[talldayo]

Twitter shouldn't be privately owned. That's the problem - Jack Dorsey wasn't able to promise a non-censored town hall and neither was Musk. They are running a business that is inherently at-odds with the ideal of informing people. They can't make money just providing Twitter - as a business it doesn't work.

The utility Twitter provided isn't written-off, but it really shouldn't have happened on a for-profit advertising platform. What people are unwilling to accept is that Twitter was lightning in a bottle - it won't come back because everyone learned the lesson that it doesn't make money. You can either move onto a radical platform that tries to fix the original sin (eg. Mastodon/BlueSky/Nostr) or you can stick with the huddled masses that rely on a censored and monetized platform to speak freely online.

[ipaddr]

The radical platform alternatives still censor and often to the whims of a random person. It's like a reddit subreddit or wikipedia article: you are censored by the moods of the admin. They are privately owned.

[talldayo]

The solution is easy; host your own instance. Federated solutions let you put your money where your mouth is and host yourself to your own content. If what you have to say is considered useful, you'll be a viral figure in no time.

Allow-only instances won't show your content but chances are they won't show most content. These are hugboxy environments you'd probably not want to be around anyways (and they sure don't want to be around you).

Block-only instances will show your content as long as it doesn't piss them off. If you are being racist or posting illegal content, you're gonna get muted. They have absolutely no obligation to propagate your content if you're not going to reach bare-minimum decorum.

[Freedom2]

> If what you have to say is considered useful, you'll be a viral figure in no time.

The assumption that useful speech goes viral is incredibly misjudged.

[talldayo]

I can see how you'd think that if you've never used Mastodon.

[always_imposter]

> Jack Dorsey wasn't able to promise a non-censored town hall

I believe his version of twitter was the closest thing we could get to an "uncensored" twitter. Everything is relative. How do you run and sustain a platform where people who call for genocide are getting their voice amplified? And is that even legal? Like, the platform has to take responsibility if it isn't going to "censor" speech.

Freedom of speech shouldn't mean freedom of reach. Yeah, if you want to make some ill-taste racist jokes, you must be shadow banned so that unless people specifically search for your name, the platform shouldn't amplify their voice.

> it won't come back because everyone learned the lesson that it doesn't make money

How can anyone dismiss Twitter earning >$5B in revenue as something not viable? Dorsey's twitter had too many employees. IIRC, their personnel costs alone was something like a $1B. Why do you need such a big team? Why are you hiring so many people and running mini experiments in the company hoping that you can become facebook level money making machine?

Dorsey should have realized that they are never going to become facebook level rich and just stay content with what they have and grow modestly and layoff people. Keep working on your core features. You don't need to be the next facebook, you are already twitter, heck, you have your company's name as a noun in a dictionary. Reduce your costs and coast. Nothing wrong with that.

But you need to be content with yourself first to think about company's decisions like that.

What has happened with twitter is truly shameful and Dorsey got with the wrong people (that's what i believe happened since he rolled his old twitter equity into x(itter) equity).

[arromatic]

Why did dorsey left bsky for twitter again ?

[talldayo]

> I believe his version of twitter was the closest thing we could get to an "uncensored" twitter.

I mean... I don't agree with that, considering that BlueSky exists now. I never used either of Dorsey's social medias but I would argue BlueSky is fundamentally closer to uncensored than X or Twitter ever was.

> How can anyone dismiss Twitter earning >$5B in revenue as something not viable?

Because their expenditures were through the roof, and even running it on a skeleton team a-la X seems to be losing money hand over fist. Twitter could have contented themselves with lower revenue, but they'd have to redesign their product stack or find ways to make more money elsewhere. Both of those take time and burn goodwill with the community.

At the end of the day, as a lifelong outsider to Twitter, it's just an endlessly ironic fate for the site. I have no love for Elon Musk but I also don't see Jack Dorsey as some messianic genius. The dude sold out his site in his final years because he failed to operate it for a decade and couldn't force people onto his crypto bandwagon. He never tried to correct course on Twitter (instead funding BlueSky as a contingency) and basically left his userbase to suffer as a value-add to his stock package. When I hear people complain about how bad Twitter is I just imagine frogs sitting in a boiling pot asking why their legs are numb. Do we really have to go over this again?