When (Software) Freedom is the Goal
Some hours ago in Geminispace I saw someone publicly announcing that he was leaving social control media (Twitter/X) to focus on Gemini. Some people take a different route: dump proprietary social control media and adopt 'free' or 'open' and/or "decentralised" (not!) social control media. I believe this to be a misguided approach, based on a lot of personal experience, dating back to 2009 (Identica).
Tobacco patches are not the goal when you want to get away from smoking or wean yourself off cigarettes. The patches are an interim thing - part of the "journey" to use a common metaphor. When trying to get off social control media the "federated" stuff like Mastodon is also not the solution because many of the same issues persist, no matter if source code is available for the platform. One could argue similarly against long-term use of WINE and proprietary software on GNU/Linux when trying to get away from Windows and - by extension - Microsoft.
We've already covered the many negative facets of social control media. It would be difficult to revisit the issue without properly covering all the relevant points (there are many). Let's just say that social control media is all about controlling the users; the person in charge of the platform or instance (or pod in Diaspora) is truly in charge of everybody and there is also covert interference, it's not neural as far as communications go. To use a simple example, if phone lines worked that way, there would be real-time censorship and someone going on the line to advertise topics to talk about ("trending"). Do we really want such tools/actors to police speech between us and our family/friends/colleagues? Do we want ads during phonecalls?
There has been lots of media coverage about how social control media is harmful to children, to women, or to young girls. Why not just say it is bad for all humans or, collectively, to societies? █
