Haven’t read about the recent paid Verified subscription controversy?
“Oh hey! Verified are now a public commodity. Everyone can be Verified by subscribing to our recently-changed $8/mo subscription. Freedom to all!”
Well, that’s sounds fun, right? Until the infamous Nintendo of America fake account appears. With that blue checkmark.
We have written two threads in response to the situation. First is,
Instead of paying $8/mo to Twitter just for having one of my accounts to be verified, I’d rather pay $14/mo to DigitalOcean and Niagahoster to get all (expect 25) of my accounts verified on my federated microblogging service.
What a whopping $186/mo savings I could get!
https://twitter.com/reinhart1010/status/1588602299248959488
This one is real. Because we silently launched our Fediverse server by rebooting https://bots.reinhart1010.id four weeks ago, and it went well. What it takes is just a $12/mo (subject to taxes), and (assuming that we’ve never registered a domain yet) a $21.49/year (nett) .id domain. We estimated the overall value to be 14 or 15 dollars per month, where we can actually “verify” all of our official Fediverse accounts instead of subscribing to Twitter Blue for @reinhart1010 and @alterine0101.
And next is another joke aimed at the Reinhart Super App,
Instead of paying $8/mo, or 96/yr (assuming that there’s no annual discount), to Twitter just for having one of my accounts to be verified, I’d rather to pay for a slightly-more expensive subscription aptly named the Apple Developer Program.
Pair that with a free, public GitHub repository hosted on http://reinhart1010.github.io, I can create a new repository to dump all my exported Tweets, then announce everyone I’m quitting, so all official communication can only be done on one app.
Not Twitter, but Reinhart Super App.
And of course, charge the same $8/mo for access to all of my posts. “You currently have 3 free remaining posts. Upgrade to Reinhart Premium now.”
So the next time someone else asked me to return to Twitter, Instagram, & TikTok, “Your feedback is highly appreciated. Now pay $8.”
But wait, someone else could just fork your GitHub repo to skip Reinhart Premium. Meh, after all, only haxxors do that. Right @alterine0101?
https://twitter.com/reinhart1010/status/1589955855776378880 (Thread)
The angered Twitter community are currently seeking asylum into two kinds of platforms. First is Tumblr, yet another microblogging platform who was far left behind Twitter, sold themselves to the hands of Yahoo!, Verizon, and now Automattic, the creator of WordPress.
And now the Tumblr, sorry, I mean, Automattic CEO recently states his surprise about this new flock of Tumblr users, including those who left the platform for Twitter. And with Automattic being Automattic, he mentioned some interesting plans to make Tumblr as open-source as WordPress as of today!
(Also, this site is proudly powered by WordPress)
Predicting Twitter from the history of Instagram.
Before we continue, we feel that it’s important to revisit and learn how Instagram has evolved, and how Twitter could finally fall into the same cult. Started as a humble photo sharing app, then influencers and the word “Instagrammable” flocks and pops in, now Instagram has become the place where brands literally fight with each other and each other’s fans for the sake of engagement.
Whether it’s corporate, community, or personal branding, Instagram is still stuck becoming The Fortnite Battle Royale of Digital Brand Engagement, but in Photos and Videos. They just loved the competition and it’s the only platform these brands can reach audience of all ages. Of course, it’s all before TikTok.
And it proved Facebook to be more profitable, too. With more and more people of the younger generation leaving Facebook, who was still stuck under their classic social media model, Instagram paved a way of life which has led YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter to do the same.
Many younger users now feel that building relationships between brands and themselves is more important than other types of people, including themselves. Just ask those diehard Korean and Japanese media fans near you, they’re idolizing, and even marrying, as I should say, their brands and their promoted brands!
And oh root! The recent Whitelab Sehun fanmeet incident in Jakarta and these Instagram screenshots proves how far the social media generation has been married with these brands.
No wonder more and more people are now approaching social media just for content creation and profit, rather than building meaningful relationships. That also explains why I’m already tired with Recycled Developers (and their universe) as well as those middle-to-low-class YouTube channels in Indonesia who just want to beg for AdSense profits by (mostly) copying other’s content and make them viral under their own.
Beginning of Digital Protestanism?
Well, the $8/mo-to-be-verified fiasco is just the beginning, as we already have heard plans for Twitter to literally remove “everyone” who don’t subscribe to the $8/mo color thing. For brands with millions of dollars of profit, $8/mo or $96/year is just a teeny tiny amount to spend for. But for the rest of the people, like those living in poverty, the rise of this monetization and moderation model could become another new problem of digital humanity. Like, the extreme version of subscription fatigue.
Well, Jason, it’s no longer a secret, then, it is profitable. It is what Elon Musk loves, anyway. And also, we love the Raspberry Pi’s explanation regarding this situation (and how they finally moved into a dedicated Mastodon instance clan which is run directly from an array of Raspberry Pi 4 devices!)
The changes coming to Twitter look to fundamentally change the way the site feels. The dramatic cuts that the moderation team seems to have taken will open up the platform to spam, scams, and other things that we don’t want to have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. But there are also issues around identity, and I’ve been thinking a lot about identity verification and trust since the announcements.
The announcements around Twitter Blue are concerning not because they give wider access to identity verification; we’d welcome that. Instead they don’t seem to do the opposite. It comes down to what identity itself means: a blue tick next to someone on Twitter no longer means that their identity has been verified by an employee of the company; it means that they can afford $8 a month. That’s not the same thing.
Allan A. “An escape pod was jettisoned during the fighting”. Raspberry Pi Foundation. https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/an-escape-pod-was-jettisoned-during-the-fighting/
And it makes us wonder if the Elon company raises the $8 price tag, like, into $12, $25, or even $99/mo? Then threatening those who can’t afford to pay higher to be kicked into Twitter’s equivalent of the Spam folder?
Update November 11, 05:00 UTC: Gotcha!
Just as the Catholic church sold indulgences (official church letters of forgiveness) to people for funding their then-unfinished new church building construction, Twitter sells the “Verified” status under their premium subscription for a not-guaranteed-to-be-a-fixed-amount-forever subscription fees.
God’s free forgiveness should not be sold by humans, and being “Verified” and (un)algorithmed by God on the physical, spiritual, and digital world shouldn’t be, too.
So, prepare, and we’ve prepared ourselves, for another wave of digital exodus.
How do local (Indonesian) social media platforms react, today.
Some of you might know about my involvement in Kenangan, which is still undergoing a major community testing. However, I recently left Kenangan so I can focus more on finishing my bachelor thesis.
Additionally, Kenangan is still currently uninterested to focus more into microblogging as Twitter does, instead of photos and videos as what TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and even Shopee Video do.
I’ve never heard news about Sebangsa and Woilo (formerly Sestyc) again, after Woilo’s latest news to integrate NFTs into their accounts.
However, TipTip publishes a new ad campaign, reusing the “bad guy” theme as used in many of today’s product scams. Instead of the “guy”, it is now “the algorithm”. But the most unfortunate thing about TipTip here is that they themselves are also built on algorithms, and “naughty” or “nice” algorithms will eventually be “Verified” by the public, not Santa Claus.
The Fediverse.
Oh, right! I forgot the other kind of platform which those Twitter people migrates to, though. It’s the Fediverse, and it’s the same platform that our new (definitely-not-Kenangan) social media service is operated on.
Through his now-deleted post, this is what Elon Musk refer as Masterbatedone.
Mastodon, I mean, Masterbatedone, is not just the only server available in the Fediverse. There are many, and we’re just one of them, too. Our server has recently been “Verified” to exist by Pixelfed, another non-Masterbatedone Fediverse service. And we’re proud to be the first PSE-certified Fediverse service operator on the Fediverse.
The best part of Masterbatedone is that the interface is still ugly for some, and it’s good. The folks at Twitter may discredit us for being a copycat of the 2010s golden era of Twitter, but it’s okay.
Because what matters here is not the user interface. It’s the respective users who also pay with time and money to build the platform altogether. And the cost of running it could rise beyond the $8 per month subscription, but hey, it’s your home. You can eventually have as many Verified accounts as you like. Just like the first joke.
Instead of paying $8/mo to Twitter just for having one of my accounts to be verified, I’d rather pay $14/mo to DigitalOcean and Niagahoster to get all (expect 25) of my accounts verified on my federated microblogging service.
What a whopping $186/mo savings I could get!
https://twitter.com/reinhart1010/status/1588602299248959488
And as we recently argued how should we name these Fediverse servers, the Fediverse is made out of thousands of active Internet servers dedicating their lives to store and send messages across each other, possibly forever. Fediverse exists not because of advertising revenue, but many of their users literally paid to operate them in an individual basis.
I’ve already seen that they are mostly uninterested in building and marrying with brands. And TipTip’s so-called “bad algorithms” don’t exist here, no algorithmic content curation exist and each instance/clan doesn’t have to choke all of the posts and activities happening in the Fediverse.
But instead, they highly care in nurturing their decentralized communities. People to people, and community to community. Some instances/clans exist to cater certain types of community, like those Linux diehards, art, gaming, VTubers, and so, and they can still be connected to each other.
And this is the reason we’re joining the Fediverse. For real this time. Not for engagement as a brand, of a group of brands, but for building real and actual relationships to all kinds of people.
The ex-Twitter ones, those GNU activists, some people and organizations that Indonesian folks may mock them as SJWs (aka. social justice workers, as mocked as someone who begs for awareness and attention), bot allies, and so.
3 important announcements.
Finally, we have come to the announcement part. We intentionally put this almost at the end as we believe everyone should understand the recent situation on Twitter, even though you’re not interested in it or Twitter as a whole.
For those who have followed us on Twitter, thank you for much time spending with us. Twitter has become the most addictive social media app in my life (yes it beats Instagram and even TikTok), as I personally love to create things more by writing, rather than taking photos and editing videos.
However, as an effort to make ourselves feel more calm in facing this situation, we’ll be inactive on Twitter starting from Monday, November 15 to Sunday, November 21. If things get worse we might want to extend them right to December and the new year.
Second is that our next official accounts will be available exclusively on the Fediverse, to allow us to simplify our social media engagement strategy without paying for expensive paywall and API access and so. We will eventually explicitly mention which other, non-Fediverse accounts are our own to combat potential future scams which relate to our names and products.
And lastly, we’ve been teasing five new projects in relation to the Fediverse. Want to learn more? Just checkout all “Posts and Replies” section on my official account @[email protected].
Wait, so you wanna join the Fediverse, too!?
The Fediverse contains lots and lots of servers. Or “pods” and “instances” as some of them said. But we prefer to call them as clans for some good reasons.
The clan server at bots.reinhart1010.id is closed for new registration, since we only intend this one to be filled with our official, (checks notes) “Verified” accounts. However, if you have joined such a clan before, for example, on Mastodon, you can simply put our usernames on your search bar and follow us thereafter.
Our clan currently works best with clans who are using either Misskey or Pleroma, as they both support custom reactions (aka. “likes”), which Mastodon doesn’t. And if your clan doesn’t either run Mastodon, Misskey, or Pleroma, ask the clan leader/owner whether their server supports ActivityPub, which we require at all times.
…but I’m still afraid of the PSE thing!
Yes, maintaining a community, PSE-certified Fediverse clan is challenging, especially on the moderation part, as we mostly sleep 7-8 others a day, while the existing PSE regulation requires highly-sensitive topics (such as child pornography) to be moderated at most 4 hours after the takedown request is issued. Or else we’re blocked by the Indonesian government. And also the issue when these reported, so-called “negative content” didn’t come from our clan, but federated from other (non-PSE) clans.
We are currently in talks with 2 Misskey and 1 Mastodon clans regarding the PSE certification thing, as well as whether we can reference them for new followers from our communities. Fortunately, 2 of them agreed, so it’s currently safe to join these Indonesian-owned clans:
That’s all for the announcement, now get back to build things.
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