X/Twitter

[Changaco]

Twitter has been a part of the journey of Liberapay and its predecessors since the beginning in 2012. But Twitter is no more, and I think it's time to stop supporting its successor. The concerns that some of us had when Twitter was taken over by an individual who was already showing signs of being unfit to run it have proven to be justified.

I propose that we stop using and linking to the https://x.com/liberapay account. Our Mastodon account has long had more followers and engagement than our Twitter account, so there isn't a lot to lose.

[jorgesumle]

We don't gain anything linking to X, so I don't mind not linking to it, but the account has a lot of followers and might give us some traffic and new users. I volunteer to maintain the X account posting the same things that we post on Mastodon, it shouldn't be hard.

[Changaco]

We can do that, but I'm not sure it's the best choice. The idea is that X no longer deserves any kind of contribution from us, and that whatever we might get in return for those contributions probably isn't worth it. If we decide to keep updating the Liberapay account anyway, it should probably be with messages that link to our posts on Mastodon.

[jorgesumle]

The last message on X could say the reasons why we are not posting anymore, and maybe link to the Mastodon account.

[Changaco]

I've changed the profile description on X to “We don't really use X anymore. You can find other ways of contacting and following us on our website.” and disabled Direct Messages.

I've also drafted an announcement:

For a decade, Twitter was a part of the journey of Liberapay and its predecessors. Today, we're announcing our intention to phase out support for X.

The Liberapay community has long been more active on the Fediverse than here, so we encourage you to follow our Mastodon account: https://mastodon.xyz/@Liberapay

[Changaco]

Liberapay's Mastodon accounts are now bridged to Bluesky thanks to https://fed.brid.gy/. I also created an account for Liberapay on bsky.social but deactivated it since the bridge seems sufficient for now.

Second draft of the announcement:

For a decade, Twitter was a part of the journey of Liberapay and its predecessors. Today, we're announcing our intention to phase out support for X.

The Liberapay community has long been more active on the Fediverse than here, so we encourage you to follow us there.

Our Mastodon account is https://mastodon.xyz/@Liberapay

Its Bluesky mirror is https://bsky.app/profile/Liberapay.mastodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy

[Changaco]

Announcement posted: https://x.com/liberapay/status/1886363024077758589

[Changaco]

The announcement has a low number of views. It was probably “suppressed” by the algorithm.

[DeclanChidlow]

It may be advantageous to post an image containing the message so it doesn't match whatever suppression triggering phrases it did.

[Changaco]

X probably uses OCR to extract text from images.