A quick rant regarding "decentralized media":
It's important to clarify that free speech in the social media sphere has 2 core pillars:
1) Being able to produce content
2) The ability for your audience to actually SEE that content
X will practically always allow you to do #1, as there's no weight attached to it.
What's far more important is the REACH aspect, i.e. whether or not your content is actually served to those who clicked the "Follow" button on your name.
Everyone who's digging deep into rabbit holes that matter have had run-ins with shadowbans/suspicious reach throttling at some point or another...and there's a reason for that.
There are immense financial ties between Big Tech and those industries which so many of us expose through our content.
Thus, our content's visibility to our followers is under the complete control of a singular entity, making it *at best* at risk, and at worst a ticking time bomb for being partially or completely rug-pulled by algorithm changes and/or suspensions/bans from the platform.
Now to be fair, my guy Ian Carroll is riding a heck of a wave on his fantastic content he's pumped out, and very well may have broken this paradigm by becoming "too big to censor" similarly to people like Joe Rogan, who's attained enough of a platform that any attempt to censor would backfire with some major Streisand Effect.
But for 99% of people out there, on a long enough timeline, if you are effectively speaking truth to power toward those with large financial ties to Big Tech firms like X/IG/YT etc...you will face the wrath of the algorithm. Without fail.
Always remember: you are a RENTER here, and have no control over what the algorithm decides to call goodthink vs. badthink under any given leadership regime, let alone what it decides to do with your account should you cross these arbitrary boundaries set by a faceless "ministry of truth" controlling the flow of content behind the scenes.
This is why I have been, and will continue to bang the drum on #Nostr.
On Nostr, you own your content, as there is no CEO or central entity forcing your content through an algorithm. Instead, there is a FREE MARKET of MANY data servers (called "relays") and applications to access said content (called "clients").
If one of these relays decides to cut off your content, guess what? You can connect to 10 more.
And if every single one of them kicks you off, but there's still ONE person on earth who still wants to follow you? You can run YOUR OWN relay, and all that follower has to do is connect to it, and they will see your content on their feed!
It's a beautiful system that changes the game, and every day more people are finding their way over there, realizing there's no point in investing time/energy anywhere else.
The future is indeed decentralized. But that future will be built on NOSTR, not X/IG/YT, no matter how much they attempt to adopt this narrative that "This time we're totally going to be about free speech, we promise."
Stop blindly trusting centralized entities with your time, energy, and content. Take 5 minutes to spin up a Nostr account on primal (npub12vk…pugg), damus (npub18m7…q955), nos.social (npub1pu3…tfch), or any of the other clients out there, so you can get a taste of what true uncensorable free speech feels like ⚡️
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[ /END, here's the link to help boost and wake up more X peeps: https://x.com/benwehrman/status/1834752083599274326 ]