Since Elon Musk took over Twitter this company really really really annoys too many people to much of the time. And I do not mean those who suffer from Musk’s Twitter not adhering to contracts and paying for their office spaces or cloud services. I also don’t mean those researchers that are currently blackmailed to delete their research data. I mean the average Twitter user.
Just recently Twitter – in an effort to shy away all those nasty robots that crawl the content and strain the servers – has tried to limit access to tweets… unless of course you are paying for Twitter. Not only do you have to be logged in – you also get only access to a limited number of tweets. I do not have ANY reason anymore to use Twitter. It was bad… now it is programmatic disinformation with a dysfunctional user interface.
Onward…
So … Threads?
Now Facebook comes along and wants to take over… throwing the Instagram users into the ring and trying to jumpstart a Twitter rip-off clone called “Threads”. And guess what? Why should people want that now? Replace Mr. Musk with Mr. Zuckerberg? Is Facebook (or Instagram) “good karma”? Not it is not. Facebook is the company who would not hesitate to throw you your content under the bus if that means it could make a buck more. It does not hesitate to throw out democracy or let young kids suffer from eating disorder – to make a buck more. It would not hesitate to ignore the democratic will of nations and try to turn to systematic censorship – to make a buck more.
Why should you think Threads is any different? It is just another bait to get people to spend time on repetitive posts of people who want your attention and inject ads into your attention span.
No, wait! Threads IS different! It seems Facebook is not planning to release Threads to the EU market anytime soon. Facebook is concerned that EU privacy laws would be too demanding for them to follow. Obviously exploiting the data of users without them knowing about it is the only business model Zuckerberg can come up with.
We don’t need Twitter. We don’t need Facebook’s Threads-thing either. What we need is a network that can’t be monetized indefinitely by only a few people. We need a way to kill the incentive to capture public discourse just to be able tune and tweak it according to a business plan (or political influence).
What we need a good standard, a decent protocol and superb clients (without cool client software, people will turn away from possible alternatives). We need a distribution layer that can’t be centralized so that gatekeepers can monetize a monopoly.
Nostr – Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays
This GitHub page on the Nostr repository explains pretty well the problems with Twitter, Mastodon (and soon Threads I suppose).
