Stallman would not be proud.

The FSFE's mission, as I understand it, is to support and promote free software. But as far as I know, Twitter has never been a friend of free software, nor has it been supportive of other related values the article mentions, like 'privacy', 'transparency', 'autonomy', 'data protection', etc. It has always been a non-free, centralised network which cared about profit more than user rights, and engagement more than fostering civil discourse.

I don't see FSFE's presence on a platform as endorsement of its values, but rather as a way to leverage its popularity to better promote their mission. That hasn't changed; X is still a popular platform. It's attitude to Free Software and related ideas doesn't seem to have changed, either. So why leave now? I get 'misinformation, harassment, and hate speech' are never a good thing, but I don't recall the FSFE opposing them so vehemently before (more like just ignoring them), so why now, out of the blue? Unless there's been a change in their internal priorities, which they don't communicate, it doesn't really add up for me.

In the end, this just reads like them taking a political stance and trying to rationalise it in more neutral language. And I can understand and respect that decision, but the fuzzy phrasing still rubs me the wrong way.

> "In the current situation we see ourselves unable to collaborate both with the FSF and any other organisation[sic] in which Richard Stallman has a leading position."

I do wish more people would try to fix things from the inside, and I get there's a point where it's no longer possible, but in this case it sounds like they didn't like people calling them out on X and had no way to control the narrative. What other gain would there be for a group trying to spread information in as many channels as possible?

[edit: link removed; I don't want to promote that guy but to give the gist he was saying that people who believe in free speech are trash, targeting X users with hate. Mastodon is absolutely saturated with this.]

Most of the criticism I see of X seems completely made up out of malice or is regurgitation of things other poorly informed or resentful people have said.

The supposed FSF in Europe should post links to the sections of the open source algorithm they claim to be criticizing, and show us their PR.

what happened to the official blob & official press releases ? these things are a solved problem (wordpress etc, if you wanna subscribe use RSS)

On the other hand, Twitter/X has a problem of spam. I don’t even think it’s bots but actual humans. You see low effort and racist comments all over the place, poisoning the conversations. And it’s not just on political posts. If you’re Chinese or African or Indian, there will be vile comments spamming your posts.

Such a space isn’t welcoming to many people and I think groups like FSFE have legitimate reasons to want to avoid exposing their members to this stuff. It’s a hostile environment.

* A web-of-trust social media, where I can instantly see, about any account, all of the chains of separation between us, in order to verify and validate the humanity and social connection of another person.

Presently, twitter (and even moreso, reddit) are just so overrun by bots whose job seems to be to muddy all waters with short-shrift, low-effort takes, but expressed in way more words than are necessary.

I don't mind (in fact, I love) long-form posts like were common in the old reddit, but that are thoughtful and perhaps radical (in the same of addressing the root of the subject). Today's reddit is almost as bad as twitter. I'm kinda ready to get off both of them, but I'd like to still have daily engagement on topics that challenge me / my worldviews.

Love it or hate it, Twitter (yeah, I choose to be stubborn here) is still probably overwhelmingly the most impactful platform in this way.

While I respect the idea of the "boycott" in the abstract, perhaps the most wrong thing people think about it is "Because it's controlled by so-and-so, everyone who uses it is brainwashed and it's impossible to do good there."

Nope. Look, a lot of good people are still there. I personally also wish they would all leave and we all go elsewhere -- but that's not the present reality.

As such, people who insist that you must leave and no good can happen through staying ring the same to me as "IF SO AND SO GETS ELECTED IM LEAVING THE COUNTRY."

> In the current situation we see ourselves unable to collaborate both with the FSF and any other organisation in which Richard Stallman has a leading position

https://fsfe.org/about/fsfnetwork.html

These guys are entitled to use or avoid any social media platform they want. I'm entitled, as well, to judge them for putting purity tests in unrelated domains above their commitment to free software and thereby rendering themselves ineffective in their primary mission.

Irrelevance is their choice.

That said, there's a transparency consideration. Doesn't Europe have laws about charities having to use donor funds to advance the ostensible purpose of the charity?

Matthias Kirschner is FSFE president and a full time employee. Do FSFE's donors know the FSFE is making itself less effective towards its mission of promoting free software by avoiding people who the FSFE leadership team dislike for reasons unrelated to free software? If they want to do this stuff, they should put it in their charter.

But what are they going to do instead, nothing? Killing yourself in protest makes it really easy on your enemies (and aren't the only enemies of Free Software the people who want to sell closed devices?). Do what you do, don't feel like you have to control all the responses to what you do, or that they are hurting you. Your engagement with the public is independent of any reaction to you. You have total control over it. In this case, it looks like you're choosing to withdraw into a closet and only speak to your friends.

All that being said, twitter/X, both pre-Musk and post-Musk, sabotaged and sabotages reach based on opinionated, political, and profit-driven algorithms. People don't even see you. If your reach numbers were crap, you might as well not waste the effort. But I actually don't know what the effort is to fire and forget links to your press releases and current campaigns that you've doubtlessly posted other places. Seems almost zero.

My fear is that this is being pushed by people who are simply taking advantage of their power in an organization to push their own personal grievances. Free Software should only care about Elon Musk and Twitter to the extent that it is not Free Software. If you've moved into the "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil" place, you've lost the plot.

I'm also getting a bit sick of Europeans stepping out of conversations because they aren't censored enough, even if the algorithm is definitely promoting the worst for engagement. It's scary. Europe has a comically bad history with this.

edit: and even the mention of "misinformation" is a red flag. I don't want a FSF that is a "misinformation" and hate speech monitor. I want a FSF that neonazis and climate skeptics feel free to join if they think that software should be Free.

Always has been.