Elon Musk to buy Twitter for $44B US
Pete Evans,
CBC News,
Apr 26, 2022
The big news today is that Elon Musk has reached an apparent agreement with the Twitter board to buy the company for around $US 44 billion. He would then presumably take it private and run it as a fiefdom. This is of course always a possibility with proprietary platforms (while researching today I found that SlideShare is completely blocking me from viewing people's slides, which is what I feared when I left the platform after it was purchased by Scribd). So people shouldn't be surprised. If you want a public square, it has to be publicly owned. The best take on this is probably deAdder's (behind a subscription wall on Jeff Bezos's Washington Post website).
Unsurprisingly, as soon as the announcement hit, the federated social networking site Mastodon was hit with a surge of interest (and subsequennt slowdown, at least on mastodon social). People interested in this open source alternative to Twitter are directed to joinmastodon.org, which will offer then a selection of instances to choose from (the whole idea of Mastodon is that we don't all end up on a single platform owned by a billionaire). Note that you'll still be depending on billionaire owners of telecom platforms, so this isn't an issue that goes away simply by #leavingtwitter.
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