FBXL Social

Is it time to leave that toxic X? Or are we flogging a dead bird?

Musk's abuse of personal power and Twitter's increasing unpleasantness has pushed many to fly the nest.

But what next? We need federated social media where users can move freely between platforms.

Here's why 🧵

#Musk #Twitter #X #socialmedia #Bluesky #fediverse

https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/the-twitter-xodus-time-to-stay-or-time-to-go/

In the current walled garden model of social media, users are locked-in to a particular platform.

People can't move accounts without losing networks they've developed.

Under tech oligarchs, users have no influence over how content is prioritised or the platform's algorithms.

#fediverse

Federated social media offers competition and choice.

As with email or mobile phones, your account should be able to work across any provider regardless of the network.

This is interoperability and it’s key to improving standards.

#fediverse

We value the ability to switch providers in services like utilities.

Much has been done to ease the barriers in the name of consumer protection and to drive up quality through competition.

But monopolies pervert this model.

#fediverse

With water companies, there's capitalism in theory through privatisation, but no choice over provider.

The sewage crisis is a fitting parallel to social media. Owners have a captive consumer base, so there’s little incentive to improve the service.

#fediverse

Without competition, there’s no consumer choice and therefore voice.

The disincentive to leaving a platform is losing your investment in networks.

Interoperability lets you migrate your account between platforms without losing followers.

#fediverse

A decentralised model of social media gives us, the consumer-citizen, the right to leave.

This portability of our account fights against the network effects of users congealing around one provider that can begin to act with impunity.

#fediverse

Where we have digital land barons, they can algorithmically dictate the terms of debate.

Interoperability means we can choose differently without losing access, forcing providers to think differently with the interests of its users in mind.

#fediverse

Open standards for social media gives the potential to promote better standards of moderation.

Third parties are able to repurpose, filter and represent content in ways that users want according to community principles of engagement.

Open standards mean third-party developers can experiment to build new tools, apps, platforms and feeds that can connect to an interoperable network.

Consumer choice is given meaning, where the platform sets the floor and users raise the ceiling.

#fediverse

Open Source technologies let everyone participate and bring social media to their own communities.

Governments, real communities and organisations can control their own publication and data.

#fediverse

The fediverse is threatened by onerous legislation, such as the Online Safety Act that’s forged in the idea of monopoly owned social media platforms.

Competition to engage consumer choice needs to be strengthened instead.

#fediverse

There are challenges to the federated model.

This includes an increase in bubbles that can foster hate, where platforms are self-selecting and exclusionary of marginalised communities who are underrepresented in the tech world.

But hate-based networks thrive best when they can infiltrate and attack wider society that they seek to undermine.

Hate-based networks are hard to protect against, but depend on poorly-moderated, big tech platforms to spread their bile.

#fediverse

We need citizen-powered social media to break the incentives to ignore poor moderation which ignores our concerns, and to be able to tackle hate-based networks.

Continuing to depend on monopoly capitalism to bring this change simply cannot work.

#fediverse