•  Wheeljack   ( @Wheeljack@nerdbin.social ) 
    42•1 year ago

    I don’t really grok products like this.

    If you have a fundamental disagreement with a platform, continuing to engage with it, even through a condom, is still perpetuating it. It’s maintaining that platform as still important and integral, and a place that others should continue to engage with. It’s telling advertisers that it’s still a place that’s worth their money to maintain a presence on. It stymies the momentum in shifting to an alternative; why put the effort into a new service if people are still seeing your posts?

    It’s like pirating Windows instead of moving to a different OS. You’re still perpetuating the MS hegemony and telling software developers that Windows is the platform they need to develop for.

    •  jjdelc   ( @jjdelc@lemmy.ml ) 
      50•1 year ago

      The analogy of simply choosing different software doesn’t apply here. Because I can switch my os or calculator app. Those choices don’t depend on other people. Sadly, we still depend on being able to read content that other parties we care for still publish on Twitter even though I disagree with it as a to. Maybe they do or dont care. I can disagree with Twitter and like my influencers. For that, something like nitter is a good step in the direction. I want to move. As muchas I’d like to snap my fingers and have everyone into my network of personal choice. It cannot happen.

      •  atwerp   ( @atwerp@feddit.nl ) 
        4•1 year ago

        Sadly, we still depend on being able to read content that other parties we care for still publish on Twitter even though I disagree with it as a to. Maybe they do or dont care. I can disagree with Twitter and like my influencers.

        As somebody who still has to check Reddit from time to time because of the vast amount of content there, I totally see your point. But don’t influencers nowadays use everything possible? If you don’t like Instagram, follow them on Tiktok/Youtube, if you don’t like Twitter, follow them on Threads.

        •  jjdelc   ( @jjdelc@lemmy.ml ) 
          1•1 year ago

          I used influencers as an example, that’s true that they’re everywhere. But there’s many communities I follow that don’t care about Twitter politics, and they got little interest or even information to consider moving elsewhere.

    •  theluddite   ( @theluddite@lemmy.ml ) 
      13•1 year ago

      I developed something like this, so maybe I can answer. It was a browser extension that let people bypass the old twitter login wall. It had many thousands of users until Twitter started walling themselves off this summer.

      I was inspired to make it in the most American way possible – someone I know was in a school that got locked down due to a shooter threat (ended up being a false alarm). The police and news agencies were live-tweeting the updates, and their partner didn’t have a twitter and couldn’t read them without making a fucking account that very moment, wondering if their partner was even alive. I directed them to nitter, but they’re not very into tech, and replacing the URL was just intimidating for them at the moment.

      I found the whole experience so grotesque that that very evening I made an extension that lets you press a button to dismiss the login modal and keep scrolling (just a few css changes, or about 30 lines of code).

      My two cents: Though I don’t personally use it, the fact is Twitter does have a lot of valuable stuff on it. Same goes for other large platforms – google results are now worthless without adding “reddit” to the search, for example. These companies are bad, but there’s so, so many things to care about, and people can’t care about all of them. Tactically, that makes consumer-driven change very difficult.

      I’m not sure what kind of organizing we need to start doing to take back the internet from these big platforms, but whatever it is, I think it has to reckon with our past mistake of giving a few companies ownership of most of the internet, which means it has to go beyond just stopping to use them. These few platforms have the last 10 years of the internet currently walled-off, and they plan on charging rent on that forever. That’s shitty. We should try to stop them from doing that, if we can.

    •  AnonTwo   ( @AnonTwo@kbin.social ) 
      2•1 year ago

      I think it would be better to think of it like a cigarette patch

      The goal is to lower your activity to your assumed essentials, and eventually stop entirely when you start replacing it in your daily activities.

      It makes it easier for people either on the fence or just not entirely comfortable with trying something new.

      •  jcg   ( @jcg@halubilo.social ) 
        1•1 year ago

        That’s a good analogy, it’s also way easier to describe this than fully explain Mastodon and the fediverse. If somebody’s looking to quit Twitter but they’re on the fence because they’re like “but I still need the info even if I don’t actively participate” you can just say “hey here’s an alternative until all that info can move, at least you won’t be directly supporting them and won’t be further contributing value by being tempted to participate” rather than “well all that stuff will move eventually”

      •  InfiniWheel   ( @InfiniWheel@lemmy.one ) 
        3•1 year ago

        To be fair on the second one, IIRC, that instance was flagged for being used to access illegal content hosted on Twitter, which was already publicly available. It was an automated report and the site was inmediately taken down because of it.

        There was of course no action against Twitter.

        •  roux is a lib   ( @roux@lemmy.ml ) 
          1•1 year ago

          This is precisely what I was thinking. It happened a few times and later it worked again. I think it’s just happening because it’s not Twitter. It’s just a redirect site so it’s literally the same exact content.