The most revealing part of today is Musk essentially admitting that buying Twitter wasn’t about making it a better and more open social network, but rather about entrenching the status quo and amplifying an authoritarian, right-wing agenda.

Today opens another opportunity for Farcaster to differentiate from X and Musk. Will probably not happen.

@vocdoni, prev. Bitcoin Magazine | Purple #203 | Cohost: /diy /anthropology /vote /biohacking /cooperatives

Being an differentiated, meaning orthogonal, social network means not reacting either way, not reflexively being anti-X :)

Software Engineer @ Cadence Design Systems. B4: Stanford EE / Illinois ECE

oops, if X does something good like supporting encrypted chat, we should praise that.

We indeed should highlight how decentralized systems are better, I do so all the time.

But what I see too often (especially on BSky) is differentiation for the sake of opposition, rather than starting from first principles, which is why I like your follow up response.

The problem I see is tribalistic thinking, where Mark Zuckerberg becomes good because he's against Elon Musk. Or I have to be against Tesla or SpaceX because he's mismanaged X. 

If X does something good, like 

We want X to be more like BlueSky and Farcaster. The original intent of BlueSky/ATProto was to be a replacement protocol for Twitter. I think we should want to convince Elon that the decentralized way is better but he can learn it the easy way or the hard way.

If we differentiate from X, it always needs to come out of first principles, not out of tribalism because Elon is running it and was supporting the red tribe, because ultimately Farcaster is for every tribe too.

Farcaster has some attributes and values: Open protocol, sufficiently decentralized, composability.

Why shouldn’t someone respond to what’s happening in society* by highlighting those values?

It would be natural for Farcaster to take the opposite stance, simply out of antagonism.

We live in a society, not in a sterile operating room.

*The result of a wealthy, drug-abusing, far-right individual taking control of one of the major social networks to serve their own agenda,after having lied about their intentions to make it more open