I understand their decision. And to my surprise, they used stats to justify their reasoning. Even if they hadn’t, I understand why prominent voices decide to leave. Twitter has become unquestionably more toxic since it was acquired by Elon Musk, even if its problems predate the acquisition.
I’m glad to see Mastodon and BlueSky’s user base growing, but not fast enough to my liking. I’m curious to see if prominent members of EFF like Cory Doctorow will leave too.
If your favorite social media platforms only showed you posts of people you follow, would you be satisfied?
That’s literally what social media was and why it grew before enshittification. So the answer is an obvious yes. I mean, even objectively yes.
I really appreciated this part:
When you go online, your rights should go with you. X is no longer where the fight is happening. The platform Musk took over was imperfect but impactful. What exists today is something else: diminished, and increasingly de minimis.
I think this is a bad move. The EFF’s goal should be to spread their message as much as possible, especially on platforms that need changes.
Absolutely no one who is legitimate should be on X any longer. To do so, is very irresponsible.
Am i the onlyt one who doesn’t see an actual reason for leaving? Can we read this as just “Twitter has right wing voices”? And what dictator demands in particular were they talking about?
So, you’re saying you don’t pay attention to tech news at all.
There’s more if you look
This is one side of a discussion that seems to be omni present these days (within politics, public institutions, privacy advocates, etc). Many people agree with you (“We need to be wherever our audience is.”), others say: “Don’t even bother, since it makes you part of the problem.”). While I do have a clear preference, I think both parties have a point.
From the article:
an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.
That’s exactly my experience too. I recently set my account as private because so little people read it now that it isn’t worth it the data leakage.
Surely social media is as good as we make it for ourselves? I’m not a massive x user (not a massive socials guy full stop in honesty) but figured I would take a look at mastodon and blue sky as I have heard them both mentioned before.
Bluesky immediately wanted me to believe that if America got rid of all white men and replaced them with immigrants women would be “70-80%” safer.
Mastodon immediately told me that housing should all be free.
Neither post was meant to be ironic. But that wouldn’t put me off as I would curate my feed as I wish.
Are they truly better platforms or are people just ideologically against Elon (which is totally valid by the way, we should vote with our feet).
This feels performative more than anything else. I love the EFF and their mission, but this ain’t it. Doesn’t help anyone at all.
I like the idea behind Mastodon, but BlueSky doesn’t add anything interesting or new. It’s quite literally just another Twitter clone, and it’s community makes it feel like a Truth Social for leftists lol.
Instagram is more apolitical I guess, Threads too (surprised there’s still people still using it).
I don’t like Elon either but Twitter seems fine to me. My only complaint is how many AI bots and engagement farm accounts there are, seems like they working on it but idk, still annoying.
It does not seem like a good decision if the goal is widening reach, as it should be.
Yeah you’re seeing a lot of big brands or orgs bailing on Twitter post the take over making the website absolutely miserable to use. It’s definitely not worth sugar coating the pre Musk era where it was a giant security nightmare that was rife with backdoors that the Saudi government used to track down dissidents, but at least that shit show was fun to post on.
I really miss the old Twitter, it was the great equaliser where a lot of the economic and cultural elite would go there and let the brain worms of social media eat away at their minds the same way us normal people do. None of the Twitter alternatives have managed to capture that lightning in the bottle, and I don’t think anything ever will with the end of monoculture.
Musk has always been an incredibly annoying and embarrassing person, but it’s next level now that he ruined my guilty pleasure and oafishly tried to force his way into politics.
In some countries such as Turkey, it’s not possible to leave X, where pretty much everything happens on the platform. Someone’s husband is literally trying to kill them and the police don’t care? Unfortunately, you have to post on X to get “attention”. The government does something corrupt, which happens every day, you post on X to get attention because it’s “free” unlike most of the news channels which are owned by the government. These are just a few examples.
There’s also the football factor. Football is literally interwoven with daily life, and X is the best platform for sharing and getting engagement. Sometimes, clubs only beef with each other[1] on X.
Yes, there are alternatives, such as Bluesky or Mastodon, but they don’t matter if no one uses them.
one of my favs: https://x.com/i/status/1341844896819388418 ↩︎
I can’t answer for others, but I’m ideologically against Twitter. It relies on the surveillance business model, which is inherently anti-privacy and generally not cool in my book.
I think mastodon etc are better platforms on an abstract level, but agree with you that their lack of network effect makes them far less useful in practice.
No.
Honestly, there are a ton of real people on Twitter still. After this forum and YouTube, it is probably our #3 most active social platform*, and that’s not looking at fake “impressions” or other stats that Elon surely boosts behind the scenes, but actual engagement like replies. And we reach the type of people who are not already super into privacy, which is the goal.
It’s all fine to want to live in an ideal world where everyone uses Mastodon and manages their privacy to avoid having their profiles scraped by AI and data brokers, but if we’re going to be activists the realist approach is to use the platforms where you can reach the most people who aren’t a part of your cause for as long as you can.
*If I had to rank them, in terms of how many people there are actually interested in looking at the stuff we do at Privacy Guides, for the record it’s probably something like:
- This forum
- YouTube
- Twitter and Mastodon are usually neck and neck, but Twitter definitely reaches a more diverse group of people while Mastodon people are similar to people on this forum lol
- TikTok
- [All the other platforms]
- Threads
I cannot find any evidence that any real people use Threads, only brands.
Ok so due to this thread I decided to actually create a mastodon account to test it properly. Someone please confirm, it wants me to pick a server. Does the server in a way dictate what or who I can follow? For example if of has a mastodon account will I find it on all servers? And if so surely pg wouldn’t need an account on each server, right?
I do not use Mastodon, but it is my understanding server admins can (and do) restrict federation with other instances based on either block-lists or allow-lists. If your server admin has blocked an instance you would like to access then (I think) yes you might have a need for multiple accounts.
I think in general this is just used to protect users against harmful content though, as defined by the instance’s admin team.
Need for a secondary account on mastodon seems unlikely, atleast if you are not trying to follow extreme and ideologically opposed individuals. Though server federation and blocklists are why I like to describe the fediverse (including mastodon) via an email analogy.