With Trump being kicked off Twitter, the discussion about Parler being kicked off [[AWS]], there's lots of discusison about federated and censorship proof social networks.

I got drawn into a long thread [kicked off by Stefan George](https://twitter.com/StefanDGeorge/status/1347861734716035074 pull) of [[Gnosis]], who wanted to post a bounty to save/store Twitter stuff to IPFS. I [pointed out that Twitter archives already exist](https://twitter.com/bmann/status/1347937473494618112 pull?s=20).

From there I got into a whole back and forth, including people suggesting that Twitter data should be mass exfiltrated to setup an alt social network. Maybe at one point I would have reached for a purely technical solution like this, but here's my final take:

Technical tricks to try extract Twitter data is probably orders of magnitude harder than …just doing the work in building out critical mass communities.

The difference between the two approaches? One is technical challenges, the other is marketing and community building. [@bmann](https://twitter.com/bmann/status/1348350579072921605 pull)

I am... somewhat distraught that a lot of decentral type people think about this issue as censorship, rather than the "let's deplatform fascists issue" that it actually is. Twitter is in no way a public utility. Own your "distribution" -- whether it's direct mailing list subscriptions or your own community social network: run your own Discourse or Mastodon server. Twitter is today's mass media: use it for distribution, but know that you're there at the company's sufferance.

And of course, when I see lots of crypto people happily using Medium and Substack, I'm not going to take the rest of their opinions seriously. Your words need to get backed up by actions, my dudes.

Jeff Henshaw popped back up on Mastodon -- and he's hosting his own Mastodon server. He was asking me why I'm on Mastodon, here's my answer:

the concept of collective ownership / maintenance.

Nothing wrong with “multi user” systems, but we have to clearly understand that it costs people time and some server resources to run things.

I’m working on a model of awareness that people should pay for apps — that behind that app are real people, not just corporations.

“Exit to community” is a related theme. Plus governance, etc etc [@bmann@social.coop](https://social.coop/@bmann/105532951231308481 pull)

Yes, I'm posting my own content back to my own site. Which means it becomes part of my forever content, and also I can link to and include it in search.

I guess I should document my [[Twitter Archive]], which lives at https://tweets.bmannconsulting.com/. In a week or so, when [[Fission]] has [[Github Actions]] support, I can start publishing this to [[IPFS]] directly, instead of hosting it on Github Pages. Doing this direct from Google Sheets to Fission would be ideal, as a little one off Twitter Archive app.

It was really easy to setup. Michael Hawksey's @mhawksey post explains it all: [[Keeping your Twitter Archive fresh and freely hosted on Github Pages]].

I just emailed Michael to see if I can send him some thank you money, or donate to some project on his behalf.