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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Plus paying users are explicitly given higher priority in the reply section, which naturally hands a megaphone to the demographic that is willing to give money to Elon Musk and wear the "I gave money to Elon Musk" badge.
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.
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.
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.
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 on 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.
> 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 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.
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
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
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.
> 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?
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.
Why help Twitter be a safer more trustworthy platform when Twitter doesn't seem to want to be a safe or trustworthy platform?
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.
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.
if that's what the algorithm is showing you, you may want to self reflect 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 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.
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.
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.
Plus paying users are explicitly given higher priority in the reply section, which naturally hands a megaphone to the demographic that is willing to give money to Elon Musk and wear the "I gave money to Elon Musk" badge.
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.
I see more hate and misinformation on mastodon than I see on X. Here is a very mild one:
https://mastodon.social/@crazyeddie/115661963350693475
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.
and nothing of value was lost
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.
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 on 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.
I don't see how they would be any more transparent about it.
> 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)
It got more deliberately manipulative with pushing a right wing agenda.
It became more obviously manipulative when it started pushing a right wing agenda.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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) ...
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
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?