The Free Software Foundation Europe Deleted Its Account on X
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Dec 4, 2025 at 10:33 AM EST
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Always has been.
I follow someone who used to use Twitter to update on his projects, 2 years ago he received a few hundred times more engagement for dunking on flat earthers than for pushing his video on Maxwell. He decided to stop. More engagement for controversy was always the algorithm, but it was two orders of magnitude lower a decade ago.
Do you follow any content creator anywhere? Before 2019, you basically _had_ to be on Twitter to follow updates. Then the media diversified, but by 2023, even people still on X will rather use discord to have update on content creator they follow (or, weirdly, Instagram it seems? At least my favourite vulgarisation content creator seems to think so)
They're certainly welcome to do whatever they think is right, and it sounds more "on brand" for them, but it seems ridiculous to say something like "[Using Twitter was] important for reaching members of society who were not active in our preferred spaces for interaction." but then end with "Follow the FSFE on Mastodon and Peertube!" I am very tech literate and I've never even heard of Peertube. There is very little chance they are ever going to reach even a single set of ears this way.
At that point, they might as well just send random fliers in the mail to strangers.
Is it just me or have people started using the same phrases more often and faster than before? Reminds me of when everybody started saying "God forbid" a few months ago.
- one hit on a Lana del Rey message board
- one bluesky post from 8 months ago with no likes, reposts, or replies.
If you widen the search to “should be on that platform” then you get more hits, but many are references to Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, TikTok etc. It seems that people are reaching for a noun that can refer to these social media properties that are not just “sites” and not just “apps.” It would appear that ”platform” is the word we’ve landed on.
The same situation applies to League of Legends and their wonderfully toxic player base
But in all seriousness I think it's a mix of bots on the dead internet leading the monkey see monkey do paradigm. If you see 80 out of 100 people doing a thing then you get swept up in the flood. Even if 50 of those 80 are bots.
Compare that to Reddit, where my 'Home' is flooded with far-left politics.
As for content moderation, I am not convinced X is especially bad. Content glorifying terrorist groups such as the Al Qassam brigades can stay up for many days on Reddit, for example. I had to personally fill the special form for content illegal in the EU, and even then it took a long time to be removed.
Personally, I am not convinced the complaints against X are fair and unbiased. I suspect a lot of it is politically motivated, coming from liberals who typically hate Musk and would like to see conservatives banned from online discussions.
The liberal-conservative political dichotomy was dying before Trump and is decidedly non-descriptive now.
Like, we can describe the illiberal wings of the right and left, MAGA and academic progressivism, respectively, and it will get readership in the New Yorker and Atlantic, but it’s not going to tell you much about who’s in power and why.
More specifically, complaining about “liberals who typically hate Musk” misses that most of Musk’s antagonism in the last 1 year has come from a different cohort than that which has soured on him since he bought Twitter which is again quite different from the crowd that never liked him at all. There is no “typical” Musk hater, even if we just focus on those who vote blue.
One is a political movement that controls the Presidency and several states. The other has a seat at the table in a few cities. If you’re seeing equal footing, you’re squinting hard.
> What do you mean by "illiberal" exactly, and why would that apply to progressives?
I’m specifically referring to the policing of speech. Brendan Carr telling broadcasters what they can and cannot say is illiberal. Same goes for the euphemism escalators that regulated the form, but not content, of classic political correctness.
But to the point, LatinX and the Gulf of America being similarly dumb is an academic exercise. They’re functionally dumb and dangerous for entirely separate reasons. Compressing them into illiberalism is interesting, but not usefully descriptive.
Going back to OP, treating the world as pro- or anti-Musk is similarly uselessly reductive.
I dont use reddit much anymore, but even I noticed that between the gloating about Charlie Kirk's assassination, disinformation that the shooter was far-right regularly hit the front page to the tune of 100K upvotes. Is that acceptable?
Take a look at /r/conservative when they often suddenly completely change their shared opinion.
now, you want to post conservative or rationalist ideas and better use 3 layers of metaphors or else you will be flagged within a minute
I don't even know what this means today. What things are "non-political"? Saying "there are no politics" seems like the same thing as "the status quo is the only possibility" - exactly the stagnation from which I want to move away on socials.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/politics
Narrow sense:
> the art or science of government: as [that] concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy, ... [or] winning and holding control over a government; political actions, practices, policies, ... affairs or business
Broad sense:
> the total complex of relations between people living in society
In my experience, the question is almost always disingenuous. Topics being "political" is clearly the exception rather than the norm. The subtext of asking is something like "you are a bad person for objecting to my political statements (but I will still reserve the right to object to yours, should you decide that turnabout is fair play)".
> Saying "there are no politics" seems like the same thing as "the status quo is the only possibility" - exactly the stagnation from which I want to move away on socials.
There are all kinds of projects and activities that can be discussed without touching upon the relations between people in society, let alone matters of governmental policy or the quest for power.
There is nothing at all "stagnant" about a community focused on such things. OP is about the Free Software Foundation; focusing on discussion of the software has nothing to do with politics, and is generally improved by consciously avoiding politics.
The mere fact of existence of other political possibilities does not necessitate discussing those possibilities at every opportunity.
A number of their campaigns have direct policy/political goals: Public Money Public Code, Device Neutrality, etc.
Free Software in its current form relies on copyright, an answer to a bunch of questions about what we value and how we reward it. That is politics by either of your definitions.
Not to mention that Free Software is inherently, explicitly prescriptive about how we make and publish software, who controls it, who can benefit from that, and how. Changing how society approaches software is its stated goal. Every single instance of Free Software, or at least specifically copyleft software, is advancing a political agenda even if the author doesn't care about that consequence.
Of course I'm just a random butting in, but what I see is:
jMyles: People don't see X because of the status quo bias.
zahlman: But I see no evidence of X.
That strengthens my impression that rebuttals to the claim that "everything is politics" are, usually, examples of the reason "everything is politics."
For that matter, if I check any random tweet link in an incognito tab and look over at the "What's happening" panel, it's all sports and celebrity nonsense, nothing "culture war" or political at all.
Otherwise the site is at most, "egg prices had tripled" bad. Far from cash on wheelbarrows bad.
Definitely more open discussion up in X. Here or in reddit everything gets flagged and banned pretty quickly which defeats the purpose.
And I don't mean hate, etc. Questioning some topics is basically taboo in a lot of media nowadays.
Personally I'm not much a fan of Reddit or Twitter though, simply because the algorithmic nonsense is clearly there just to drive ad views and not to provide me with the interactions I'm there to have. Nostr is a much more pleasant experience.
I see one side engendering discussion and debate. The other side wants to shut discussion down.
People on either side find comfort in echo chambers, but definitely one more than the other.
I remember reporting open calls to violence in various socialist subreddits with no action ever taken as far as I could tell. That was about a decade ago.
There was also a comment (I still have the link saved and it was never deleted) from more than a decade ago, from a moderator at the time (account since deleted) of the main transgender subreddit, openly accusing transgender members of the sub of being drug addicts and prostitutes based on absolutely nothing beyond disagreeing with the moderation team's hard-line woke (it was called "SJW" back then, of course) posture.
Every platform has their extremists and if you let the algorithm suggest content to you it will be stuff designed to fester hated and rage. However twitter is one of the few platforms that let you curate your feed, and I couldn’t use it without that.
How long will he allow the peasants to mute or block him?
The only difference with how it is now is they can still view your posts. I don't have a dog in this fight (don't have Twitter) but this seems like a good feature.
On reddit I've been blocked and then called a Nazi/reprehensible person/nonhuman scum. When blocked, you can't see what people say about you. I would like to report the comments for harassment, but I can't.
Blocking should stop someone from being able to communicate with you - but it shouldn't be a shield against reporting harassment.
Do you not run uBlock Origin for some reason? Is the modern web even usable living like that?
But x’s algorithm is a self-evolving b*tch so my recent feed can change anytime…
I can see people which open an account without a specific purpose just letting themselves fall into the first rabbit hole Twitter shows them.
But if your goal is to prevent other people from having the name altogether, the move I personally enjoyed engaging in was getting my account blocked. That forces them to hold your account only to prevent anyone from using it, lest you might sneak back in and say something "harmful" like "stonetoss is hans kristian graebener".
So you think the FSF should've used the account representing them to troll?
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/19/tech/twitter-elon-musk-de...
They did walk that policy back due to the backlash, but they really wanted to do it.
I think the FSF should not be on Twitter at all. Sorry if I was unclear about that in my previous comment, but the first paragraph was meant to contradict OP's suggestion.
Interesting idea. What did you do?
> say something "harmful" like "stonetoss is hans kristian graebener".
What that it?
The comic was antitrans, antisemitic (with full-on Holocaust denial), racist, and sexist... but Graebener himself is a Latino, so he gets hated on by both the Left and the Right.
Websites that cater to the alt-Right ban users for saying his real name and ban people who make Stonetoss memes that shit on Graebener for being a Nazi.
And you know why HN is actually a great place? dang isn't going to ban me for repeating verifiable facts.
And as you can downvote a comment so HN is self-regulating.
Turn on `showdead` in your settings (or don’t, probably for the best) and be prepared to read some nasty comments. No substance, only hate. There are a few on this very submission.
I think it's a mistake to imply that just because a comment is dead because it was flagged that it is hateful. The vouch button exists for a reason.
I wish people would stop inventing arguments and “reading between the lines” when interpreting comments from people they don’t know. There was no implication. Whatever you think you read is only in your head.
Of course not every flagged and dead comment is hateful. But hateful comments do get flagged so that’s where you’ll find them.
Sorry, I had to.
If you're looking for something that might actually work right now, though, I think there's still some weird libertarian-ish "principle" they're pretending makes it wrong to post elon's (or others') flight information. At least that would be where I would start, because I don't like to bother people that don't deserve it, so general abusiveness is out, and it's funny to throw their free speech bullshit back in their face.
https://help.x.com/en/using-x/x-handle-marketplace
So yeah, a dead placeholder is probably the safest choice.
> "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?
imagine thinking you can discuss a hopped up ket-head into "aligning with your ideals".
Lying. Trolling. Bullshitting. Stonewalling.
> It's only when they try to limit to whom and where they talk to people that they are not open and transparent.
I don't need to talk to you or use your favored public platform for my published material to be open and transparent on some other public platform.
What do these have to do with open and transparent communication?
> I don't need to talk to you or use your favored public platform for my published material to be open and transparent on some other public platform.
Very true, but limiting the platforms limits the openness and transparency. With some simple software you can post to all with almost no effort. Seems weird to disclude one just to write a blog post about it for attention.
If I'm lying to you, I'm being neither open nor transparent, by definition.
> Very true, but limiting the platforms limits the openness and transparency.
It only limits the audience who will see it incidentally. Anyone who's looking for it can still find it.
> With some simple software you can post to all with almost no effort.
I rather suspect that they are avoiding the platform for reasons other than the effort it takes to simply create a post. This seems moot in context.
edit: https://fsfe.org/about/fsfnetwork.html
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."
I still have people there, so I will stick around.
Stormfront is not like Twitter.
And personally the few people I follow there (mostly game devs) are totally worth talking to.
Speaking as someone who recently left the country (if by "the country" you mean the USA) ...
The insufferables are those who are trying to dictate what I should do.
Not on X. But if you’re a public figure, it sort of is. You don’t need to post anything. But you’re going to be affected by what happens there.
But a lot of people become absolutely insufferable when they try to dictate why this should be the case for someone else, I absolutely hate the framing of "indispensable" which I never said.
You don't find value, fine! I do. Let's actually talk about why I do if you like.
be the change you want to see
That's the other part of this that makes these naysayers insufferable; you can use more than one.
My twitter handle literally has my mastodon handle IN IT.
> 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 on purity tests in unrelated domains above their commitment to free software and thereby rendering themselves ineffective in their primary mission.
Irrelevance is their choice.
All these organizations have been infiltrated by career bureaucrats who have their pet political wedge issues and bite away everyone else. Of course they are silent on the really big issues. They would ban Stallman but not go after Epstein's real friends.
And that is in a nutshell how these political pseudo movements differ from the real political movements at the end of the sixties. At that time they were not afraid of going after the big guys.
https://mastodon.social/@crazyeddie/115661963350693475
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.
That’s not hate speech.
You sound like Michael from the office!
On the first point the simplest thing is I used to report people who use overt slurs or anti-semitic language. When Musk took over it started taking months for them to follow up and the response was simply to lock the account until they deleted the offending tweet. Eventually when I would report those people X just switched to saying they weren't breaking the rules. Now the replies of tons of seemingly normal posts that get lots of visibility are full of vile people trying to derail conversation with racism or anti-semitism.
Another big problem is the way that blue-check accounts are boosted has incentivized every account to act like click-bait all the time. Whenever a post gets semi-viral the blue-check replies are artificially lifted to the top and most of them are totally worthless because the commenters are just trying to 'grab space' so people click their profile and follow them. It used to be that if big accounts posted something interesting you might see a bunch of interesting follow up replies. Now it's spammers at the top and then racists / crazies mixed in with more thoughtful replies if you scroll down a few pages past the blue-checks. It used to be that the algorithmic feed would surface me all sorts of interesting and novel work from people across the tech world but now there's a whole category of people trying to make every single Tweet viral enough to get payouts.
And then there's Musk himself. He's ordered the algorithm to be manipulated to boost himself more. He's clearly expressed discontent when the algorithm doesn't work the way he wants, he's meddled heavily in the platform's AI bot to make it say things Musk prefers, and he's been rather unscrupulous chasing his political goals. I think it's not unlikely he'd use the platform to guide public opinion, perhaps even using AI to do it discretely and intelligently. I view that as a significant risk.
So the platform has gone from something that's highly useful to me, and a place I greatly enjoyed, to something that more often than not wastes my time and exposes me to people that disturb me. And on top of all that I think contributing to the platform may empower someone who I deeply distrust to manipulate public opinion towards their political goals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)
> In politics, a dog whistle is the use of coded or suggestive language in political messaging to garner support from a particular group without provoking opposition.
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.
> 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.
Indeed, and FSFE writes:
> The platform never aligned with our values
> a space we were never comfortable joining, yet one that was once important for reaching members of society who were not active in our preferred spaces for interaction
And then says in no unclear terms what changed:
> Since Elon Musk acquired the social network [...] the FSFE has been closely monitoring the developments of this proprietary platform
> Over time, it has become increasingly hostile, with misinformation, harassment, and hate speech more visible than ever.
> an algorithm that prioritises hatred, polarisation, and sensationalism, alongside growing privacy and data protection concerns, has led us to the decision to part ways with this platform.
You cherry-picked two words "direction and climate" from the article and criticised them for taking an ambiguous political stance, but there is nothing ambiguous about the actual announcement and they clarify their exact motivation for leaving multiple times.
And I didn't criticise them for taking an ambiguous stance. On the contrary, I remarked they seem to be taking a rather unambiguous political stance (one opposed to that of X's new leadership). What I criticised was their not being upfront about this and instead giving explanations which don't really add up for me (for reasons restated above).
I quoted only short parts to avoid making my comment appear twice as long, but please let me know if you found the way I did so to be misleading in some way.