[kwlug-disc] Trust in Musk.. or go to NextCloud

[Doug Moen]

Some of the panic might be motivated by the fact that in the US, the phrase "free speech" has been redefined by the alt-right to mean a hellscape of alt-right trolling where liberal voices are brutally suppressed. And Musk is alt-right, so some people assume his "free speech" pronouncements are in fact an alt-right dog whistle. He has more recently made statements that allay these concerns. But the staggeringly incompetent and chaotic process by which Musk acquired Twitter suggests that Musk has no plan. Eventually he may stumble on a good formula and get it right. That could take time. We will see.

Meanwhile, Mastodon is available right now, and unlike Twitter there is no centralized censorship system, just a few thousand instances that each define their own acceptable use policies. Because of its decentralized structure, the Fediverse can support free speech in a way that Twitter probably never will, due to Twitter's centralized structure and its need to keep advertisers happy.

Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, has just launched a new decentralized social media system called Bluesky Social. It's a federated protocol, not a centralized platform. That is worth checking out. (How does the new "AT" protocol compare to ActivityPub?) Frankly, Dorsey's project to create a Twitter replacement sounds more exciting to me than whatever Musk is doing to Twitter. Dorsey has put years of thought into this.

Musk, in addition to being a master attention whore (how many people have heard of Bluesky Social?), is best known for taking other people's business plans, claiming the credit for them(*), then executing on them, improving them through rapid iteration. Musk is superhumanly good at execution. Space-X is my favourite corporation. In the case of Twitter, I don't see a plan, just goals that he doesn't know how to accomplish yet. Musk's track record for achieving ambitious goals that don't have a solution already specced out and explored by someone else isn't stellar. Where is full self driving, neural lace, hyperloop?

(*)References available on request.

On Thu, Nov 3, 2022, at 10:57 AM, Chris Frey wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 03, 2022 at 08:20:21AM -0400, Doug Moen wrote:
>> The @joinmastodon Twitter account points out that running your own
>> Mastodon instance is cheaper than paying for a blue checkmark on the
>> new Twitter. But how easy is that? Perhaps NextCloud Social is easier
>> to set up and maintain than a Mastodon instance?
>
> If Elon Musk manages to stir a fire of interest in distributed/federated
> open source services, he may have done more to advance the state of
> technology than most. :-)
>
> Even so, I don't understand what people's panic is about.  Isn't Musk
> supposed to be a free speech promoter?  If so, then there should be
> *less* censorship on Twitter post-Musk than pre-Musk, no?
>
> Nothing has quite motivated me to join Twitter yet, not post-Musk and
> certainly not pre-Musk.  Twitter has been a hellscape so far, it's
> long past time to let another man have a crack at it, and see what
> comes out the other side.
>
> - Chris
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> kwlug-disc mailing list
> To unsubscribe, send an email to kwlug-disc-leave at kwlug.org
> with the subject "unsubscribe", or email
> kwlug-disc-owner at kwlug.org to contact a human being.