Twitter is NOT the public square.
It literally exists on a server farm owned by Elon.
If he wants, he can literally pull the plug on Twitter.
No one should base their online life on that thing. Or anything owned by Meta, for that matter.
I've said this previously in a reply, but it deserves its own thread 🧵
The following is a form of public square or can be made into one:
* Fediverse
* Email
* HTML pages
Twitter is NOT the public square because it is *physically* owned by Elon Musk. You can't start a Twitter instance.
Hence why the Fediverse is not the same as Twitter.
For example, on Mastodon, you can easily migrate to whatever instance is of your choosing, or you can host your own instance if you're willing to put in the work.
Someone might say, "But people can own a Fediverse server."
Sure, but a key difference is that the Fediverse is built for redundancy.
Twitter has no redundancy.
If it were to have anything resembling redundancy, it would be Mastodon -- which is decidedly NOT Twitter.
You can set up a Fediverse server if you wanted to do that, which would build more redundancy.
You can't set up your own version of Twitter, though.
Thus, Twitter is *not* the public square -- but the Fediverse is.
Some folks also say, "Wherever the public congregates, that's the public square."
I don't think that applies to Twitter.
When I say that Twitter is *physically* owned by Elon Musk, that's not a small thing. It's actually a big deal.
And that should tell you a big difference between the Fediverse and Twitter right there.
No one can pull the plug on the Fediverse.
Chris Trottier
Kevin Tinker