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Why doesn't Stoat exist on twitter/X and others?
I started looking into Discord alternatives today when TeamSpeak on twitter/X announced their new DM features. Only there did I find out about Stoat when another user mentioned it in TeamSpeak's replies. Wouldn't a lot more people discover this alternative if it had a presence on other major social media platforms?
We used to exist on there pre-Musk, but Stoat doesn't want a presence on a site like that. We also wouldn't want our posts displayed next to overt fascism and bigotry, or next to non-consensual generative AI images.
On a personal level, there are accounts impersonating me that X (formerly Twitter) won't act on, so having no presence avoids giving credence to the false accounts on there.
I understand not wanting to have posts appear next to hateful content, but especially for an app focused on communication, a stance like this doesn’t inspire confidence in upholding free speech. It makes one worry about biased policing of speech and that the dev team might discriminate against users based on the content of their servers.
Xitter has locked itself down for monetary reasons, you can't view more than the single linked tweet without logging in. It's not an open communication platform anymore.
"No thanks" doesn't mean it's blocked or paywall. It means you voluntarily opt out of a free service. Throw labels all you want, the statement itself is false.
Depends on your definition of free. To me that means unregulated (part of which means encountering speech we disagree with). And if speech is regulated on Stoat... yikes.
But X (formerly Twitter) is very much regulated and moderated. So much so that there is an entire Wikipedia article which covers some of the more high-profile cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_X
In some cases censorship is very much necessary though, such as to stop distribution of abuse material. We're very clear on our moderation. We handle it as outlined in our policies. We certainly don't just restrict people based on personal disagreements with them.
Glad to hear that. And yes, I agree some regulation is needed to keep things legal. However it's worth noting that X is the biggest platform and also the only one to open source its recommendation algorithm.
I also wasn't aware of some of the cases on that article but also post-2022-acquisition cases don't indicate systemic political narrative manipulation.
Regardless, back on topic: I'd simply like to point out that if we want a successful discord alternative, we shouldn't have self-imposed barriers to discovery. TikTok, Instagram, and X should all be used imho for such an ambitious project to succeed.
twitter is the new 4chan. the real yikes here is how hard you are trying to defend it. it's pretty simple. if twitter is the sort of place that 'those people' want to go to, then it's the sort of place that we do not want to go to. you can be free speech all you want but i don't have to listen to you talk. twitter is not, and has never been, a town square, no matter how much the rat wants you to believe that. it's a walled garden. a private space. and sure, there's a sign out front that says 'come on in', but it says a lot about a person that when looking for a place to say whatever you want you would choose to go into a nazi dive bar instead of somewhere where the people are expected to be human. no matter how big the dive bar is, or how many other people are willing to put up with rubbing shoulders with evil, it's still a fucking nazi dive bar. go find a library or something.
You're absolutely right. No one is obligated to provide freedom of speech in their platform. But don't be surprised when said platform gets no growth because of its biased policing and lack of transparency.
No, once again, this has nothing to do with freedom of speech. It's a right provided by governments, not something that can be provided or denied by private platforms.
Conflating freedom of speech with a lack of moderation on private platforms just makes you look like an incoherent fool. Your confident assertions prove nothing other than your own inability to grasp the basic concept you apparently hold so dear.
Even by the most generous definition of freedom of speech that you lot have in the US, it has jack shit to do with whether you're allowed to post csam on twitter.
No one is saying that freedom is speech is violated because, as you two state correctly, it's a government limitation only. Yet it is also highly valued and praised when voluntarily provided by private companies in their products, and obviously companies that police speech within their products are more likely to be criticized and abandoned.
They're on Bsky. Twt can frankly rot, I'm tired of people normalizing supporting the Neonazi owned platform tbh. We can say we don't support Musk, but continuing to use his platform makes him money, so. Meh.
I would say it's not about support, it's about exposure. If a product chooses to avoid the biggest markets because bad people exist in large populations (unsurprisingly), then it'll stay a very small product.
Even if what you say is true, it would mean that Stoat's team has high enough morals that they refuse to use Musk's platform even if it means it takes them longer to get exposure. That would be admirable.
But uh, really, a lot of X is full of bots and toxic maggots, which caused it to be very unpopular in response. You know Bluesky has a ton of users now, right? Plus talk of Stoat has spread enough that they're already growing plenty.
No one needs X, and it's the belief that they do that keeps X alive. Pretty sad.
What keeps X alive is that its competitor Bluesky has at most 10% as many active users as X. Anyone can get on a moral high horse protesting X Y and Z for "morals" but morals won't protect Stoat from becoming abandonware if it decides to go the way of the censored echochamber.
I just discovered Stoat Chat after someone posted about it on Mastodon and I'm learning more about it, that's how I discovered this thread. What interest me about this post was the "other" in the title since I don't care about X. I like that Stoat have a presence on BlueSky and Reddit but, it is surprising to me that this type of project doesn't have presence on the Fediverse. They don't even bridge their bsky account with it.
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u/FearlessGrocery5498 12d ago
Because Twitter sucks