I kind of feel the same way, or at least I used to, by default, and in private I ridiculed my friends for being on twitter for over a decade, and always referred to it as "walmart.com" because it seemed so stupid to me to use a corporate-owned site to post your own thoughts and whatevers, where you aren't even the customer...

... BUT!!! ...

...eventually my own twitter feed was fucking awesome, because that is where the people are, and I followed the right mix of 60-70 people. Not too much content, but really good. I didn't post there, but I read it several times a week.

Then the oligarch weirdo guy bought it, and began disgracing himself and the company in various ways — one of the more generally insignificant (but personally repugnant) of them being that his own ignorant (or not?) retweeting of Nazi memes and self-owns belittling his own disabled employees etc ETC began surfacing in my feed to a degree that the programmatic intervention was obvious — so I was like, gross, this is disgusting, this is not for me (and also: I was right ...)

So I left.

But then I joined Mastodon and tried to follow the same people, but not all of them were there. And there were hardly any racists or bigots or mysoginists, which you wouldn't maybe think I'd miss, but compared to twitter the Mastodon feed I got (and still have so far) is like dad jokes and "science is real" followed by "yes indeed, science is real, look at these interesting new papers" and no sick evisceration of science-denier guy because the science-denier guy isn't even there.

And I'm not even saying I am unhappy that the science-denier guy isn't allowed on any of the instances my instance federates with (or, more likely, doesn't know about and has never even heard of Mastodon).

I'm just saying it's boring. So I don't expect most of my Twitter people to show up.

And so that is where I have — belatedly and grudgingly — come to accept the value of these corporate cunts and their proprietary platforms: they get people to show up.

So I walked back my fuck you walmart.com or whatever the fuck stance, one notch. I no longer just whip out my dick and piss all over any proprietary platform. I concede there may be some bargain to be struck.

If you make it easy enough to participate that we end up getting to see Grady Booch and MC Hammer discuss the nature of machine consciousness, or the true innovators in whatever the fuck we care about have interesting discussions... then, well, that's not nothing.

It even might go on as a win-win for years, even a decade or perhaps two.

But there's an implicit balance there, which requires both sides to act in good faith. Even though we aren't the customer, because your customers buys ads which you annoyingly insert into what we're looking at... if it's not too much, most of us are maybe OK.

But this probably means that even if these arrangements work, the time is always limited.

Because when the corporation whips out its dick and pisses all over us then... I mean, I think that means not only that the relationship is over, but also fuck you and fuck your IPO and we hope you don't make it, and if we can without inconveniencing ourselves too much, we'll torpedo that shit, because you fucked us over.

But like I don't think any of that happens in this case without the proprietary platform, because there never would have been any platform at all.