I make this assumption because there are plenty of services that can post to multiple social media accounts, and even cross-posting really wouldn't take that much effort- maybe an additional minute per post if you have to log in each time.
They're purposely limiting their reach, and I see no reasoning listed so I assume not everyone there is proud of their "why".
That leaves everyone using it with no non-political options -- there are political implications whether you stay or go.
Leaving it now (when a bunch of others are going too and the front man has recently been dropping bombs) is probably the less political option -- especially in the long term if you think the site is going to get more radical.
Bonus points for moving to a federated alternative, since you can move away from big tech (which is more of a principled stand and/or tactical move than a political statement, IMO.)
This announcement does tell us w3c is a politically motivated org that disagrees with the new regime.
And most people smart enough to know what the W3C is are also smart enough to know that antisemitism isn't political.
Being on the platform is considered political to some and leaving the platform is considered political to others.
All things considered, I think they did fine by not making a big fuss about it. They don't seem to be looking for pats on the back.
Anyone who is posting just on Twitter is limiting reach. Twitter is closed internet.
W3C posting to open platform is not limiting reach.
And they should feel no obligation to support a private, closed source company.
Please quote the part of W3C's announcement that discusses their political views with regards to Twitter.
Even if you personally don't use Twitter, virtually all the contemporary media you consume is being molded by it. Even today. It'll take a lot more influential people to drop it or move elsewhere before it won't be significantly impacting your life.
In the US, at least. I don't know how seriously it's taken in other countries.
E.g, you can be sure that if Macron starts tweeting from mastodon (the gov has an official instance https://social.numerique.gouv.fr), thousands of journalists and politics will switch.
If Twitter is going to be declared dead, I think it will likely be an avalanche type thing. It won't be any individual account that kills it, but rather a large amount of prominent accounts across multiple parts of our culture.
But maybe there are more nails, any will do
From loading it just now: my top feed items are over 60% "interaction bait," i.e. ranked posts from accounts that I don't follow. When I turn off my adblocking rules, these are interspersed with bottom-barrel advertisements.
In other words: it's dead, but the corpse is still warm.
What surprised me was how QUICKLY tiktok died for me! It's so vanilla and boring these days, every second video is some ad of a chinese dude selling me some trinket. It's very strange. Instagram caught up with their reel tech, and instagram is just a wild west of content and comments, love it!
If you wanted to keep up with what's happening around you, either in general or in a specific topic, it was the place to be.
It was possible to hear directly from the people who are reporting on the news you care about, but also from the people the news were about. And INTERACT with them directly.
Unfortunately that didn't last for long.
What the openai debacle showed us very clearly is how important the platform still is despite all the damage. Threads was as if it didn't even exist.
The thing is, none of the fediverse networks who try to replace Twitter would be able to accomplish that same mission.
The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture. I'm not judging, I have guilty pleasures too, but for my tastes: good riddance!
I wish every government would establish a national instance to deliver public announcements and create channels for easy and fast communication with their citizens.
Large companies should adopt Mastodon as well. People can easily receive news and comment on them.
But none of them will have the best people in ai, and blockchain, and finance, and rockets engineering, and commidians, etc. in a single website to not only deliver the news but also help make sense of it.
Now, it's a real pain to just find the instance that hosts the real account of your favorite multimillion news organization, let alone some world-class expert in a very niche topic that became the topic-du-jour for some reason.
Not the grand parent, my instance is shutting down in January. I have no way to migrate my posts. This is the sixth time I've gone through this over the years. I don't feel like dealing with this stuff anymore.
> The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture.
If you pay attention to the few notable people in their fields, they describe some of the problems such as:
https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/111511735894043437
I hope my comment explains some of the whys for you.
Because the common person expects content and content creators to be surfaced for them. Which Mastodon instance provides this for the larger fediverse?
> The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture.
Well, that and the other millions of regular people that are just hanging out and posting on Twitter. I'd love to see them come to Mastodon but they have no incentive.
Twitter/X is still the de facto global real-time news platform.
If 5% of X's top users exited to a different platform, X users would just screenshot and redistribute their noteworthy content on X and it would be business as usual.
You can't beat the network effects.
I say that's a huge win, when you shift your lens away from "the destructon of twitter" and instead "options outside of twitter"
That makes Threads probably a much closer approximation of what the average person cares about. You have to be like five levels deep into bizarre internet drama to be glued to your phone to get live updates about Sam Altman's and Helen Toner's employment status.
Key people covering OpenAI e.g. Alex Heath, Kara Swisher, Casey Newton were all posting on Threads first.
It was then re-posted on X.
I apparently missed this. What important role did Twitter play there?
I'm not sure that twitter added much other than allowing us to spectate the whole thing in realtime. I don't think it impacted the outcome in any meaningful way or provided us a ton of useful context. I actually worry that the endless speculation (and intentional misinformation at times) can be a bit dangerous. Kind of like when news stations went 24/7 and then grasped for anything at all to put on the screen to fill all that airtime.
So, I think there's potential, but it's definitely not ideal.
[1] https://fedidb.org/software [2] https://fedidb.org/software/smithereen [3] https://friends.grishka.me/w3c@w3c.social
But sarcasm aside, JS is a web standard, just like HTML and CSS. While I understand the opinion of people who don't want to execute JS in their browser, I'm also highly sympathetic to devs who want to use things that are enabled by default in all modern browsers.
... and this is neither.
It's like opting out of the genepool. Twitter/X is still where everything happens and where you get closest to the source.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com
Even the most vocal Spaceman haters come back whenever something big is happening. This was reaffirmed again recently with the entire OpenAI CEO saga.
Add to that community notes, the single best social media innovation.
It's not where the W3C happens, clearly. That statement becomes less true by the day as more and more accounts leave.
And community notes is a nice addition but it isn't a replacement for moderation.
And sometimes that's a perfectly fine thing to do.
>Twitter/X is still where everything happens and where you get closest to the source.
Please explain why this concept would be vital for W3C, and how it might be detrimental to their existence to opt out.
they aren't coming back because it's twitter, they come back because they need to reach a lot of people. That isn't unique to twitter in the grand scheme of things, it's just the current crown bearer.
You misspelled cesspool.
Twitter is not a platform any more it used to be, a lot of fake accounts with blue ticks and ads after ads.
I just wonder what was Elon's original idea with Twitter, buy big social network, rename it to "X", show to the world that "Yes, I can", then destroy it gradually from inside?
The alternative is having a random selection of highly liked (and, often, very old) posts show up on their profile for logged-out users. Setting their account to protected is an easy and effective way of making that go away -- and it also prevents users from following an account that's no longer in use.
I'm hoping Elon gets kicked out like at PayPal and Twitter is able to become less cringe.
