Friends, don't use the tools of the enemy.

[Voltaire2]

17. There are democratically operated social media platforms, xitter and facebook and bluesky are not among them.

Mastodon and Lemmy, for example are part of the 'fediverse' of federated social media open source non-commercial platform systems, one for twitter-like messages, the other for reddit like link aggregation.

People new to either, but especially Mastodon, are uncomfortable with the experience if they migrated from the equivalent commercial platform (xitter) because there simply is no 'algorithm' stuffing their 'feed' to maximize gaze farming. You have to organize your feed, and that is apparently not providing the same addictive hit that xitter gives people.

I think the obvious fact is that facebook and xitter and tik tok are addictive, and as amply demonstrated by the election campaign, if the algorithms are manipulated by the owners to achieve desired political outcomes, really dangerous to the preservation of republican democracy. We've allowed an almost entirely unregulated array of addictive substances to spread through the population, and also allowed the suppliers of these substances to abuse their addict populations for their own purposes.