which cared about profit more than user rights, and engagement more than fostering civil discourse.
Indeed, and FSFE writes:
> The platform never aligned with our values
> a space we were never comfortable joining, yet one that was once important for reaching members of society who were not active in our preferred spaces for interaction
And then says in no unclear terms what changed:
> Since Elon Musk acquired the social network [...] the FSFE has been closely monitoring the developments of this proprietary platform
> Over time, it has become increasingly hostile, with misinformation, harassment, and hate speech more visible than ever.
> an algorithm that prioritises hatred, polarisation, and sensationalism, alongside growing privacy and data protection concerns, has led us to the decision to part ways with this platform.
You cherry-picked two words "direction and climate" from the article and criticised them for taking an ambiguous political stance, but there is nothing ambiguous about the actual announcement and they clarify their exact motivation for leaving multiple times.
* A web-of-trust social media, where I can instantly see, about any account, all of the chains of separation between us, in order to verify and validate the humanity and social connection of another person.
Presently, twitter (and even moreso, reddit) are just so overrun by bots whose job seems to be to muddy all waters with short-shrift, low-effort takes, but expressed in way more words than are necessary.
I don't mind (in fact, I love) long-form posts like were common in the old reddit, but that are thoughtful and perhaps radical (in the same of addressing the root of the subject). Today's reddit is almost as bad as twitter. I'm kinda ready to get off both of them, but I'd like to still have daily engagement on topics that challenge me / my worldviews.
I see more hate and misinformation on Mastodon than I see on X. Here is a very mild one:
[edit: link removed; I don't want to promote that guy but to give the gist he was saying that people who believe in free speech are trash, targeting X users with hate. Mastodon is absolutely saturated with this.]
Most of the criticism I see of X seems completely made up out of malice or is regurgitation of things other poorly informed or resentful people have said.
The supposed FSF in Europe should post links to the sections of the open source algorithm they claim to be criticizing, and show us their PR.
My criticism of X is primarily rooted in 2 things: the massive degradation of my experience using the platform and a distrust that Musk wouldn't use the platform to manipulate public opinion to achieve political goals.
On the first point the simplest thing is I used to report people who use overt slurs or anti-semitic language. When Musk took over it started taking months for them to follow up and the response was simply to lock the account until they deleted the offending tweet. Eventually when I would report those people X just switched to saying they weren't breaking the rules. Now the replies of tons of seemingly normal posts that get lots of visibility are full of vile people trying to derail conversation with racism or anti-semitism.
Another big problem is the way that blue-check accounts are boosted has incentivized every account to act like click-bait all the time. Whenever a post gets semi-viral the blue-check replies are artificially lifted to the top and most of them are totally worthless because the commenters are just trying to 'grab space' so people click their profile and follow them. It used to be that if big accounts posted something interesting you might see a bunch of interesting follow up replies. Now it's spammers at the top and then racists / crazies mixed in with more thoughtful replies if you scroll down a few pages past the blue-checks. It used to be that the algorithmic feed would surface me all sorts of interesting and novel work from people across the tech world but now there's a whole category of people trying to make every single Tweet viral enough to get payouts.
And then there's Musk himself. He's ordered the algorithm to be manipulated to boost himself more. He's clearly expressed discontent when the algorithm doesn't work the way he wants, he's meddled heavily in the platform's AI bot to make it say things Musk prefers, and he's been rather unscrupulous chasing his political goals. I think it's not unlikely he'd use the platform to guide public opinion, perhaps even using AI to do it discretely and intelligently. I view that as a significant risk.
So the platform has gone from something that's highly useful to me, and a place I greatly enjoyed, to something that more often than not wastes my time and exposes me to people that disturb me. And on top of all that I think contributing to the platform may empower someone who I deeply distrust to manipulate public opinion towards their political goals.
It's a good idea to leave X, considering the values of the Free Software Foundation and how they don't exactly align with X's profit-driven model, and the spread of internet garbage.
I think either leaving a hostile platform or staying to promote ideas which run against it are reasonable choices. But what the article doesn't say is why they (as an organisation whose mission is to protect and promote free software) should choose to leave now, when from what I know, Twitter has always been a non-free, profit-driven network.
Good on them. It always feels like " But other than that, Mrs Lincoln enjoyed the play" watching people rationalize why they are still on Twitter or use Grok
why would anyone need to rationalize it? they're still two of the best platforms in their respective silos. most people don't care about drama and virtue signaling
> In the current situation we see ourselves unable to collaborate both with the FSF and any other organisation in which Richard Stallman has a leading position
These guys are entitled to use or avoid any social media platform they want. I'm entitled, as well, to judge them for putting purity tests in unrelated domains above their commitment to free software and thereby rendering themselves ineffective in their primary mission.
Irrelevance is their choice.
That said, there's a transparency consideration. Doesn't Europe have laws about charities having to use donor funds to advance the ostensible purpose of the charity?
Matthias Kirschner is FSFE president and a full time employee. Do FSFE's donors know the FSFE is making itself less effective towards its mission of promoting free software by avoiding people who the FSFE leadership team dislike for reasons unrelated to free software? If they want to do this stuff, they should put it in their charter.
If you ever run a large organization you will quickly find there are lots of people you are unable to cooperate with for reasons unrelated to your organization's primary mission. Especially in a nonprofit, the primary thing for being effective in your mission is having people who want to work together, if you have people who can't stand each other you're not going to be effective.
> What initially intended to be a place for dialogue and information exchange has turned into a centralised arena of hostility, misinformation, and profit-driven control, far removed from the ideals of freedom we stand for.
The issue is the new algorithm I think. It's the same on thread. You're more likely to get a view by responding to outrage bait than by promoting your own work, while before it was 50/50: responding to bait was great to reach a new audience, but for people who already followed you, you could still reach them by posting 'normally'.
Do you follow any content creator anywhere? Before 2019, you basically _had_ to be on Twitter to follow updates. Then the media diversified, but by 2023, even people still on X will rather use discord to have update on content creator they follow (or, weirdly, Instagram it seems? At least my favourite vulgarisation content creator seems to think so)
Thread is less political overall and have exactly the same issue, it not about political side imho, it's about engagement and the new algorithms.
I follow someone who used to use Twitter to update on his projects, 2 years ago he received a few hundred times more engagement for dunking on flat earthers than for pushing his video on Maxwell. He decided to stop. More engagement for controversy was always the algorithm, but it was two orders of magnitude lower a decade ago.
Except now the just have less reach? I didn't follow them, so perhaps they had 10 followers and no reach to begin with, but this seems foolish if you have a mission you care about.
I found myself wondering the same thing. Do they genuinely expect people who have never heard about FSFE to be using a decentralized social platform? That sounds scary. Normal people don't use scary sounding things.
They're certainly welcome to do whatever they think is right, and it sounds more "on brand" for them, but it seems ridiculous to say something like "[Using Twitter was] important for reaching members of society who were not active in our preferred spaces for interaction." but then end with "Follow the FSFE on Mastodon and Peertube!" I am very tech literate and I've never even heard of Peertube. There is very little chance they are ever going to reach even a single set of ears this way.
At that point, they might as well just send random fliers in the mail to strangers.
Love it or hate it, Twitter (yeah, I choose to be stubborn here) is still probably overwhelmingly the most impactful platform in this way.
While I respect the idea of the "boycott" in the abstract, perhaps the most wrong thing people think about it is "Because it's controlled by so-and-so, everyone who uses it is brainwashed and it's impossible to do good there."
Nope. Look, a lot of good people are still there. I personally also wish they would all leave and we all go elsewhere -- but that's not the present reality.
As such, people who insist that you must leave and no good can happen through staying ring the same to me as "IF SO AND SO GETS ELECTED IM LEAVING THE COUNTRY."
I don’t think leaving a platform you don’t enjoy has much, if anything, in common with physically relocating. I left X, but I have an account i use to log in about once a week to see if there’s anything worth while. I haven’t really found an alternative to X, things are fragmented now. Where I used to be able to follow most people I were interested in on Twitter, i now have some on bluesky, some on mastodon, some still on X, a bunch at instagram and YouTube… it’s a mess
The parallel I'm drawing here is that a lot of people threaten that when they don't really mean it, and more specifically, don't seem to think about why others don't.
I still have people there, so I will stick around.
I don't understand people who have the opinion that twitter is indispensable for them. I never had a twitter account and I only see tweets if they are posted on some news site or whatever. I don't feel uninformed. I don't feel like I am missing any critical information. I don't see any value in it.
Thank you. Hey, I 100% respect anyones individual decision about the place FOR THEMSELVES.
But a lot of people become absolutely insufferable when they try to dictate why this should be the case for someone else, I absolutely hate the framing of "indispensable" which I never said.
You don't find value, fine! I do. Let's actually talk about why I do if you like.
> Nope. Look, a lot of good people are still there. I personally also wish they would all leave and we all go elsewhere -- but that's not the present reality.
Nah, fuck that. If Stormfront had half a billion daily users that doesn't somehow compel you to participate; anyone willing to stay on Twitter isn't worth talking to even if they are personally nice to you.
Stormfront users wouldn't have really been relevant for the FSF. But on a platform like Twitter, which isn't mono-subject like the Stormfront forums, would have been relevant for an organization like FSF.
And personally the few people I follow there (mostly game devs) are totally worth talking to.
There are plenty of people who love FOSS and terminally on X. Yes they are crazy, paranoid and racist but thats cutting off one of your key markets lol
Perhaps, but of all people, FOSS devotees should know why Twitter needs to die. The fact that so many people remain on the platform is disheartening to say the least. How bad does it have to get before you refuse to take part?
That's a lot of words with not a lot of substance. I suppose their whole identity is announcing that they're superior to other people and branching off, while asking for money for what looks like mostly sending people to talk at events (which are probably mostly more fundraising).
> "In the current situation we see ourselves unable to collaborate both with the FSF and any other organisation[sic] in which Richard Stallman has a leading position."
I do wish more people would try to fix things from the inside, and I get there's a point where it's no longer possible, but in this case it sounds like they didn't like people calling them out on X and had no way to control the narrative. What other gain would there be for a group trying to spread information in as many channels as possible?
While I'm not against people not-using Twitter/X (or any other platform): would it have been better to keep the account as a 'placeholder' so no one else can grab it? Have a post saying "We do not monitor this account." or some such?
You only need a placeholder if you think the platform matters enough to hold space for. For example: they don't have a placeholder on MySpace.
But if your goal is to prevent other people from having the name altogether, the move I personally enjoyed engaging in was getting my account blocked. That forces them to hold your account only to prevent anyone from using it, lest you might sneak back in and say something "harmful" like "stonetoss is hans kristian graebener".
> the move I personally enjoyed engaging in was getting my account blocked.
So you think the FSF should've used the account representing them to troll?
Haven't tested lately, but at least for a while you could get your account blocked by publicly suggesting people follow you some other place.
I made my account private and put my bsky address in my profile, so that doesn't appear to be an insta ban.
IIRC, it was for a while and then the decision was reverted.
> the move I personally enjoyed engaging in was getting my account blocked.
Interesting idea. What did you do?
> say something "harmful" like "stonetoss is hans kristian graebener".
What that it?
Stonetoss is a well known comic by an alt-Right Neo-Nazi. He kept his identity secret for years (for obvious reasons), but was outed a few years back. He received a lot of hate over this, and got fired from his tech job over it.
The comic was antitrans, antisemitic (with full-on Holocaust denial), racist, and sexist... but Graebener himself is a Latino, so he gets hated on by both the Left and the Right.
Websites that cater to the alt-Right ban users for saying his real name and ban people who make Stonetoss memes that shit on Graebener for being a Nazi.
And you know why HN is actually a great place? dang isn't going to ban me for repeating verifiable facts.
Why help Twitter be a safer more trustworthy platform when Twitter doesn't seem to want to be a safe or trustworthy platform?
I agree. Park the handle with a polite "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy" note and a suggested list of other places for more fruitful discussion.
I don't think twitter allows someone to take over an account after it's been deleted
They absolutely do. Someone’s parked on what use to be my account there.
During deactivation period nobody can take the username but after deletion I'm pretty sure they can.
I congratulate you to that decision. Twitter is really a breeding ground for racism and hate. Nobody should be on that platform.
Really depends on your feed, I first muted Elon, and only follow artists, so that's all my feed is, no hate or any racism.
I made and follow my own "lists" and that blocks just about anything (including most ads). Also, having just under 10,000 block and mute words helps a bit.
> blocks just about anything (including most ads).
Do you not run uBlock Origin for some reason? Is the modern web even usable living like that?
But you had to mute the owner and sole decision maker of the platform to get that result.
How long will he allow the peasants to mute or block him?
You literally can't block people anymore on X https://www.cnet.com/tech/blocking-on-xtwitter-doesnt-work-a...
That's social media in general
It's not the content- it's the ownership. I don't want to give another dime to Mush and Zuckerberg.
From my experience, Twitter/X is doing just fine. I don't even see politics on my feed.
Compare that to Reddit, where my 'Home' is flooded with far-left politics.
As for content moderation, I am not convinced X is especially bad. Content glorifying terrorist groups such as the Al Qassam brigades can stay up for many days on Reddit, for example. I had to personally fill the special form for content illegal in the EU, and even then it took a long time to be removed.
Personally, I am not convinced the complaints against X are fair and unbiased. I suspect a lot of it is politically motivated, coming from liberals who typically hate Musk and would like to see conservatives banned from online discussions.
I never visit twitter/X “for you” or homepage, but instead just use the timeline and see only people I follow. This is mostly interesting people in tech or hobbies. It is great for that!
Every platform has their extremists and if you let the algorithm suggest content to you it will be stuff designed to fester hated and rage. However twitter is one of the few platforms that let you curate your feed, and I couldn’t use it without that.
> I don't even see politics on my feed.
I don't even know what this means today. What things are "non-political"? Saying "there are no politics" seems like the same thing as "the status quo is the only possibility" - exactly the stagnation from which I want to move away on socials.
[delayed]
the same in HN where ad hominems, insults, rants are fine as long as they attack the right or use passwords like "fascist" or "racist"
now, you want to post conservative or rationalist ideas and better use 3 layers of metaphors or else you will be flagged within a minute
My account here is throttled for posting what I think are conservative views.
> I suspect a lot of it is politically motivated, coming from liberals
The liberal-conservative political dichotomy was dying before Trump and is decidedly non-descriptive now.
What has replaced it?
The usual hodgepodge of policy and constituent packages that evolve election to election, pasted onto semi-tribal partisan affiliations. Politics is rarely ideologically coherent because the data pull the model, not vice versa.
Like, we can describe the illiberal wings of the right and left, MAGA and academic progressivism, respectively, and it will get readership in the New Yorker and Atlantic, but it’s not going to tell you much about who’s in power and why.
More specifically, complaining about “liberals who typically hate Musk” misses that most of Musk’s antagonism in the last 1 year has come from a different cohort than that which has soured on him since he bought Twitter which is again quite different from the crowd that never liked him at all. There is no “typical” Musk hater, even if we just focus on those who vote blue.
[flagged]
I'm sure you're the sort of person who's perfectly fine with the sort of ideas that the algorithm and its owner widely disperse such as "white replacement theory", "no Palestinian child is innocent", and "let's invade Venezuela".
Reddit regularly upvotes straight disinformation to 100K upvotes on the frontpage. Just for balance, are you going to mention that too?
Basically this, yes.
I see one side engendering discussion and debate. The other side wants to shut discussion down.
People on either side find comfort in echo chambers, but definitely one more than the other.
[flagged]
[flagged]
To be fair, that's what it shows by default. I recently created an account just for a short-term purpose, after years of not using it, and the starting algorithmic TL was just right-wing rage-bait about either my country or the US; nothing else. I chose to experiment, and it took days of active curation and follows for the algorithmic TL to stop trying and just show me game/anime stuff for example.
I can see people which open an account without a specific purpose just letting themselves fall into the first rabbit hole Twitter shows them.
it is naive to think that twitter/x is a neutral platform when the owner of the site created a bot that called itself "mecha hitler". do you really think he isn't affecting everyone's feed as well?
Why does everybody I see complaining about modern Twitter say the exact phrase "Nobody should be on that platform."? I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with your point, just curious if there was some manifesto going around or if everybody suddenly started using the same phrase.
Is it just me or have people started using the same phrases more often and faster than before? Reminds me of when everybody started saying "God forbid" a few months ago.
I don't know about the phrase, but I share the sentiment. The owner is a racist promoting racist things. It's not a 'public square' because he controls the algorithm, so it'll never be a 'fair fight' for those who disagree with him.
Paying users are also explicitly given priority in the reply section, which naturally hands a megaphone to the type of user that is more willing to give money to Elon Musk and wear the "I gave money to Elon Musk" badge.
I did some searches for “nobody should be on that platform” and found:
- one hit on a Lana del Rey message board
- one bluesky post from 8 months ago with no likes, reposts, or replies.
If you widen the search to “should be on that platform” then you get more hits, but many are references to Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, TikTok etc. It seems that people are reaching for a noun that can refer to these social media properties that are not just “sites” and not just “apps.” It would appear that ”platform” is the word we’ve landed on.
We want X to exist to contain these people.
The same situation applies to League of Legends and their wonderfully toxic player base
Can you find me some notable examples?
It's mostly been on comments on various Reddit posts over the last few months. I unfortunately don't have any examples saved. I'm not accusing anybody of anything, just personally curious and remarking on a pattern I've perceived and was wondering if it was just a "me" thing.
It's a straightforward solution to the monopoly problem.
Like pareidolia humans are great at seeing patterns that don't exist. Nobody should on that platform is an extremely common phrase. So you'll probably hear it more than once. However that doesn't mean there is a conspiracy.
It's quite possible it isn't a pattern but I'd like to add I never implied (or meant to imply) a conspiracy.
The best time to leave Twitter was when Elon made it a yahtzee pron site. The next best time is now. Kudos to the FSFE, it's never too late to do the right thing.
Generally speaking, both using and not using X seem like reasonable choices for the FSFE, in my opinion. But deciding to leave it right now over changes in 'direction and climate' seems… odd.
The FSFE's mission, as I understand it, is to support and promote free software. But as far as I know, Twitter has never been a friend of free software, nor has it been supportive of other related values the article mentions, like 'privacy', 'transparency', 'autonomy', 'data protection', etc. It has always been a non-free, centralised network which cared about profit more than user rights, and engagement more than fostering civil discourse.
I don't see FSFE's presence on a platform as endorsement of its values, but rather as a way to leverage its popularity to better promote their mission. That hasn't changed; X is still a popular platform. It's attitude to Free Software and related ideas doesn't seem to have changed, either. So why leave now? I get 'misinformation, harassment, and hate speech' are never a good thing, but I don't recall the FSFE opposing them so vehemently before (more like just ignoring them), so why now, out of the blue? Unless there's been a change in their internal priorities, which they don't communicate, it doesn't really add up for me.
In the end, this just reads like them taking a political stance and trying to rationalise it in more neutral language. And I can understand and respect that decision, but the fuzzy phrasing still rubs me the wrong way.
It's really not that fuzzy.
> The FSFE's mission, as I understand it, is to support and promote free software. But as far as I know, Twitter has never been a friend of free software, nor has it been supportive of other related values the article mentions, like 'privacy', 'transparency', 'autonomy', 'data protection', etc. It has always been a non-free, centralised network which cared about profit more than user rights, and engagement more than fostering civil discourse.
Indeed, and FSFE writes:
> The platform never aligned with our values
> a space we were never comfortable joining, yet one that was once important for reaching members of society who were not active in our preferred spaces for interaction
And then says in no unclear terms what changed:
> Since Elon Musk acquired the social network [...] the FSFE has been closely monitoring the developments of this proprietary platform
> Over time, it has become increasingly hostile, with misinformation, harassment, and hate speech more visible than ever.
> an algorithm that prioritises hatred, polarisation, and sensationalism, alongside growing privacy and data protection concerns, has led us to the decision to part ways with this platform.
You cherry-picked two words "direction and climate" from the article and criticised them for taking an ambiguous political stance, but there is nothing ambiguous about the actual announcement and they clarify their exact motivation for leaving multiple times.
If you still have a twitter account, you really ought to be ashamed. There's no longer any excuses.
What should anyone with an X account be ashamed of, exactly?
I want something that seems so very simple:
* A web-of-trust social media, where I can instantly see, about any account, all of the chains of separation between us, in order to verify and validate the humanity and social connection of another person.
Presently, twitter (and even moreso, reddit) are just so overrun by bots whose job seems to be to muddy all waters with short-shrift, low-effort takes, but expressed in way more words than are necessary.
I don't mind (in fact, I love) long-form posts like were common in the old reddit, but that are thoughtful and perhaps radical (in the same of addressing the root of the subject). Today's reddit is almost as bad as twitter. I'm kinda ready to get off both of them, but I'd like to still have daily engagement on topics that challenge me / my worldviews.
I see more hate and misinformation on Mastodon than I see on X. Here is a very mild one:
[edit: link removed; I don't want to promote that guy but to give the gist he was saying that people who believe in free speech are trash, targeting X users with hate. Mastodon is absolutely saturated with this.]
Most of the criticism I see of X seems completely made up out of malice or is regurgitation of things other poorly informed or resentful people have said.
The supposed FSF in Europe should post links to the sections of the open source algorithm they claim to be criticizing, and show us their PR.
My criticism of X is primarily rooted in 2 things: the massive degradation of my experience using the platform and a distrust that Musk wouldn't use the platform to manipulate public opinion to achieve political goals.
On the first point the simplest thing is I used to report people who use overt slurs or anti-semitic language. When Musk took over it started taking months for them to follow up and the response was simply to lock the account until they deleted the offending tweet. Eventually when I would report those people X just switched to saying they weren't breaking the rules. Now the replies of tons of seemingly normal posts that get lots of visibility are full of vile people trying to derail conversation with racism or anti-semitism.
Another big problem is the way that blue-check accounts are boosted has incentivized every account to act like click-bait all the time. Whenever a post gets semi-viral the blue-check replies are artificially lifted to the top and most of them are totally worthless because the commenters are just trying to 'grab space' so people click their profile and follow them. It used to be that if big accounts posted something interesting you might see a bunch of interesting follow up replies. Now it's spammers at the top and then racists / crazies mixed in with more thoughtful replies if you scroll down a few pages past the blue-checks. It used to be that the algorithmic feed would surface me all sorts of interesting and novel work from people across the tech world but now there's a whole category of people trying to make every single Tweet viral enough to get payouts.
And then there's Musk himself. He's ordered the algorithm to be manipulated to boost himself more. He's clearly expressed discontent when the algorithm doesn't work the way he wants, he's meddled heavily in the platform's AI bot to make it say things Musk prefers, and he's been rather unscrupulous chasing his political goals. I think it's not unlikely he'd use the platform to guide public opinion, perhaps even using AI to do it discretely and intelligently. I view that as a significant risk.
So the platform has gone from something that's highly useful to me, and a place I greatly enjoyed, to something that more often than not wastes my time and exposes me to people that disturb me. And on top of all that I think contributing to the platform may empower someone who I deeply distrust to manipulate public opinion towards their political goals.
It's a good idea to leave X, considering the values of the Free Software Foundation and how they don't exactly align with X's profit-driven model, and the spread of internet garbage.
I think either leaving a hostile platform or staying to promote ideas which run against it are reasonable choices. But what the article doesn't say is why they (as an organisation whose mission is to protect and promote free software) should choose to leave now, when from what I know, Twitter has always been a non-free, profit-driven network.
and nothing of value was lost
Good on them. It always feels like " But other than that, Mrs Lincoln enjoyed the play" watching people rationalize why they are still on Twitter or use Grok
why would anyone need to rationalize it? they're still two of the best platforms in their respective silos. most people don't care about drama and virtue signaling
Note the word "Europe":
> In the current situation we see ourselves unable to collaborate both with the FSF and any other organisation in which Richard Stallman has a leading position
https://fsfe.org/about/fsfnetwork.html
These guys are entitled to use or avoid any social media platform they want. I'm entitled, as well, to judge them for putting purity tests in unrelated domains above their commitment to free software and thereby rendering themselves ineffective in their primary mission.
Irrelevance is their choice.
That said, there's a transparency consideration. Doesn't Europe have laws about charities having to use donor funds to advance the ostensible purpose of the charity?
Matthias Kirschner is FSFE president and a full time employee. Do FSFE's donors know the FSFE is making itself less effective towards its mission of promoting free software by avoiding people who the FSFE leadership team dislike for reasons unrelated to free software? If they want to do this stuff, they should put it in their charter.
If you ever run a large organization you will quickly find there are lots of people you are unable to cooperate with for reasons unrelated to your organization's primary mission. Especially in a nonprofit, the primary thing for being effective in your mission is having people who want to work together, if you have people who can't stand each other you're not going to be effective.
I don't see how they would be any more transparent about it.
Ok, now how about a GPL-4 that forbids "AI" training?
> What initially intended to be a place for dialogue and information exchange has turned into a centralised arena of hostility, misinformation, and profit-driven control, far removed from the ideals of freedom we stand for.
Always has been.
The issue is the new algorithm I think. It's the same on thread. You're more likely to get a view by responding to outrage bait than by promoting your own work, while before it was 50/50: responding to bait was great to reach a new audience, but for people who already followed you, you could still reach them by posting 'normally'.
Do you follow any content creator anywhere? Before 2019, you basically _had_ to be on Twitter to follow updates. Then the media diversified, but by 2023, even people still on X will rather use discord to have update on content creator they follow (or, weirdly, Instagram it seems? At least my favourite vulgarisation content creator seems to think so)
Yes, but now it's the wrong side controlling it.
Thread is less political overall and have exactly the same issue, it not about political side imho, it's about engagement and the new algorithms.
I follow someone who used to use Twitter to update on his projects, 2 years ago he received a few hundred times more engagement for dunking on flat earthers than for pushing his video on Maxwell. He decided to stop. More engagement for controversy was always the algorithm, but it was two orders of magnitude lower a decade ago.
It got more deliberately manipulative with pushing a right wing agenda.
It became more obviously manipulative when it started pushing a right wing agenda.
Except now the just have less reach? I didn't follow them, so perhaps they had 10 followers and no reach to begin with, but this seems foolish if you have a mission you care about.
I found myself wondering the same thing. Do they genuinely expect people who have never heard about FSFE to be using a decentralized social platform? That sounds scary. Normal people don't use scary sounding things.
They're certainly welcome to do whatever they think is right, and it sounds more "on brand" for them, but it seems ridiculous to say something like "[Using Twitter was] important for reaching members of society who were not active in our preferred spaces for interaction." but then end with "Follow the FSFE on Mastodon and Peertube!" I am very tech literate and I've never even heard of Peertube. There is very little chance they are ever going to reach even a single set of ears this way.
At that point, they might as well just send random fliers in the mail to strangers.
[dead]
[flagged]
What is X?
The new name for Twitter, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Since_2022
Bad idea.
Love it or hate it, Twitter (yeah, I choose to be stubborn here) is still probably overwhelmingly the most impactful platform in this way.
While I respect the idea of the "boycott" in the abstract, perhaps the most wrong thing people think about it is "Because it's controlled by so-and-so, everyone who uses it is brainwashed and it's impossible to do good there."
Nope. Look, a lot of good people are still there. I personally also wish they would all leave and we all go elsewhere -- but that's not the present reality.
As such, people who insist that you must leave and no good can happen through staying ring the same to me as "IF SO AND SO GETS ELECTED IM LEAVING THE COUNTRY."
I don’t think leaving a platform you don’t enjoy has much, if anything, in common with physically relocating. I left X, but I have an account i use to log in about once a week to see if there’s anything worth while. I haven’t really found an alternative to X, things are fragmented now. Where I used to be able to follow most people I were interested in on Twitter, i now have some on bluesky, some on mastodon, some still on X, a bunch at instagram and YouTube… it’s a mess
Wasn't it supposed as a feature of mastodon when people are on different servers and you can integrate them email style?
The parallel I'm drawing here is that a lot of people threaten that when they don't really mean it, and more specifically, don't seem to think about why others don't.
I still have people there, so I will stick around.
I don't understand people who have the opinion that twitter is indispensable for them. I never had a twitter account and I only see tweets if they are posted on some news site or whatever. I don't feel uninformed. I don't feel like I am missing any critical information. I don't see any value in it.
> don't understand people who have the opinion that twitter is indispensable
Not on X. But if you’re a public figure, it sort of is. You don’t need to post anything. But you’re going to be affected by what happens there.
Thank you. Hey, I 100% respect anyones individual decision about the place FOR THEMSELVES.
But a lot of people become absolutely insufferable when they try to dictate why this should be the case for someone else, I absolutely hate the framing of "indispensable" which I never said.
You don't find value, fine! I do. Let's actually talk about why I do if you like.
Every click on Twitter puts a penny in musks pocket. If that is not enough reason to leave, nothing ever will be.
Pretending you’re going to emigrate from your home country is not similar to actually logging off from a website you hate.
Never used twitter. Never found that to be a problem or limitation in any way. Now it's owned by Musk, it's even less attractive a prospect.
Speaking as someone who recently left the country (if by "the country" you mean the USA) ...
And that's fine if that's what YOU WANT TO DO. I respect that.
The insufferables are those who are trying to dictate what I should do.
> Nope. Look, a lot of good people are still there. I personally also wish they would all leave and we all go elsewhere -- but that's not the present reality.
be the change you want to see
I am!
That's the other part of this that makes these naysayers insufferable; you can use more than one.
My twitter handle literally has my mastodon handle IN IT.
Nah, fuck that. If Stormfront had half a billion daily users that doesn't somehow compel you to participate; anyone willing to stay on Twitter isn't worth talking to even if they are personally nice to you.
Stormfront users wouldn't have really been relevant for the FSF. But on a platform like Twitter, which isn't mono-subject like the Stormfront forums, would have been relevant for an organization like FSF.
And personally the few people I follow there (mostly game devs) are totally worth talking to.
Be serious.
Stormfront is not like Twitter.
There are plenty of people who love FOSS and terminally on X. Yes they are crazy, paranoid and racist but thats cutting off one of your key markets lol
Perhaps, but of all people, FOSS devotees should know why Twitter needs to die. The fact that so many people remain on the platform is disheartening to say the least. How bad does it have to get before you refuse to take part?
You can either be a leader or a follower.
That's a lot of words with not a lot of substance. I suppose their whole identity is announcing that they're superior to other people and branching off, while asking for money for what looks like mostly sending people to talk at events (which are probably mostly more fundraising).
> "In the current situation we see ourselves unable to collaborate both with the FSF and any other organisation[sic] in which Richard Stallman has a leading position."
I do wish more people would try to fix things from the inside, and I get there's a point where it's no longer possible, but in this case it sounds like they didn't like people calling them out on X and had no way to control the narrative. What other gain would there be for a group trying to spread information in as many channels as possible?
What strategies could FSF employ to "fix things from the inside" on Twitter?