Re: Rough times for Twitter

[Jacob Hrbek]

   It only took one middle age crisis of a bilionaire to make people
   realize how much of a garbage twitter is... glory to the fediverse!

   -- Jacob "Kreyren" Hrbek

   -------- Original Message --------
   On Nov 7, 2022, 17:25, Paul Sutton via libreplanet-discuss <
   libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org> wrote:

     On 06/11/2022 22:44, Akira Urushibata wrote: > Twitter, now owned by
     Elon Musk, is going through a major upheaval. > According to Musk
     the company is losing 4 million dollars a day. > Half of the
     workforce will depart in a massive layoff, raising > concerns that
     there may not be enough staff left to monitor harmful > content. > >
     Twitter is also exploring new venues of raising money. One is >
     making authorized accounts, previously available to celebrities and
     > public officials for free, open to all for a charge. Some are >
     worried that imposters make take advantage of this feature. >
     Twitter, with its urgent need to raise money, may prod a small team
     > to implement it as quickly as possible. > > I request fellow list
     members to be on the alert. Someone may > set up an account
     pretending to be Richard M Stallman or some other > influential
     programmer, and be granted verification. The account may > not last
     long but significant damage can be done with no more than a > few
     tweets. > > Elon Musk paid 44 billion dollars to acquire Twitter.
     Many observers > now feel certain that the unreasonably high price
     has led to savage > cost-cutting measures. What people don't notice
     is that Musk got much > free software as well. More accurately he
     got access thereto in the > form of experienced engineers who know
     what free tools are available > and how best to apply them. Many of
     them are now leaving Twitter > and that means the firm is losing
     access to free software. > > Because free software is free (as in
     "free beer") the loss does not > immediately show up in the
     accounts. Neither does the effect of any > inappropriate tweet made
     by the maverick owner. Being invisible loss > of this nature evades
     the attention of most observers, especially > financial experts. It
     is possible that even Elon Musk fails to > understand the extent of
     the problem, for as we all know, he is one > character especially
     fond of the money that he can count. > There has been a huge exodus
     to mastodon over the past few days, something like 60,000 users, so
     this really does open up opportunities for the free software
     communities to help and support. 1. More instances to even the
     overall user load 2. Opportunities to help people develop the skills
     needed to run their own instance 3. Opportunities to open up
     discussions around free software, given that much of mastodon is
     based on GPL or similar licensing structures 4. Lets just share
     news, content etc on Mastodon, peertube etc and help each other
     share this content to these new users We have the opportunity to
     make sure the conversation around any free software is positive, so
     promoting LibreOffice or BBB or Jitsi as alternatives to teams /
     zoom etc. Paul _______________________________________________
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