Some quick points:
- 𝕏 requires you to have an account to see the full feed of another account (otherwise it just shows a random selection of posts that got the most likes or engagement or something; nitter.poast.org is a great workaround, but few people know it). And once you’re logged into your account, of course they will start tracking your activity on other websites via third party cookies (not sure how well browsers protect against them these days).
- @tim.one The “discover more” feature, showing you random posts, is enabled by default (at least I didn’t change any settings other than switching to light mode and it was on for me). Moreover, whether we like it or not, most people do not read the “Following” tab (only what you’ve chosen to see) but the “For you” tab (selection of posts mixing accounts you follow and posts inserted by an algorithm optimized to drive user engagement at the detriment of the sanity of political discourse).
- I must say that, as a gay man, the fact that Facebook has a mostly unchanged audience after announcing new guidelines that basically say you’re not allowed to call anyone a retard unless that is out of LGBTphobia just makes me want to vomit. I will readily admit that this is not an entirely rational sentiment, just like my deleting my Facebook account was not entirely rational[1]. I would advise individual people to just leave 𝕏 and Facebook for elsewhere, because making other platforms more interesting than these is the only way these can die and stop being the fuelers of hate speech that they are today. I nevertheless understand it is much more delicate for an organization to make this sort of decision which has some political flavor. (Today’s world has a very big problem with the fact that so many political parties have fallen into ideologies which should be wholly unacceptable in a saner world, so that things which should be a “simple” matter of not being an asshole become politically charged. But the PSF is not responsible for that problem, and dealing with it is delicate.)
- With that being said, I feel that a welcome step which the PSF can take now, without making any politically risky moves, would be to (a) make sure the Mastodon account has all the same content as the 𝕏 one, and (b) start also posting that content to the Bluesky account, which is currently empty. That way, at least people who do want to leave have one less “account which only exists on 𝕏” roadblock.
The account was unused, so it mostly makes zero difference. ↩︎