Today, one of the biggest things on the social internet happened, with Elon Musk buying Twitter. So here's a little reminder of Mastodon. Not our usual news, but it's too big to be ignored. Twitter is a massive and important platform and now it's going to be wholly owned by Elon Musk. Regardless of your thoughts on Musk, it's still a little alarming.
Good news for those who do dislike Musk, as there is a great alternative available with Mastodon. Not perfect, nothing is, but it is a good option to try. It's very much like Twitter except it's free, open source, has no adverts and anyone can host their own instance. Thanks to how it's designed, people can follow and talk to each other across these instances too.
GamingOnLinux is on Mastodon, so feel free to give us a follow. If you don't care about this whole thing, you can also follow us on Twitter.
From the Press Release:
Bret Taylor, Twitter's Independent Board Chair, said, "The Twitter Board conducted a thoughtful and comprehensive process to assess Elon's proposal with a deliberate focus on value, certainty, and financing. The proposed transaction will deliver a substantial cash premium, and we believe it is the best path forward for Twitter's stockholders."
Parag Agrawal, Twitter's CEO, said, "Twitter has a purpose and relevance that impacts the entire world. Deeply proud of our teams and inspired by the work that has never been more important."
"Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," said Mr. Musk. "I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it."
It will be interesting to see if Musk does open up more of Twitter.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Regardless, we should all be using Mastodon (or any ActivityPub service).
I get most of my GoL news through their Mastodon presence.
Quoting: GuestI didn't realize that twitter was a cornerstone of democracy until now /s last time I checked Jamiroquai was using it to spread false information./s
Quoting: GuestWonderful news! Very interested to see what they open source.
A megalomaniac billionaire who does not tolerate criticism buys twitter, what could go wrong....
As for the opem source, so what, open source twitter algorithms won't be any better or worse then if they would be closed source. He had to loan a lot of $$$ to make this happen, he will want to make a profit.
Reminder that 'Mastodon' is not a single site, it's a software stack using a W3C protocol (ActivityPub, so the flagship/example mastodon.social site isn't any more 'Mastodon' than Yahoo Mail or GMail is all of 'E-mail' (though lots of people don't make that distinction in the latter case either).
There's a community browser for those that meet certain criteria up at https://joinmastodon.org/communities, or if you're so inclined, you can host your own - standalone, with Docker, or leverage something like YunoHost.
You can opt to keep registrations closed on your own instance, and just have your own private vanity site, do it invite-only for friends, etc., and then you and any fellow admins can fairly easily moderate as you see fit, including the fun instance-wide federation stuff - a particularly bad actor / spammy instance harassing you or your users? Add its domain to the filter, and then your server simply won't accept any of their traffic.
Or, if Mastodon specifically isn't your thing, with it being an open protocol, there's other implementations you can choose from, with of course varying levels of compatibility. You can also opt to run the Mastodon backend, but swap the front-end out for a different feel.
Unlike corporate social media being at the whims of shareholders, or the board, or private investors, advertisers, etc., we can have our own, independent communities, and choose who we associate with (or not). That is empowering by design, at the root of it all, way more than even the richest people on the planet can hope for with purchases like these.
Now, when do we figure out how to help get Matrix/Element up as a viable Discord replacement, next? ;)
While it's not impossible, I find it hard to imagine Elon making it any worse of a platform.
About the only things that come to mind are Trump and COVID misinformation type stuff being blocked/censored.
And I have been much happier.
Join fediverse, it's good.
I always thought it was a thing famous people would use to get noticed in/on actual news sites....
Last edited by denyasis on 25 April 2022 at 8:39 pm UTC
Quoting: KithopDeleted my Twitter & Facebook accounts many years ago at this point
Never had any of them to begin with
Not even snapcrap or whatever its called!
Mountain Man Apr 25, 2022
Not so great news for those who think there isn't enough censorship in the world.
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