[liberationtech] Wealthy entrepreneurs ask whether you would use a Liberationtech-friendly Twitter clone?

[Brian Behlendorf]

On Wed, 27 Apr 2022, Yosem Companys wrote:
> Dear Liberation Technology community,
> 
> A group of wealthy serial entrepreneurs who built a Twitter clone to foster civic democracy in the 2020 elections just reached out to me to ask whether you would be interested in using a
> Liberationtech-friendly Twitter clone now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter. They want to know the following:
>  *  Would you use a Liberationtech-friendly Twitter clone?
>  *  What would make you want to use it? Conversely, what would make you NOT want to use it?
>  *  What would you name it? They said they might even be open to calling it Liberationtech, if there were enough interest. 
> Thank you, Yosem

If there is any lesson from all this, I suspect it's that any centralized 
communication service even run by the most competent, well intentioned, 
humble and not-profit-oriented (clearly, judging from their stock price) 
founders & techs is susceptable to subsequent capture by others. As the 
open source software community figured out, the "right to fork" is the 
only meaningful check on the winner-take-all power-corrupts dynamic in 
networks.

So I think the answer is, those founders should either make their service 
with, or just go use one of the existing implementations of, Mastodon or 
other emerging dweb alternatives.

Brian
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