Some folks don’t seem to be happy that Twitter is now a walled garden, where you have to be logged in to see Tweets.
This is a good thing, isn’t it? Tweets will vanish from the search engines, and Elon Musk’s desire to build a right-wing disinformation network to further his own beliefs (and those of the likes of Peter Thiel) can be an echo chamber.
But public entities are on it, people say.
Well, maybe they shouldn’t be.
Or, they should put more effort into their own web presences. Alternatively, governments can combine a whole bunch of departments into a single fediverse server that’s open to citizens to see.
To media and journalists who are on it, I offer the same advice. What was the point of staying on a platform whose proprietor has expressed disdain for us? Whose press department is only capable of responding with poop emojis? He mocks every journalist, yet so many continued to fund him by providing free content.
Follower numbers on these big sites are meaningless if engagement is low, and the fediverse’s, while not as lively as it was at the end of 2022 for me, still nets me more notifications than anything on Big Tech once did.
Twitter, or, as I call it, OnlyKlans, is the sort of place whose numbers will be propped up by bots who are running rampant without a trust team to take them out—ironically one of Musk’s own expressed concerns prior to his acquisition of the website. Facebook has been running bogus numbers for years, from what I can tell.
The sun is setting on Big Social and it’s about time, too. Those of us on the side of good will be happy to put our brains together and create things that are far better, and far fairer, for humanity.
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“OnlyKlans”; that’s hilarious! I wish I’d come up with it.
Every day I feel smarter and better that I left the day he bought the platform; I knew what was coming, and I didn’t want to be a part of it. Too bad, since it was my favorite social media platform, but I really haven’t missed it much.
It must be nice to reclaim your Twitter time!
I saw OnlyKlans on Mastodon, I believe, but I can’t find the author now. I’d love to give them credit.
I joined Mastodon in 2017 and it’s been a much more civilized platform than Twitter. Holly is there, too. Would love to see you there if you felt it might be useful!
I’m good at the moment. I’m sure you’ve heard what’s coming on Thursday; Apple people will be able to download Threads, Meta’s version of Twitter. Since I’m not an Apple person, I won’t have access to it for a while, but I’m not sure I’m ready for it anyway.
I tried it out, mainly to make sure we had our usernames. It’s available for Iphone and Android. It’s not particularly remarkable and so far it doesn’t connect to the rest of the fediverse. You’re better off on Mastodon, which doesn’t take as much private information. (The official Mastodon app claims to take none; the desktop version of Mastodon.social does leak to Google Analytics.) Threads takes a remarkable amount of private data (here’s an example).