A reminder about social media walled gardens
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From yesterday's news:
Elon Musk emails Twitter staff to pause ‘new feature development’ during glitch that told users they were ‘over the daily limit’ and blocked them from posting
Twitter users across the U.S. and Canada on Wednesday were unable to send messages and received an error message informing them that they were “over the daily limit for sending tweets.” Roughly 30 minutes later, users were able to send tweets again but are still unable to send direct messages and follow other users.
Given that Twitter has never had such a thing as a daily limit, this accidental error is essentially an admission that Twitter plans to roll out functionality to lock or serious curtail the ability to tweet behind a paywall.
It's a stark reminder that at the end of the day, when you use many of the popular social media sites and apps, you're walking into their walled garden. A garden that Mr. Musk and his team have decided he wants to charge an admission fee to enter. A garden where your contributions are ensconced behind the walls of the app, never to be reached from the world wide web.
Remember that while it is possible to also close off sites running NodeBB behind paywalls (and introduce ad-supported content), the software itself is open-source, and anyone is free (in the freedom sense) to create their own community using any number of free and open-source forum software, whether it be NodeBB or not.
