Debian is Ditching X (Twitter) Citing These Reasons
1y 4mon ago by discuss.tchncs.de/u/petsoi in linux@lemmy.ml from news.itsfoss.com
Personally, I think that the discussion around this will evolve as the news spreads, but I agree with Robert on this one. Sure, X/Twitter has become a less welcoming place than before, but shutting out a significant portion of your community without seeking their input first isn't a sensible move for such a foundational open source project.
Nah, I think I'm cool if Debian doesn't respect the input of Nazi sympathisers.
Yeah, that section is bad.
For one, it's has classic vibe "if you want to keep the nazis out, you're the one who's exclusionary".
But also, how is refusing to engage on a platform "shutting out a significant portion of [the] community"? That sounds backwards to me. Blocking people from engaging with Debian on its own platforms would be shutting them out. The implication in the article is that Debian is obligated to be unconditionally present on every social platform its users might be on.
The other twist is, unlike Xitter, you don't have to create an account on Mastodon to be able to read their feed. You can access it like any other website. So nobody is getting shut out. They're just posting elsewhere, where anyone can read it.
You don't even have to go to the website. Every Mastodon feed can be accessed via RSS. You just have to add ".rss" to the end of the URL.
That's a super neat trick actually. Why the heck has RSS been losing popularity when it seems to be the only magic protocol you really need to keep up with what you actually care about?
Oh I just answered my own question: It must be harder to hijack RSS with intrusive ads and clickbait...
Find the RSS viewer in Chrome or Firefox 😉
Ohhh I see what you did there. They're all extensions. So 98% of users doesn't even know it's a possibility if it's not default lol.
Blah.
Yeah what the fuck is with that.
It's a very twitter centric view of the web. If you're not on xitter you're "shutting out a significant portion".
The thing is, it's not simply that Musk has an ideology that is disparate from my own, he has an agenda that is egregiously contrary to the stated values of the Debian project.
You'd consult with the community over a new logo or blog layout maybe, but on whether to assist Musk in his far right agenda there's not really any decision to be made honestly.
Last time they seeked input they ignored it and shoved systemd anyway...
So Wayland?
Came here to make this joke. Was an hour too late...
Care to explain?
The X Window System (aka X.Org or X11) has been the default window system in many distros. Recently there has been a new window system called Wayland, so the joke would be that Debian is dropping X11 and switching to Wayland.
Adding a bit more context, X.Org/X11 is often just called X for short
Does Wayland has its own Mastodon instance? If yes, they could do a funny.
They can be found on Mastodon here: debian@framapiaf.org
In case that link doesn't load for some users: https://framapiaf.org/@debian
For now that was just a bot mirroring posts. I don't think they've said whether they'll use that going forward.
It's mirroring micronews.debian.org, not Twitter.
Good riddance. Stop using Nazi platforms and join the fediverse instead.
When it forces you to log in to view stuff, it's usefulness as a platform for announcements is substantially lessened.
I'd even say, the usefullness is fully gone.
Wild that so many are still hanging out at the Nazi bar
Yes, I'm sadly surprised by many open source projects still posting on that cesspool
The problem is for organizations it's harder to leave because that is where the people you want to reach are. That's the only reason any org or company is on social media in the first place. If they leave too soon they risk too many people not seeing the things they send out to the community.
It's more an individual thing because so many people just have social inertia and haven't left since everyone they know is already there. The first to leave have to decide if they want to juggle using another platform to keep connections or cut off connections by abandoning the established platform.
That doesn't explain why yhey don't start a transition by posting to both the new platform and the old. And not including links to their new account on their websites.
Doesn't Twitter directly suppress such links? I remember there was a crackdown on people linking their mastodon accounts a while back.
And external links in general get a huge suppression in the algorithm because Twitter does not want to recommend tweets that take you off the site.
The platform actively fights you if you want to move elsewhere (which should really be a telltale sign for you to move), so I get why some orgs struggle with that decision. Doubly so if your job relies on the platform's outreach.
I'm talking about posting on their website a link to alternative social media accounts.
If I ran an org, that needed to reach a community of say... 1000 people in need, and 900 of those people were ONLY on twitter, guess what?
That org needs to be on twitter, even if President Musk is profiting from it. Otherwise, the org would be remiss in their mission.
Not really a hypothetical though. Its the very reason I kept a non-profit's account on twitter, and facebook, and instagram, for as long as I did - Because we HAD to in order to effectively hit the mission for the non profit.
What would be the unlazy, creative, and effective strategy?
BTW, remaining where our community members are is very effective at messaging to the community we need to communicate with...
I wouldn't argue with the dude; he's got a clear case of bad-faith-itis. What you did was bad, so you shouldn't have done it, but no I won't tell you how to fix it.
The absolute best you could have done is cross-posted to a Mastodon/Bluesky/whatever account as well, but you can't just always go around yanking the rug out underneath communities especially if you're in a position where it's not just lazy shitposting and worthless commentary.
...that said, you have moved anything you can to being posted somewhere in tandem riiiiiiight?
Open another channel and tell everyone that the main channel is the new one. And tell them how to join the new channel, step by step.
Effective was a requirement.
Its that social inertia, and I get it.
I ran a neighborhood group's social media, and even after FB turned openly shitty, I had to stay on there, because thats where people are.
I mean, I could have pushed the org to drop them, but then we would have lost the eyeballs of thousands of neighbor's we're trying to work FOR.
Same deal with Twitter, they've just gotten to the point where most NPOs lose less by leaving than they would by staying.
That's beginning to wane. The fewer major posters there are, the fewer people will look to the site for information. And the fewer people on there looking for info...etc.
Yep, it's viable now for many orgs...
The answer (IMO) is to open another channel and announce it so people can migrate. And start using more the other channels, using each time FB/X a little less, until (almost) everyone has left FB/X.
You're forgetting the (often) free labor used to make changes like this are limited.
I, for example, did not get paid for the 20 hrs/week I was putting into the organization, as I was also a board member, their IT person, and for a couple of periods, board president...
Its a cost/benefit analysis.
Everyone who have use Twitter in the past 2 years is a nazi.
That's a very silly take
Good, now if only OpenSource devs switched from Discord to let's say Matrix/XMPP
We'd be partying
go back to forums. Support in discord is awful. Discord is not as searchable as a forum public on the internet
Yeah, forums please. I hate the idea of troubleshooting information being locked behind some stupid software we can't easily index and search. Forums can be put on archive.org, you can literally print a page, or save it as a PDF for reviewing later. You can make use of bookmark software like Linkwarden to archive things.
Discord? Not so much. You can use third party software to scrape it and save information, but no search engine can index it. Community building is great, but I loathe having to trawl through tonnes of blithering blathering conversation BS just to figure out where to find firmware for a particular chip I have is.
Makes me want to projectile vomit all over the place, throw my computer out the window, and move to convent.
Thank you! This has always been my main gripe about "collaboration platforms" in general (Discord, Slack, Teams, WebEx, etc). It's just chat with extra steps, and does not make important information any easier to find.
Oh my gods, the mess that is Teams. When I first started working at my current company I was kind of excited because all of the software just works together. It felt novel, and I was enchanted by it. That quickly died when I realised that it makes finding anything a nightmare. There's a billion different tabs and solutions for every single individual thing, and even multiple things within the same project. I think the main project I work on has like fifteen different test documents, and good luck trying to find the documentation for pushing stuff live! The only real way to find things is to ask someone who knows. There's half a billion different search bars and finding the right one is just way too time consuming.
The "searchification" of fucking everything is driving me absolutely insane! No, I don't want a search bar to be the only way to find things, and hiding the actual file functions does nobody any favors. Having a big prominent search bar in your product only tells me that you're actively scraping my data to sell to advertisers.
That’s what happens when people don’t know how to use the system properly. They just throw their files and announcements into random places without any thought, and expect everyone to be able to find them.
In cases like that, you just need to ask a more experienced user for direction, because nothing else works. It’s not your fault you can’t find your way around a labyrinth like this. It’s the fault of everyone who turned that place into a labyrinth.
Can we also blame the software? Maybe, if the marketing was misreading. Mostly though, this sort of mess emerges as a result of ignorant people abusing the system.
https://forums.debian.net/exists for Debian
I want to move my music discord to a forum platform. Can anyone recommend a good FOSS forum with good iOS/mobile app support? Some of the musicians are going to resist if there isn’t a decent, usable, mobile app. It’s been a long time since I set up a forum. Last one I installed on a server was phpBB!
Maybe Discourse? The mobile website is pretty good and there are also a number of third-party mobile apps.
Excellent. Thank you for the suggestion. I’ll take a look at Discourse.
What about this one that you're on right now?
I may sound too radical, but I'd go so far as to support a common Logseq knowledge graph.
God I hope I live to see the day. Discord at first appears like a good IRC wrapper, but the XP of actually using it is fucking gross.
If we're swapping out discord, please just go with Zulip... It's FLOSS, and has a solid company backing it that actually cares about FLOSS (They even bought the product back, after it was sold to a company that was enshittifying it)/
Zulip sounds neat!
Shoutout to https://revolt.chat/as a Discord alternative too.
Maybe for the Discord use-case of joining mass-community servers it simply doesn't have the network-effect yet. I haven't used it much myself sadly! But I imagine a lot of users had the same idea you did: "Let's make a server! Aw nobody's here."
But I think adoption would grow if we started using it for what a LOT of people use Discord for currently: The micro-server for get-togethers of smaller social circles.
- Voice chat for videogames
- Small digital meet-ups, like artists, churches, clubs, etc.
- Distance-playing tabletop RPGs.
- College study groups.
That's where adoption starts and snowballs. Unfortunately, I believe the VC-funded data-mining corpo-apps will always have the advantage in scooping up the "I want to join a crowded mass community room" users.
But that's okay for a start.
The way I see it, we need to be most concerned with keeping our security and privacy amongst our closest associates, and occasionally we'll need to venture out into the "commercial-net" with our hoodies up and sunglasses on to interact with the crowd, fully aware there's surveillance everywhere.
This is probably much closer to discord than Zulip is, tbh. I never knew about it previously :)
How is it feature wise? Parity with xmpp/matrix? Better?
Better. I'd say its fully on par with Discord, minus the dark patterns. There's a public Zulip instance where you can check it out.
Having worked on a couple of Matrix deployments over the last year, that shit needs to be simpler and easier, yo? Once the Matrix server exists, it's easy enough to get people to use it.
Contrast it's ease of deployment with Mumble for example.
Just remove matrix from the alternatives and I 100% agree, long live xmpp😊
Meanwhile one can use: slidcord
What's wrong with Matrix ? Well there's SimpleX & GNU-Jami as well as Revolt
First it is reinventing the wheel, xmpp exists for a very long time, second there are only a few server implementations, third the resource consumption of them is so high that you can't really run it reliably on a raspberry pi for your family
Point taken (Although I don't see any issues with re-inventing the wheel), I really wished XMPP had riddiculously good bridging capabilities
Then XMPP Would be perfect
Have a look at https://codeberg.org/slidge
Matrix and XMPP don't even pretend to be Discord replacements.
But they are replacements
In that case we could all just use email.
Then try out DeltaChat in that case
I'd make a blind bet on that over Matrix for suitability.
shutting out a significant portion of your community without seeking their input first isn't a sensible move for such a foundational open source project.
Ironic when X shuts out anyone who isn't logged in and shuts out anyone who doesn't pay for a blue checkmark from having visible replies.
Having an X account isn't consequence-free - if it becomes where updates occur, people have to sign up for an account and subject themselves to nazis everywhere and all manner of crypto spam just to see updates. And they have to pay Elon tribute to be heard in response. It's crazy that anyone sees it as being friendly to users.
Agreed. Notably, Bluesky doesn't require an account to read posts.
Yet
I don't know enough detail about ATproto, but I wonder if it's technically possible to block access to posts without also blocking federation. From what I've heard the functionality is more modular than Activitypub (content indexing being a separate service from content hosting) so I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't possible.
Were they using Twitter to provide exclusive updates not available anywhere else?
My impression from the post is that they are publishing the exact same updates in multiple locations, including mastodon at https://framapiaf.org/@debian ...so just because they were publishing in that one extra site to make it accessible to a particular subset of people does not mean all other people were being shut off from receiving updates.
However, I do agree with the move, but only because Debian being a FOSS initiative should stay away from proprietary platforms and promote FOSS.
Kinda wondering who in that community is going to bat for Elon Musk after the last two weeks.
Nazis.
I keep making the incorrect assumption that everyone has already left X. Just seems common sense we've hit all hands abandon ship
It's just Debian, always behind.
ok, that's just hilarious :P
The equivalent of IE being the last one to move to the fediverse lol
Never underestimate the network effect and how reluctant people are to move to another social network. The masses just follow the crowd, so every big account moving out from there helps take more users away.
It's a shame I haven't seen more YouTubers leaving X, they all seem to use it to talk about whatever they do. Not that I watch a lot of YouTube these days but my family does, younger ones especially watch those minecraft SMP types. Its arguably the most toxic social media but "everyone's on there".
I liked this article about the whole ordeal so I'll share it here: Why You'll Leave X as well as instagram and all other private platforms
I keep making the incorrect assumption that everyone
Nicely concise description of bubble-dwelling.
There are lots of brands and people still on X and try to justify it with hand waving.
I still use it. For that which I engage, or who I engage with, it hasn't changed for me. Almost 100% for metal bands. Tours, album releases. We have a pretty cool metal community going. People I've been speaking with for many years now.
Leaving a platform you don't like, or the reasons you don't like it, isn't "common sense".
I'm happy you've found a place to talk with people. I hope that space doesn't get invaded by assholes
I don't mind, actually everyone should ditch Twatter.
& all the US-based corporate social media… Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Reddit, Discord, LinkedIn, & GitHub.
The VC-funded ones too like BlueSky
Nail on the head… it isn’t about one particular service or protocol but the philosophy of federation
In any case, RSS should be enough.
"640k should be enough for anybody"
I still don't think I understand the full utility of RSS. I guess it's good for forum communication too?
Because my first thought was "RSS is cool but first we need human-written content and blogs to come back."
RSS to know when there's a new post on the blog.
I've managed to ditch every single one of those except LinkedIn. We simply CANNOT get new clients without it. The lockin to that platform is truly terrifying. LinkedIn is a crime against humanity.
Question: how is LinkedIn useful to you?
For me it's just a non-stop swarm of recruiters from India who want me to kindly listen to their offer of a job that pays less than I'd make picking up garbage, utter sociopaths dredging up some psychotic hustle culture nonsense, and previous people I've worked with/for asking for favors, which of course means free.
Is it somehow more useful for an actual business?
Microsoft bought these social media platforms like LinkedIn & GitHub for this very reason. They want you stuck in their ecosystems …then train their proprietary AIs on your communications, then sell it back to you when you were the one that made it.
I think Bluesky can be an exception. I think it's way better than Mastodon from a UX standpoint. And it's still open.
People just don't learn.
And it's still open.
It like chromium, control by for profit vc company.
No.
It costs literally hundreds of thousands of USD per month to run your own node. If it isn’t accessible to the masses, it isn’t revolutionary. De facto centralization due to prohibitively expensive costs is effectively centralization—same reason we should not trust a platform like Matrix.
Bluesky is just another startup grifting with open washing. It has all the same VC-funded trappings where the history of Twitter will literally just repeat itself—like we didn’t see what happened with it the first time around.
Mastodon can improve its UX but some of these platforms are rotten to the core. Or also use something on ActivityPub that does have a UX you like since they can all intercommunicate—or XMPP PubSub Social Feed since it has stricter governance to prevent it from getting too messy.
I didn't really need another reason to love Debian more but here we are... I'm donating to Debian today
Debian continues to be one of the best distros ever made. If I had the means, it would get funding every time I run apt update.
Oh I like that rhythm.
"I'm lock up, no way Corps and hearsay Brought me to jail FOSS not too late
All I say is I'm donating to debian today"
... Debian was on twitter??
My town’s subreddit just started a policy to disallow links to X for similar reasons.
There is a movement to avoid the platform.
shutting out a significant portion of your community without seeking their input first isn't a sensible move for such a foundational open source project.
It actually is a perfectly sensible move, and it doesn't "shut out" anyone. If anything, prioritizing twitter is what shuts users out. They linked to two-three alternatives. What's the argument here, exactly, from the other side?
I think the argument is that those alternatives already existed before. Twitter was not being prioritized, it was essentially mirroring the content already available in RSS, mastodon, etc. So effectively, there's now one less place where the news will be visible.
However, I do agree with the move, but only because Debian being a FOSS initiative should stay away from proprietary platforms and promote FOSS, even if it means effectively "shutting off" a portion of users who don't wanna leave the twitter bubble.
As it turns out, having an account on a social media platform full of Nazis, violent racists, and child diddlers is not good for business.
god, the replies to their tweet are awful...
Sounds like bots
Honestly I had the same thought. But on the other hand, internet outrage talking points have also become extremely formulaic...
It is depressing, but I try not to forget we are seeing a sort of survivorship bias of stupidity on the former Twitter at this point. The cohort of remaining posting accounts is dumber and dumber on average. And this dynamic is magnified in the replies, because they are paid blue accounts at the top. Eg, self-selected losers. (The top account has likely just hidden their checkmark)
Edit: PS, are you still using Nitter? I thought it had died?
There are still a few nitter instances alive
Blue checkmarks...
This is to me one of the major reasons Twitter discourse is completely ruined and the platform is mostly useless for seeing what people think now.
When the only people who get to be at the top of discussions are people who pay for twitter, the only opinions that get shared are those that are pro Twitter, pro Elon, etc. Because they have a direct stake in the game.
And that's if the accounts posting aren't all bots that pay for a checkmark to boost engagement, which is almost all I see when I occasionally have to check Twitter these days.
So glad more people are leaving it. There's nothing to gain from it anymore.
Those replies are why they are leaving. And good riddance to such a godawful platform.
Why politicize everything?
Simps for X (formerly twitter)
That first reply highlights a major difference in how people approach the world.
Speaking very generally, conservatism and right wing politics seen to attract those who see everything as a competition and that dominating other people is what it means to be a good person. Funny that it also leads to frustrated, angry, isolated people.
So if we want to switch to using a website that doesn’t promote hurting/killing 2% of the population, we are now BOWING DOWN to the minority some of us would not rather murder.
It’s the same reason they hate DEI so much.
Ah, that captures such a stark answer to why people use xitter though.
It's not "so I can hear from you" it's "So YoU cAn HeAr FrOm Us!!11oneone"
Walled gardens? More like prison yard. Lol
The replies illustrate the problem nicely.
This is a great example of where linking to a blog post about an announcement is better than linking to the announcement itself:
after digging a bit deeper, I discovered that there was originally a longer, more detailed announcement that was later scrapped. I found it in a GitLab commit made by Jean. [Link to GitLab comment in article]
Good job, itsfoss.com
Good for them. It's an organisation's free choice to pick the platforms they post and interact on, if any. Their presence is a service in itself while there are plenty of other ways to follow or reach them if needed.
I don't like how people are trying to stir up dissent and drama around this. The message posted is short and on point, it includes all the important bits. There really isn't much more to add.
Oh but look at this deleted draft PR release that was committed that doesn't really say anything spicy and was later sharpened up to reflect the intentions of the author.
Fuck X.com, all my homies use wayland.social
It's not loading for me. Is that instance up?
Oh, that's sad. See https://mastodon.social/@compositor@wayland.socialfor some of their posts.
The reasoning behind this move is said to be X/Twitter not being in line with Debian's shared values
Maybe we'll go back to forums.
I hope BBS's make a comeback. Pixilated titles and all..
I mean, have you seen YetAnotherForum.net? .Net Core, PostgreSQL/MySQL Support and the old VBulletin styling from the hayday of internet forums.
Great news, Thank you Debian community!
They were still on Xitter?
The reasons (summarized using Copilot):
- The platform no longer aligns with Debian's values, social contract, code of conduct, and diversity statement.
- Concerns over X becoming a place where people they care about don't feel safe.
- Abuse on the platform happening without consequences.
- Issues with misinformation and lack of moderation.
bad bot
Did it make a mistake?
Doesn't look like it... It's 'AI bad'.
AI is bad!
We don't need to use all this water and energy just to avoid having to click on news articles.
I wonder where you draw the line of when the use of resources for technology is okay and when it isn't.
Ah I see. This is getting ridiculous.
The lesson is to just not cite when you use AI.
If you ask me, this looks like a big possibility, as X/Twitter's evident bias towards the newly established U.S. government and their favoring of one demographic over the other could have set off Debian's move.
That's just me speculating, though. 🙃
No, you got it right. I get that you need to cover your ass to avoid a lawsuit, but it's exactly because a guy who loves the adoration of nazis owns the platform.
Yeay, Debian user here who also left Twitter/X for similar reasons. I was already on Mastodon and Bluesky but didn't make a habit out of it. Leaving the bad platform entirely (and having my data archived and searchable) helped a lot.
Glad to hear they moved on!
L M A O
party rock is in the house tonight
Now I wish they had an ARM Qualcomm distro. Been hoping for a Linux distro for my Snapdragon X Elite machine. Now Debian had taken a stand for something they will probably be my distro once there is Linux support for my machine!
Debian already has an ARM version. Do you mean some Qualcomm drivers are missing? There are already Ubuntu ROMs for Android phones, so this shouldn't be an issue, right?
Arm is insanely fragmented, every device must be have dedicated drivers and hardcoded specific configuration in the kernel. And sometimes even separate kernel builds. Also Snapdragon X devices are not even fully supported upstream in the most recent kernel yet. Which means they are many years away from being supported in Debian. Unless someone makes a fork of Debian with latest kernel and not yet upstreamed Qualcomm specific patches (which how these "arm distros" are usually made).
There are ARM distros, yet the SnapDragon X Elite SOC is not yet supported fully. The drivers are a mess. They are progressing, but slowly probably due to the small number of people who would use it.
Good job Debian.
Fucking awesome
Ship ship ship!
Unfortunately the accounts listed under Social network accounts of Debian teams and Social network accounts of Debian contributors are almost exclusively Twitter accounts.
The "safety" thing is a bit hyperbolic. I wish they'd just say "the quality of the interactions is going down" or "poor moderation" or something else a little more honest.
Twitter is a shitty platform in structure, format, and moderation. I'm glad Debian's not on it. But I am disappointed in them for using hyperbolic rhetoric.
Safe is a very broad term. Its not being used hyperbolically here. It's not referring to physical safety.
Yeah I'm aware that it means "emotional safey" the way they're using it. But they're still being hyperbolic, because emotional safety in the context of opinions on the Internet is just not meaningful. In a relationship one can speak of emotional safety in context of emotional manipulation or violence, but on a microblogging platform? The axiom of Tyler the Creator still applies, and we're not even talking about targeted harassment.
What is "The Axiom of Tyler the Creator"?
It's a bit of a gloss (as most microblogging posts are), but the essence of it is that words in themselves can't really hurt you unless you let them: https://x.com/tylerthecreator/status/285670822264307712
How does one not feel safe on a digital platform? Even if someone physically threatens you, nothing is going to happen to you. And you can block/mute people you don't care for.
Digital platforms have promoted genocide. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa16/5933/2022/en/Blocking people you don't care for would have no impact here.
Leaving the platform would have no impact either. You are talking about something different.
Drag values not being a Nazi and X doesn't. This isn't a dumb reason to stop using it.
Fuck off, placating Nazis does more damage to free speech than any of this.
It is a valid reason, it is also perfectly moral to use violence against Nazis.
There will be peace when we have killed enough Nazis.
Yeah sounds about right, enjoy your failed state.
Imagine being so fragile you can't tolerate opposing viewpoints.
Imagine being so fragile you get shook by people leaving
Nice straw-man, oh wait here comes the rain, it's melting.... guess there was nothing of substance there after all......
I don't mind opposing views. I do mind views that say some of my family members or some of my friends should kill themselves. I have no business on a platform that allows such hateful conduct, end of story.
It's a matter of basic decency and respect.
I don't respect Nazis
Nazi = Anyone I disagree with
Imagine your view point is aligning with Musk one... You're either a billionaire or a dumb looser thinking is a part of a club he isn't in
Shouldn't you be out burning teslas? You know, save the planet with EVs.... oh nevermind you don't actually have any convictions ....just programming....
Are you really rage answering to comments on a 2 month post on which you litteraly posted that not tolerating opposing opinion is being fragile 🤣🤣🤣
I wont downvote you but you arent undestanding it. People like Trump and Musk are radical ones and they want "to clean" LGBT+ under view of "they are pedophiles". Trump is said to be "anti vaccines" but he paid in advance for them and he wrote 200 orders like Javier Milei super law of basis, (ley omnibus) with modifications for 300+ laws. This is an anti democratic behaviour.