I get it from the Dev’s side of things. If you have a (supposed) Trillionaire-backed tech platform threatening you with legal action for a project that likely wasn’t some huge money-maker (if it made any money at all) I would likely do the same.
It’s easy to sit here and say “fight back”, but unless some entity like the EFF is gonna back you it’s hard to justify the time, expenses, and hassle of even just dealing with a legal threat from one of these platforms if you aren’t a journalist and are just some random dev who found a workaround to accessing Twitter/X content outside their app.
I do worry what this portends for other projects though. No doubt Google is keeping a close eye on this when it comes to YouTube alternative front-ends and apps. At least there you have more options so it becomes a game of “whack-a-mole”.
GrapheneOS actually does have Mastodon. But yeah, generally if I see some content creator or the like on Mastodon and not shitter these days, I immediately treat it as a signal that their content must be worth something cuz they’re sacrificing audience reach by doing this—so they can’t be total sellouts chasing trends and writing nonsense for the clout. At the very least they have integrity.
IMO Mastodon should be the default “town hall” of the internet, because it’s the least likely to be enshitified and closed down. It may not be perfect, but for keeping up with a company or person it’s in no way worse than twitter.
The people aren’t ready to hear it, but twitter should be nationalized. So many public organizations refuse to use another communication channel, so twitter should not be under private ownership by a guy that is too busy building mecha hitler to care about doing a public good.
And it can’t get much worse than the president of the united states owning a for-profit social media site called “truth”.
No, the last time something was nationalized was July of 2026, when the British Government nationalized British Steel. The last time this occurred before British Steel was in May of 2026, when the Armenian Government nationalized Electric Networks of Armenia. Neither of these two events resulted in 60 million people dying.
For me it’s videogame news. It’s the only platform the gaming companies are posting (except Meta services, which I refuse to use), why would I spend an unnecessary amount of time reading all gaming news subreddits when I can have a chronological Twitter feed of only the news I care about?
Except you did not once state in your argument that nationalizating companies because the CEO is incompetent was a bad thing. You implied all forms of nationalization was bad because it kills people by linking it to the various communist revolutions of the 1920s and 40s. Also you did not make it obvious your statement was sarcastic or figurative (outside of the last sentence, but even then anyone could easily interpret that sentence as being it’s own separate sarcastic remark not directly related to the previous sentence), so you cannot claim any response to your argument is strawman if you did not make it obvious your argument was figurative or sarcastic to begin with. Also, mountainofmeat was not arguing Twitter should be nationalized because it was ran incompetently. He was arguing it should be nationalized because various public organizations use it exclusively to post public information, and that this public information is not made easily accessible without a Twitter Account, and therefore it would be a public benefit if it were nationalized because then this public information would be made more accessible to the public. I will not post any further responses directly related to this conversation.
What I was implying is that this hypothetical act of expropriation
would yield nothing but uncertainty and distrust in our state and economy.
The Great Leap Forward was in the 60’s, not the 20’s or the 40’s.
so I’m sure it’s a great idea.
Which sentence are you specifically referring to? The two lines of text joined by a comma that I wrote are still two complete sentences. It was evident that I was being sarcastic, while I was also drawing parallels to Russia’s recent nationalizations and jokingly pointing out how we could fund our war in Iran through seizure of assets.
the “common good.”
I have already covered this in the reply. Perhaps you should actually read replies directed at you and not skim over them,
Also, Twitter is not exclusively a frontend for news. It’s social media and people use it to communicate with each other.
There’s no law mandating that platforms have to be accessible without an account, or that once a platform becomes a treasure trove of information that it should be expropriated. Therefore, there are no grounds for the nationalization of Twitter, even if it was for public benefit.
What would help make information more accessible is encouraging the use of RSS feeds and/or dedicated platforms.
Instead of bailing, how about you explain why should we give the state a platform for them to push their narratives on? And what stops the state from using the “public benefit” argument for virtually anything?
Well as I mentioned, the president literally has his own social media platform, which for some reason is also privately owned (and he charges companies for early access to his “truths”).
The point being that nationalizing a platform that is effectively a public utility because of it’s massive size isn’t that out there in the grand scheme of things, I even think it’s reasonable.
There is information that is virtually inaccessible, information from official government organizations as well, because elon musk wanted a way to protect his precious data for AI training. The world’s first trillionaire can surely stomach not getting to play private government by controlling the flow of global information.
A free market solution here does NOT work. The switching cost is gigantic unless you are china, so a competitor will not win. Not to mention that elon briefly had this scam called doge in the government, so there are clear ties anyways.
Now, of course you could also argue that you do not want government protection, but the point of a government is to protect its people, even if that’s easy to forget these days.
Twitter wants to grow so it makes sense for them to make it worse and harder to use their platform
I know there’s some popular saying about just getting people on your platform like windows or YouTube even if they aren’t spending money. Pirating windows and using adblock on youtube has not stopped then from being massive business successes.
He’s free to have his own social media. The issue is him selling early access to his posts, and said early access is most likely being used for insider trading. In other words, he’s abusing his position of power for personal gain.
Most government organizations post primarily on their website, and even have RSS feeds. Their social media accounts are more about reaching other audiences.
Again, he’s free to do that. Does it suck? Yeah it fuckin’ does. What could be done is raising awareness about this, albeit the majority of people (presumably) won’t care about an issue so insignificant, because they probably have Twitter accounts themselves and because they don’t realize that it’s part of the larger campaign against the free internet.
What cost are you talking about? (Not a demeaning question or anything, just asking you to elaborate)
I am arguing that markets should be truly free and that there should be no government intervention, besides enforcing the laws that ensure fairness.
Off Topic