[FRIAM] (not) leaving Twitter

[Jochen Fromm]

Until now I have used 3 Twitter accounts for scientific, development and personal stuff. I have used them more frequently since Google+ was shut down. One main reason why I do not use Facebook or Instagram is Mark Zuckerberg. As Grady Booch used to say "Facebook is a profoundly unethical company, and it starts at the top, with Mark Zuckerberg".For Twitter it is similar now. I really don't want to support a platform that belongs to someone who likes to insult others, like Garry Kasparov or the real Tesla founder Martin Eberhard or many others, just the way Trump likes to do it.The note for advertisers was plain marketing. His intention to save the world? A lie. This town square stuff? Nonsense. He certainly didn't write this, it was more likely written by Twitter's CCO Sarah Personette and her team. However, he has created his own hell by buying the platform he is addicted to. https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitter-acquisition-problems-speech-moderationI am using Mastodon instead now, which does not belong to an egomanic or eccentric billionaire. Yes, it is named after an animal which died out at the end of the Pleistoscene, but the distributed and decentralized approach is much better than having one big centralized system. My new Mastodon accounts are here:fediscience.org/@cas_groupberlin.social/@JochenFrommruby.social/@jofr-J.
-------- Original message --------From: Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> Date: 10/30/22  6:50 PM  (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com> Subject: [FRIAM] (not) leaving Twitter 
    https://mashable.com/article/please-stop-tweeting-leaving-twitter
    https://mashable.com/article/i-was-going-to-quit-twitter-but-elon-musk-takeover
    I have a *very* limited twitter engagement myself.  Same with FB
      and *zero* with anything else *but* Instagram where I restrict
      myself to viewing and posting and liking the equivalent of
      "family" snapshots for my family and closer friends.   
    
    I tried *mostly* to ignore the implications of a Musk
      privatization-takeover of Twitter during all the on-again
      off-again period but/and now as it has become a "done deal" I feel
      more able to engage in thinking about that (unable to avoid
      thinking about that?).  I thought I might de-activate/delete my
      nearly unused account when I discovered that I had a renewed
      interest (morbid fascination) in watching it spin out (decohere)
      or not from the front row.   I found myself looking for whether
      Musk's magic pixie dust would somehow trigger a phase transition
      (likely there will be one, but probably not the kind most of us
      hope for).
    
    Earlier discussions on *this* forum touched on what would make
      for a proper *metaverse* (not the one Zuckerberg is trying to
      create from whole-cloth).   My (very loose) engagement with the
      Cardano/Catalyst work and interest in blockchain is motivated by
      this as well.  
    
    Musk's attempts to characterize Twitter as a "town square" feels
      very off-base in many ways:
    
      https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-twitter-is-unlikely-to-become-the-digital-town-square-elon-musk-envisions/
    
    What do "town squares" look like in "company towns"?    And why
      does most social media so often feel more like a rolling
      street-brawl?
    
    I worked *peripherally* on a project at LANL trying to address
      the possibilities/implications roughly 30 years ago:
    
      http://library.sciencemadness.org/lanl1_a/lib-www/pubs/00285557.pdf
    
    there were some good insights, but it was all so young and fresh
      and raw at the same time...
    
  

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