Barnes TechI feel it’s time to follow up on my other post about social media. I laid out some of my thoughts in my last post
It would take a lot of time to go through all of the specifics of how Twitter has continued to take an almost unbelievable nosedive, but there are a couple of things worth mentioning.
First, Elon decided to start banning all sorts of reporters who reported on him, claiming that they were doxing him. Clearly, this was just his increasingly fragile ego reacting to a situation that personally irritated him. The sheer hypocrisy of what he said about free speech and what he’s doing is somewhat sickening, but Tech Dirt did a much better job going into the details of what happened and why it’s bad than I could. I do want to note, though, that if Twitter had actually ever put as much effort into protecting marginalized people as it has in the last week protecting Space Karen’s Twitter feed, it would be a far safer and happier platform.
At the time, and as mentioned in the Tech Dirt article, it seemed that they were starting to flag Mastodon links as “Malicious”. Well, as of today, it is Twitter’s “official policy” *
We recognize that many of our users are active on other social media platforms. However, we will no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) December 18, 2022
Here’s a screenshot just in case the tweet disappears.
I have not decided what I am personally going to do yet, but I am not ok supporting Twitter as a platform anymore. I also don’t know exactly what that means. I for sure will not participate in any of the advertising, and although I didn’t post a ton historically, I don’t particularly want to feed the content machine in any way either. I will likely just let my account sit, as is, and just stop using it.
I’m under no illusion that me participating or not participating makes any difference at all to these platforms, but it’s also pretty much the only thing I can do.
I’m trying out Mastodon right now. I may spin up my own server just to see what it’s like, and to mess around with it more. The Mastodon clients are not terribly polished right now, but that’s ok. It feels like Twitter from years ago where there is a sense of optimism and even a small amount of excitement. Bonus that it’s not run by a want-to-be fascist.
If you feel so inclined, my main account is @[email protected]. I will update this post if I set up my own server and change that name.
*UPDATE - Well, it only took a couple of hours for Twitter to delete that tweet. And now Elon has posted a poll asking whether he should continue running the place or not. It’s a train wreck and it’s very hard to look away.
** UPDATE Mar 20, 2023 - Updated Mastodon link since I moved servers