Elon Musk Suggests He Will Charge All X/Twitter Users a Fee to Be on the Platform
variety.com
Elon Musk may flip the switch to make X — the social network formerly known as Twitter — an entirely subscription-based platform. Musk brought up the idea of charging all users of X/Twi…

Elon Musk said he will charge all X/Twitter users a fee to be on the platform. He suggested that such a change would be necessary to deal with the problem of bots on the platform.

“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots," said Elon. I can’t believe that this is the only solution he can think of.

Dealing with bots would be Elon Musk’s responsibility, considering he’s the only one profiting significantly from X, not us. Elon Musk steals our data and censors each of our posts, now he even expects us to pay to clean up the mess he created.

Plus, the problems with X go beyond just bots. The algorithm and programming decisions are negatively impacting user experience and manipulating people’s minds.

We want a town square where everyone is free to have & voice an opinion. I do not believe we have to pay ”a small monthly payment” for such a place, especially in a country that should value these freedoms & suppressing ideas.

  • mishimaenjoyer
    1•9 months ago

    i’ve been on two instances since last fall: one mastodon, one pleroma.

    on the mastodon one i found out by accident, that i was “shadowbanned” from it’s own public timeline. inquiring why this happend, the mods didn’t told me. when i asked then that i would like to know what i did “wrong” and if they could lift this, they said “no”. i deleted my account after that.

    the pleroma one was even worse because literally on day one i was zerged by some american internet rightwingers because i posted something they didn’t agree with. i deleted my account after that.

    what do you suggest, how many times should i move/delete my account until i found an instance that at least gives me the twitter treatment instead of just doing random policy?

    • be_excellent_to_each_other
      2•9 months ago

      I mean, I already recommended firefish.social, but you are under no obligation to try it. My point is that your experience is very much not typical I think.

      In any case, if you plunk “left leaning mastodon instances” into your search engine of choice that would probably work, but you could also try a popular instance which would address several of your concerns. If firefish doesn’t interest you with its various improvements to the UI, why not just go for the original and (I think) biggest - mastodon.social.

      https://mastodon.social/auth/sign_up

    • @rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
      1•9 months ago

      The microblogging side of the Fediverse definitely has a cultural problem: people keep thinking that the instance that they join should be an indication of what “tribe” you belong to, and this can be worse that high-school politics. The only way that you can truly avoid issues with power-tripping admins is by running your own instance, but even that doesn’t help much when there are some instances around (cough mastodon art cough) that seem to love the drama and play the “everything I don’t like is literally hitler” game.

      Anyway, if you are still looking for an alternative: I have a small, professionally managed Mastodon instance that has the simple goal of offering a reliable service at an affordable price.

    • @atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1•9 months ago

      on the mastodon one i found out by accident, that i was “shadowbanned” from it’s own public timeline.

      I’m not sure that’s actually possible for a mod to do on Mastodon. Did you make your posts “unlisted” by default by accident?

      • mishimaenjoyer
        1•9 months ago

        mod/admin/whover was behind the support mail address told me, that someone made a complaint about my account (they refused to tell me what the problem was) and that they unlisted/shadowbanned me from the servers public timeline.