When it forces you to log in to view stuff, it’s usefulness as a platform for announcements is substantially lessened.
shutting out a significant portion of your community without seeking their input first isn’t a sensible move for such a foundational open source project.
It actually is a perfectly sensible move, and it doesn’t “shut out” anyone. If anything, prioritizing twitter is what shuts users out. They linked to two-three alternatives. What’s the argument here, exactly, from the other side?
My town’s subreddit just started a policy to disallow links to X for similar reasons.
There is a movement to avoid the platform.
Good riddance. Stop using Nazi platforms and join the fediverse instead.
The reasons (summarized using Copilot):
- The platform no longer aligns with Debian’s values, social contract, code of conduct, and diversity statement.
- Concerns over X becoming a place where people they care about don’t feel safe.
- Abuse on the platform happening without consequences.
- Issues with misinformation and lack of moderation.
bad bot
Did it make a mistake?
god, the replies to their tweet are awful…
That first reply highlights a major difference in how people approach the world.
Speaking very generally, conservatism and right wing politics seen to attract those who see everything as a competition and that dominating other people is what it means to be a good person. Funny that it also leads to frustrated, angry, isolated people.
So if we want to switch to using a website that doesn’t promote hurting/killing 2% of the population, we are now BOWING DOWN to the minority some of us would not rather murder.
It’s the same reason they hate DEI so much.
Those replies are why they are leaving. And good riddance to such a godawful platform.
Blue checkmarks…
This is to me one of the major reasons Twitter discourse is completely ruined and the platform is mostly useless for seeing what people think now.
When the only people who get to be at the top of discussions are people who pay for twitter, the only opinions that get shared are those that are pro Twitter, pro Elon, etc. Because they have a direct stake in the game.
And that’s if the accounts posting aren’t all bots that pay for a checkmark to boost engagement, which is almost all I see when I occasionally have to check Twitter these days.
So glad more people are leaving it. There’s nothing to gain from it anymore.
It is depressing, but I try not to forget we are seeing a sort of survivorship bias of stupidity on the former Twitter at this point. The cohort of remaining posting accounts is dumber and dumber on average. And this dynamic is magnified in the replies, because they are paid blue accounts at the top. Eg, self-selected losers. (The top account has likely just hidden their checkmark)
Edit: PS, are you still using Nitter? I thought it had died?
There are still a few nitter instances alive
Sounds like bots
Honestly I had the same thought. But on the other hand, internet outrage talking points have also become extremely formulaic…
The replies illustrate the problem nicely.
Ah, that captures such a stark answer to why people use xitter though.
It’s not “so I can hear from you” it’s “So YoU cAn HeAr FrOm Us!!!11oneone”
Walled gardens? More like prison yard. Lol
Good, now if only OpenSource devs switched from Discord to let’s say Matrix/XMPP
We’d be partying
Having worked on a couple of Matrix deployments over the last year, that shit needs to be simpler and easier, yo? Once the Matrix server exists, it’s easy enough to get people to use it.
Contrast it’s ease of deployment with Mumble for example.
go back to forums. Support in discord is awful. Discord is not as searchable as a forum public on the internet
https://forums.debian.net/ exists for Debian
Yeah, forums please. I hate the idea of troubleshooting information being locked behind some stupid software we can’t easily index and search. Forums can be put on archive.org, you can literally print a page, or save it as a PDF for reviewing later. You can make use of bookmark software like Linkwarden to archive things.
Discord? Not so much. You can use third party software to scrape it and save information, but no search engine can index it. Community building is great, but I loathe having to trawl through tonnes of blithering blathering conversation BS just to figure out where to find firmware for a particular chip I have is.
Makes me want to projectile vomit all over the place, throw my computer out the window, and move to convent.
Thank you! This has always been my main gripe about “collaboration platforms” in general (Discord, Slack, Teams, WebEx, etc). It’s just chat with extra steps, and does not make important information any easier to find.
I want to move my music discord to a forum platform. Can anyone recommend a good FOSS forum with good iOS/mobile app support? Some of the musicians are going to resist if there isn’t a decent, usable, mobile app. It’s been a long time since I set up a forum. Last one I installed on a server was phpBB!
Maybe Discourse? The mobile website is pretty good and there are also a number of third-party mobile apps.
Excellent. Thank you for the suggestion. I’ll take a look at Discourse.
What about this one that you’re on right now?
I may sound too radical, but I’d go so far as to support a common Logseq knowledge graph.
Just remove matrix from the alternatives and I 100% agree, long live xmpp😊
Meanwhile one can use: slidcord
If we’re swapping out discord, please just go with Zulip… It’s FLOSS, and has a solid company backing it that actually cares about FLOSS (They even bought the product back, after it was sold to a company that was enshittifying it)/
Zulip sounds neat!
Shoutout to https://revolt.chat/ as a Discord alternative too.
Does anyone actually use it? I put my head in every few months and it’s just a bunch of graveyard servers. Very few that have any activity so far as I can tell.
This is probably much closer to discord than Zulip is, tbh. I never knew about it previously :)
How is it feature wise? Parity with xmpp/matrix? Better?
Better. I’d say its fully on par with Discord, minus the dark patterns. There’s a public Zulip instance where you can check it out.
God I hope I live to see the day. Discord at first appears like a good IRC wrapper, but the XP of actually using it is fucking gross.
Matrix and XMPP don’t even pretend to be Discord replacements.
But they are replacements
In that case we could all just use email.
Then try out DeltaChat in that case
I’d make a blind bet on that over Matrix for suitability.
Imagine being so fragile you can’t tolerate opposing viewpoints.
Imagine being so fragile you get shook by people leaving
I don’t mind opposing views. I do mind views that say some of my family members or some of my friends should kill themselves. I have no business on a platform that allows such hateful conduct, end of story.
It’s a matter of basic decency and respect.
Imagine your view point is aligning with Musk one… You’re either a billionaire or a dumb looser thinking is a part of a club he isn’t in
This is a great example of where linking to a blog post about an announcement is better than linking to the announcement itself:
after digging a bit deeper, I discovered that there was originally a longer, more detailed announcement that was later scrapped. I found it in a GitLab commit made by Jean. [Link to GitLab comment in article]
Good job, itsfoss.com
I didn’t really need another reason to love Debian more but here we are… I’m donating to Debian today
Oh I like that rhythm.
"I’m lock up, no way Corps and hearsay Brought me to jail FOSS not too late
All I say is I’m donating to debian today"
Debian continues to be one of the best distros ever made. If I had the means, it would get funding every time I run apt update.
Wild that so many are still hanging out at the Nazi bar
its not surprising considering the overlap. many linux users are cryptofascists, i.e. luke smith
Its that social inertia, and I get it.
I ran a neighborhood group’s social media, and even after FB turned openly shitty, I had to stay on there, because thats where people are.
I mean, I could have pushed the org to drop them, but then we would have lost the eyeballs of thousands of neighbor’s we’re trying to work FOR.
Same deal with Twitter, they’ve just gotten to the point where most NPOs lose less by leaving than they would by staying.
That’s beginning to wane. The fewer major posters there are, the fewer people will look to the site for information. And the fewer people on there looking for info…etc.
Yes, I’m sadly surprised by many open source projects still posting on that cesspool
The problem is for organizations it’s harder to leave because that is where the people you want to reach are. That’s the only reason any org or company is on social media in the first place. If they leave too soon they risk too many people not seeing the things they send out to the community.
It’s more an individual thing because so many people just have social inertia and haven’t left since everyone they know is already there. The first to leave have to decide if they want to juggle using another platform to keep connections or cut off connections by abandoning the established platform.
That doesn’t explain why they don’t start a transition by posting to both the new platform and the old. And not including links to their new account on their websites.
Doesn’t Twitter directly suppress such links? I remember there was a crackdown on people linking their mastodon accounts a while back.
And external links in general get a huge suppression in the algorithm because Twitter does not want to recommend tweets that take you off the site.
The platform actively fights you if you want to move elsewhere (which should really be a telltale sign for you to move), so I get why some orgs struggle with that decision. Doubly so if your job relies on the platform’s outreach.
yeah, it’s so inconvenient to not directly support the nazi platform
If I ran an org, that needed to reach a community of say… 1000 people in need, and 900 of those people were ONLY on twitter, guess what?
That org needs to be on twitter, even if President Musk is profiting from it. Otherwise, the org would be remiss in their mission.
nice hypothetical but no
Not really a hypothetical though. Its the very reason I kept a non-profit’s account on twitter, and facebook, and instagram, for as long as I did - Because we HAD to in order to effectively hit the mission for the non profit.
sounds lazy, uncreative, and ineffective
Everyone who have use Twitter in the past 2 years is a nazi.
That’s a very silly take
Because they allow smoking
Yeay, Debian user here who also left Twitter/X for similar reasons. I was already on Mastodon and Bluesky but didn’t make a habit out of it. Leaving the bad platform entirely (and having my data archived and searchable) helped a lot.
Glad to hear they moved on!
… Debian was on twitter??
Unfortunately the accounts listed under Social network accounts of Debian teams and Social network accounts of Debian contributors are almost exclusively Twitter accounts.
I don’t mind, actually everyone should ditch Twatter.
& all the US-based corporate social media… Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Reddit, Discord, LinkedIn, & GitHub.
The VC-funded ones too like BlueSky
I’ve managed to ditch every single one of those except LinkedIn. We simply CANNOT get new clients without it. The lockin to that platform is truly terrifying. LinkedIn is a crime against humanity.
Question: how is LinkedIn useful to you?
For me it’s just a non-stop swarm of recruiters from India who want me to kindly listen to their offer of a job that pays less than I’d make picking up garbage, utter sociopaths dredging up some psychotic hustle culture nonsense, and previous people I’ve worked with/for asking for favors, which of course means free.
Is it somehow more useful for an actual business?
all of the corporate social media tbh. federation is the way out of this cycle.
In any case, RSS should be enough.
I still don’t think I understand the full utility of RSS. I guess it’s good for forum communication too?
Because my first thought was “RSS is cool but first we need human-written content and blogs to come back.”
RSS to know when there’s a new post on the blog.
“640k should be enough for anybody”
I think Bluesky can be an exception. I think it’s way better than Mastodon from a UX standpoint. And it’s still open.
People just don’t learn.
And it’s still open.
It like chromium, control by for profit vc company.
