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.
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.
The same situation applies to League of Legends and their wonderfully toxic player base
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.
The liberal-conservative political dichotomy was dying before Trump and is decidedly non-descriptive now.
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.
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.
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.
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".
So you think the FSF should've used the account representing them to troll?
Interesting idea. What did you do?
> say something "harmful" like "stonetoss is hans kristian graebener".
What that it?
> "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?
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."
And personally the few people I follow there (mostly game devs) are totally worth talking to.
Speaking as someone who recently left the country (if by "the country" you mean the USA) ...
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.
> 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.
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.
rvz•1h ago
Always has been.
doener•50m ago
GaryBluto•34m ago
baiwl•44m ago
orwin•20m ago
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.
orwin•26m ago
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)