You probably don’t need another excuse to leave the dumpster fire of X (former Twitter). But here’s one more! And this one has a strict deadline.
Time is running out to own your own stuff over at the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). Late last month, X changed its Terms of Service which lets the platform train its new A.I. After tomorrow, X will be able to legally use and sell your information for training purposes.
From the Terms of Service document:
By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to make your Content available to the rest of the world, [...] including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type.”
After being purchased by Elon Musk, what was once a Nazi problem has turned the site into a full-fledged “Nazi Bar”. It has become a platform for harassment, with it changing its blocking function so that people that you block will now be free to stalk you. Twitter has evolved into an abusive partner — so it’s time to get out.
Cancelling your account is easy: Click on your profile. Click on the Your Account tab. Click on Deactivate Account. Get out of the Nazi bar now!
Three Immediate alternatives to Twitter/X
1. Threads, by Meta
The owning company of Facebook and Instagram quickly rolled out “Threads” as a Twitter-killer. It’s shiny and popular, with over 200 million users. However, in terms of protecting marginalized groups, and not being another Nazi bar, it’s not great. Hate speech, Naziism, and misinformation has proliferated there. Plus, it’s owned by an oligarch. And all Meta social media is using your text and pictures for A.I. training as of this past summer.
2. Bluesky
Formed in part by the former Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, Bluesky is another option. It is quickly gaining popularity with the fall of X, having 14.5 Million users. It has some cool features, including ways to tweak the algorithm, and a great on-boarding program. It is set up as a public benefit LLC, which means that its governing board may factor in its users’ good in making its decisions. Also, it may not. It is also beholden to venture capitalists who funded it, and a major investor are crypto bros, literally “Blockchain Capital.” Bluesky’s CEO, Jay Graber, promises that Bluesky will never sell out. However, here’s how futurist Cory Doctorow thinks about it: (his emphasis)
But here’s the thing: all those other platforms, the ones where I unwisely allowed myself to get locked in, where today I find myself trapped by the professional, personal and political costs of leaving them, they were all started by people who swore they’d never sell out.
[...]
I have watched virtually every service I relied on, gave my time and attention to, and trusted, go through this process. It happened with services run by people I knew well and thought highly of.
Enshittification can be thought of as the result of a lack of consequences. Whether you are tempted by greed or pressured by people who have lower ethics than you, the more it costs to compromise, the fewer compromises you’ll make.
3. Mastodon
Mastodon is a scrappy little service based on a social media protocol invented by the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium — the same overseeing group that has built the protocol for the World Wide Web. Its core feature is its blessing and a curse; it is owned by nobody. Anybody can set up a Mastodon server. When you join a Mastodon server, you’re probably going to be on a server run by a person rather than a company.
It’s a little bit like email, in that — if you don’t like the server you’re on, it’s possible to move to a different server with values more consistent with yours. Again from Doctorow:
Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I’ve entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other, has been on Bluesky’s roadmap for as long as I’ve been following it, but they haven’t (yet) delivered it.
That was worrying when Bluesky was a scrappy, bootstrapped startup with a few million users. Now it has grown to over 13 million users, and it has taken on a large tranche of outside capital.
That being said, most Mastodon servers are left-leaning and pretty hard-nosed about being anti-Nazi. Because each of the Mastodon servers may be connected to each other, if one starts to be a Nazi Bar, they can be cut off from the collective whole by the decent wholesome servers and their users can be protected at the local level. It’s like email — if an email server becomes fraught with spam, it will be cut off from the world as a danger.
How to sign up for Mastodon
Signing up to Mastodon is pretty easy. There are some big servers like what I’m on (mastodon.social). However, bigger might not necessarily be better. Small regional Mastodon servers are very nice, and you’ll have a local person that you can talk to if there’s a problem. You can also check out the accounts that I follow on Mastodon, to see if there is anyone you’d like to follow, too.
Because it is developed and run by a bunch of nerds, not venture capitalists — Mastodon doesn’t have a big development or advertising budget. But what it does have is this: the inability to be bought by oligarchs and venture capitalists.
While I do not think DailyKos has a presence on Mastodon yet, following hashtags are pretty easy and intuitive. Following the hashtag #DailyKos will populate your thread with stories from here. I would love for DailyKos to have more of a presence at Mastodon. Don’t be beholden to rich and powerful oligarchs, venture capitalists, and Crypto Bros.
Follow me at @Shakludanto@mastodon.social
