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People in Thailand are migrating from Twitter after a privacy policy update

34 points| smknstd | 5 years ago |qz.com | reply

4 comments

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[+] tomohawk|5 years ago|reply
Twitter's changing their policy to share device level data, and people are changing to another service that doesn't currently do that.

What's to prevent Twitter from sharing data from the last 5 years with the government who may prosecute a Thai for saying something disparaging about the king? Or with an NGO who decides to make life difficult for people they disagree with?

[+] flanbiscuit|5 years ago|reply
> Like many other Thais, the prominent writer and social critic had grown wary and distrustful of Twitter over a recent string of developments on the platform that sparked privacy concerns. Last week, she joined a massive migration of Thai users to Minds, an open-source and decentralized platform that prides itself on being transparent about how it manages data and revenue—users receive “tokens” based on interactions and time spent on the service. The platform saw a spike of 100,000 new Thai users in a single day last week, its founder told Coconuts Bangkok, causing the service to crash temporarily. There are now more than 200,000 Minds users in Thailand, according to the company.

They've migrated over to https://www.minds.com/

Never heard of it before. Tried looking for any significant discussion on hacker news about it but couldn't find anything that had more than just a handful comments.*

Has anyone here used it?

* https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=minds.com and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19340801

[+] bsd44|5 years ago|reply
I used it before and I still have an account on Minds and Gab as I don't have any other social networking profiles.

The problem with those two is that they're a sanctuary for racists (Gab more than Minds), even though I didn't want to believe it at first. That alone isn't the problem. The problem is when you start building your online presence on those websites, you will have those people comment on your submissions. And before you know it, every post you make will be turned into a moderation hell where you'll spend more time deleting disgusting comments and blocking people than actually replying to legitimate ones.

It's very hard to build something meaningful and long-lasting on those two alternative websites. People from Thailand might be in a better position because they use their own language and their own alphabet.

[+] justinclift|5 years ago|reply
Same here, hadn't heard of it before. Looks like it's FOSS too:

https://gitlab.com/minds

  Minds is a free & open source social network dedicated to privacy and freedom.