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.

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.

Meh, while I totally get what you’re saying I think there’s something to be said about these stepping stones between dying closed source platforms and developing FOSS platforms. Especially since most content people are used to and want to engage with is on said platforms. Not everyone wants to jump onto new platforms with learning curves, but this is an in-between for the people gaining awareness.

That, and having a fundamental disagreement with the way a platform is run or what telemetry they harvest doesn’t mean I don’t like the content there. Social media has been a constant battle between the owners, the content creators, and the regular users. At the end of the day people use it for community and connection, even if venture capitalists are hell bent on destroying their product.

You’re looking at it from the perspective of somebody who disagrees with Twitter as a company and a product.

I just hate their shitty UI.

I thought the same thing when some (talented and well meaning) individuals recently put out tools/procedures to access Reddit in a more clean way.

Nah. I don’t need to be an absolutist — I’ll load up a page if some search shows me that’s the only place to get what I’m looking for — but spending time to make undesirable websites more accessible for myself isn’t something I plan to do.

Removed by mod

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.