EFF is Leaving X

Gopher:

I really miss the old Twitter, it was the great equaliser where a lot of the economic and cultural elite would go there and let the brain worms of social media eat away at their minds the same way us normal people do.

The old Twitter was co-opted by ex members of the “Intelligence Community” (it’s how they call themselves, but others call it “the deep state”) working for self-proclaimed “fact-checkers”. This resulted in a lot of shadowbanning, deplatforming/cancellation, censorship, etc. This was revealed in The Twitter Files, largely under-reported or ignored altogether by the mass media, which happens to hire the same self-proclaimed “fact-checkers”.

Elon censored some voices like CrimethInc and (temporarily) Micah Lee. But on net, there is much less censorship than before. Although I do miss people like Micah Lee and the EFF.

I think people engaged with opinions they dislike, which makes the algorithm feed you more of those opinions, which makes people hate X/Twitter and ultimately leave.

otterfoghornrainfall:

I think mastodon etc are better platforms on an abstract level, but agree with you that their lack of network effect makes them far less useful in practice.

The problem of Mastodon or Nostr is the lack of discovery. Bluesky has a decent “For you:” feed, but I still get better news from X.

jonah:

If I had to rank them, in terms of how many people there are actually interested in looking at the stuff we do at Privacy Guides , for the record it’s probably something like:

1. This forum

2. YouTube

3. Twitter and Mastodon are usually neck and neck, but Twitter definitely reaches a more diverse group of people while Mastodon people are similar to people on this forum lol

4. TikTok

5. Reddit

6. All the other platforms

7. Threads

Bluesky, Nostr and Lemmy are decent. Check them out.

tooinfinity:

Does the server in a way dictate what or who I can follow? For example if of has a mastodon account will I find it on all servers?

You can find the account on all servers as long as those servers are federated with each other. The main Mastodon do defederate some other instances sometimes, which results in deplatforming/cancellation for the whole Mastodon instance. For example, the Bitcoin Hackers instance was defederated.