Thread by @EthanZ

Okay, like virtually everyone else who studies social media, I'm fascinated by @elonmusk's takeover of Twitter. Let me say upfront: I have no idea what Twitter will be like under Elon's leadership and neither do you. But that's the point.

We already know little about how Twitter handles content moderation or how their algorithms work, and taking the company private makes it likely we will know less. What we do know is this: two billionaires will now control four of the major digital public sphere platforms.

Zuckerberg, by virtue of his unusual "founders shares", has functional veto power over much of the decisionmaking within Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. (morningstar.com/articles/10612…) A privately held Twitter will likely give Musk similar personal power over Twitter.

It's embarrassing that we've been willing to have our public, civic conversations on platforms controlled by corporate boards. Musk's purchase of Twitter just makes that absurdity even more apparent. Unfortunately, the solution is not as simple as mass migration to Mastodon.

Don't get me wrong - I love Mastodon. I've had an account since 2016, and I'm basing some of my own projects on the Mastodon codebase. But it's not a good solution to assume that everyone will leave Twitter due to a change in ownership.

We're facing twin problems of finding alternative spaces that we have more control over, and problems of interoperability in maintaining the social relationships we've already built up on these platforms. Mastodon, in which individuals can run small, federated servers

is part of the solution. It's harder than it looks to scale one of those servers, though, and moderation is always hard. It's harder if you do the right thing, which is focusing on governance - how do you decide what's allowable speech within a community and how you enforce it.

But even with a mass exodus to Mastodon servers with thoughtful governance and moderation, we've got the problem of the folks we're leaving behind - the folks who don't leave Twitter, FB or any other closed platform. We need adversarial interoperability, as @doctorow puts it

I should be able to build a tool that lets you read posts from Twitter, various Mastodons, as well as other networks like Reddit, simultaneously, and through a tool you control. We've been building a version of that tool, called Gobo. It's hard work both technically and legally.

With a good aggregator plus something that lets you cross-post to Twitter and Mastodon, migrating off this platform without losing the relationships we've built up is more realistic. It would also allow a wave of experimentation with platform governance.

While I happen to think this is a good way to go, there are lots of other exciting projects out there. One of my favorites is Pubhub, a project in the Netherlands being led in part by Jose Van Dijck, one of the world's great social media scholars. computable.nl/artikel/nieuws…

It's designed to be privacy preserving and non-surveillant. I like some of the ideas coming from planetary.social (though the inability to delete worries me), and even some of what Project Liberty is working on. But we should get our priorities straight.

First, we should limit our investment in social networks we don't govern. No more hoping a better billionaire buys out a bad billionaire. No more begging for better moderation. Find a platform that wants you to govern, not one that wants to moderate you.

Second, fight for real interoperability. Existing multi-million user networks can't have veto power over future networks. You have a right to maintain your content and your relationships when you leave a platform. Third, build platforms that have a reason and a purpose.

Existing platforms try to be all things for all people. Is Twitter a robust civic public sphere? A place for shitposting? A place for experimental bot-based poetry? The fact that it's all makes it very hard to govern. Lots of social networks, aggregated, each with purpose.

I've written tons about this at publicinfrastructure.org and will surely write more. There's tons of fellow travelers working on this from @WeAreNew_Public to @tinysubversions. Let's use this moment to demand better alternatives, not just a better billionaire.

Well this blew up, at least as much as an academic thread can.

Check out my Soundcloud! By which I mean, subscribe to Reimagining the Internet, the podcast where my team and I talk with people trying to civic-focused alternatives to the existing web: publicinfrastructure.org/podcast/