We don't have to tweet like this

As I said yesterday, I was just banned from Twitter. They didn't give me a reason, nor a way to restore my account. I did file an appeal, and maybe I get lucky, but I doubt it. My ban was part of a massive purge of thousands of accounts, many of them much milder than myself.

I won't register a new account. I'm done. I've pumped Jack Dorsey's bags with my stellar content for long enough. Screw that faggot, his CIA handlers, his Saudi investors and his troon moderators. The Twitter link at the navbar is gone, and good riddance. I quit Google in 2011. I quit Facebook in 2012. It's taken a while but now I'm completely out of Globohomo social media. Feels good man.

I'm not angry at losing a platform to broadcast my thoughts. I've had a blog for far longer than I've been on Twitter. And this is my blog. My territory. It is mine. I moved off Wordpress years ago when I saw all this coming. This is my house now. I built it. I wrote the code it runs on, the post CMS, the comments system, everything. I host it myself, in a neutral jurisdiction, nobody can take it away from me. I write what I want, edit my content as I will, moderate the comments at my pleasure.

And that's how it should be. I'm a publisher, and a publisher should take care to not be subject to the will of anyone else. This much should be obvious. It's my fucking content. I'm not angry at all at my tweets going away. Most of what I did on Twitter was shitposting, WYBs; the equivalent of just shittalking with the boys at a red light district bar while laughing at the passing hookers. Often it was literally that. I deleted all my own tweets every few weeks or so; for me it was a place for ephemeral musings. I didn't keep backups. I find it quite odd that people are fine with every shit coming out of their brains after 3 beers remaining permanently (in public!) on the internet.

What I'm quite angry about is that I did follow about a thousand people myself, and now I can't access that content. I mean I'm not stupid, I did keep a backup of my follows (and my followers), I already have them set up RSS feed made with Nitter. That took some work, though. And I should've done it earlier, to be fair. Same with my followers: thousands of them; I have a list, I can contact them again. But it's a huge hassle. And some of them are gone, perhaps forever.

It shouldn't be like this. We don't have to live like this. We can do better. And we will do better. As my readers know I saw all of this coming, and since Twitter banned Donald Trump I've been actively preparing for my eventual expulsion from Twitter. There's many options out there, plenty of Twitter clones. Gab, the Fediverse. Good people have offered to help me move to many platforms, and I thank them for that. But I won't; we don't need another Twitter. We need to change the whole damn system. We don't need vulnerable centralized platforms just to say "Based" and paste a URL and have people read it. We need to take back the Internet.

Most internet applications today are built as a client-server system. A computer somewhere serves code to other computers who consume it. The code-server computer is a, duh, server and the code receiver is a client. But that's completely incidental to how the internet works. The server and the client are pretty much the same sort of computer. Might be running the same operating system for all we know. The internet, TCP/IP, at its base, is a peer to peer system. Computers sent packets to other computers. That's it. All computers are the same as far as the network is concerned. The internet is just a pipe, it doesn't care who or what is funnelling stuff into it.

As a publisher, with a blog or a microblogging feed, you are literally serving content. You are writing stuff and broadcasting it on the internet. You, little shitlord on Twitter, You Are a Server. You should be serving your content yourself. That's what this blog does. I have a server and I serve you my writing in the form of HTML/CSS/JS code; your browsers are clients which receive the code I serve. But that's not how Twitter works. On Twitter you're just some pansy who has to register, give them your email (!) and cellphone number (!!!). Then you upload your content through a client (a Twitter mobile app or their web app) and then Twitter, at their leisure and discretion i.e. hiding your content if you like a Trump tweet, or outright banning you for undermining confidence in the stability NATO alliance, serves your content on the internet. Twitter also keeps your list of followers, your own reading feed and your DMs and they can dispose of them at their complete leisure.

Why are we doing this? Why can't we just serve our content directly on the internet? Well there's an obvious reason. It's hard. This blog took some effort to put online. It also costs me money (which my btc link in the navbar isn't covering, bitches). Twitter is easy to set up, and it's free. It's a fact that people are dumb, lazy, and cheap. And so Twitter gets to ban them for undermining confidence in the stability of the NATO alliance.

A lot of problems with the internet today (censorship, platforms just shutting down, spam, tracking, etc) would be solved if we had more servers and fewer clients. People should possess their data and serve it themselves. Everyone should have a personal server under their control which served their blogs, their microblogs, their chats, their notebooks, their spreadsheets, their identification data, their monetary transactions: anything they want, at their discretion, and no one else's.

The problem with that is that it's hard to do so. There's a reason 99.99% of internet users are just dumb clients of Globohomotech servers; serving is hard. Thankfully I'm not the only person thinking about that problem. In fact I only started thinking about this last year when Twitter purges started to get more frequent and I saw the writing on the wall. Brighter people than me have been thinking about this for decades, and they have a solution. A solution I buy, a solution I joined some time ago, and which I've been promoting now for months. Urbit.

Urbit is a personal server. Plain and simple. It is designed from the ground up to be a completely programmable server which belongs to you, forever, with a permanent ID system that can't ever disappear, be destroyed or taken away from you. And you can do anything you want with it. It's a server, you go serve what you want with it. It's a brand new operating system which functions as an overlay applicaton on top of any Linux or Mac system. But the details aren't important here. If you need help setting it up you can ask these guys on Telegram or check out https://subject.network/.

Yes, running Urbit as of today isn't exactly easy. But it's not that hard, provided you're the sort of person who can type without looking at the keyboard. And it's getting easier every day. Even if you're just not good with computers, by the end of this year at the latest you will be able to pay people to run a server for you for the cost of a couple drinks, or you can buy hardware to run it in the privacy of your home. Hell, pay me 10 bucks a month right now in the cryptocoin of your choice and I'll host you a comet (a free Urbit account) at this very moment. 20 bucks if you want email/telegram support.

I've been in Urbit for months now; I host a big group there, with hundreds of smart and based people being able to chat, write posts or share links in complete freedom. I serve that group, myself, from my computer. And it's glorious. By a mile the smartest group of people online in the whole world. "OK that's cool, but that's not Twitter" you might say. You're wrong: my Urbit group is really cool. But yeah, good point, it's not Twitter. You need to be inside Urbit to access my blog, it's not on the public internet as Twitter is.

But that's just incidental. As of now most applications run on Urbit use it as a closed network. You have to log in to Urbit's built-in web client and access Urbit groups from inside that sandboxed network. That's just the state of the network as of now. But it is perfectly possible to use your Urbit server to publish a website and expose it to the public internet. And that's what we will do very soon.

It's infuriating that I have to keep manual backups of my Twitter followers, my own follows, or my own tweets. It's infuriating that some bluehair future evil-fat-woman-in-government can ban a guy I follow and I completely lose access to that guy, period. How much of Hakan's tweets were lost forever? How is that not outrageous? If he were on Urbit and for some reason his content went down, I'd just ping him and say "hey, ~master-basted, what's up?" and he'd be accessible. Forever. Unless he blocks me or quits or something, but that's up to him.

It's infuriating and it shouldn't happen. But it won't for long. We don't have to live like this. UrbiTweet is happening. It doesn't exist yet. But I'm confident it will by the end of the year. And it will annihilate Twitter, in time.

The idea of Twitter is that you can publish stuff, mostly short stuff. People can read that stuff. and interact rapidly with it. You can like a tweet, you can reply to it, you can quote it, and you can retweet it. That's all fine, and God knows it can be addictive. But you don't need some cash-burning Globohomo company in San Francisco to do that. Ideally we would have our own UrbiTweet app in our personal server, in which we would write stuff. And sure, let's give it a length limit too. 280 characters or whatever. Maybe even ban threads. Get a damn blog if you want to write long form.

The writing side of Twitter is fine (besides the threads). The problem is the reading side. You can only read Tweets on Twitter. But ideally I'd like a feed with all the content I subscribe to. I'd like a unified feed with Twitter stuff, with Gab stuff, with Mastodon stuff, with Weibo stuff, with anything I want. And I'd like to be able to get all that stuff in my unified feed and interact with it the same way I can interact with Tweets. I'd like this one Tweet. I'd quote this Gab retard saying JESUS IS KING while his centralized database gets dropped on a motherfucking SQL injection attack. I'd retweet this video of a chinathot on Weibo so that people answer "WB" without me even asking. I would interact as I please with my feed because it's my fucking feed and it's my fucking server.

Why can't we do this? Because Twitter, or Gab, or anyone else, has an incentive to keep us locked down in their own platform, and we don't have a server of our own to customize. Oh wait, now we do. We have Urbit. We could easily do this. We could feed our UrbiTweet with data from Twitter, Gab, Mastodon, Weibo, Facebook, VK, or whatever, and we could publish anything we want while seemlessly interacting with all that stuff. We'd have the microblogging equivalent of multi-protocol chat apps (you remember those?). And we would own the data. Brilliant.

There is only one problem with this approach. If you're on Twitter's sandbox and somebody quotes a Tweet of yours, or mentions you by name, you get a notification. And that's useful. You get to react in real time, get a conversation going. The problem with interoperation is that a guy who's on Gab or Twitter wouldn't know he's being retweeted on UrbiTweet, so he wouldn't be able to respond. You can read stuff from Twitter even if you don't have a Twitter account, but you sure can't post anything to Twitter.

There's two answers to that problem. Short one: screw him. Maybe he shouldn't be on Twitter giving his content to Jack so he can hire more blue-haired troons to write reports for the Biden Administration on the perils of Domestic Terrorists Undermining Confidence on the Stability of the NATO Alliance.

Long answer is that the business of UrbiTweet is the users of UrbiTweet. UrbiTweet users would get notifications if their content has been interacted with by other UrbiTweet users. UrbiTweet users could even get notifications if they have been mentioned on other platforms. If you're on Facebook you won't know what Urbit users are saying about you; but maybe you should be on Urbit instead of selling your soul to Zuckerberg so he can buy yet another Hawaiian island. If you are on Urbit, publishing as publishing should be done, by yourself, on your own terms, then you'll have access to the same features and community reach that Twitter has; and then some. You'll have access to the whole internet.

This is not a trivial enterprise. There's work to be done. We need a way to feed data into the system. Twitter data is easy to scoop from Nitter, others will have to be hacked some way. But it's not hard; worst case scenario we can just scrape the shit out of Twitter and any other website. As long as the content is on the public internet, it can be read and fed into a machine. Content which is not public, as much of Facebook or private accounts on Twitter won't be accessible: but the sort of faggot that runs a private account on some Big Tech platform doesn't deserve his content being shared.

And of course a proper backend should be built on Urbit, but that shouldn't be too hard. Urbit servers already have a built-in social database called the Graph Store, which was explicitly inspired by Twitter.

So again, this is happening. Soon. We are going to eat Twitter's lunch, and we're gonna have a great time doing it. In the meantime, join the party (group address up in the navbar, click on the urbit icon), there's lots of other stuff going on. And all the cool kids are there already. See you in the future.

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