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People demanding Zuck be hauled before Congress to explain why No Kings insta was suspended... how would you feel if MAGA GOP hauled MSNow execs to explain why they covered Trump the way they do? Both are editorial choices protected by the First Amendment. If this annoys you...

... the answer is to not use platforms like Insta, and bring communities to social media built on open protocols, such as atproto or ActivityPub, where the account holder has way more control.

Yes, it sucks that the No Kings insta was suspended (though I still think it was likely an automated tripwire, rather than deliberate). But falling back into "well we have to politically punish media execs to get better results" doesn't fix anything.

Mike whats the reach on the most popular open protocol social media as compared to Instagram? Is it even half? 1/4 of the reach?

You are correct they'd have more control, but youre ignoring the literal entire purpose of the no kings organization which is to reach as many people as possible. Is that served by being a small platform with severely limited reach? And if not, how is your proposed solution any solution at all??

It isn’t relevant if their purpose is served though. The trade off exists and always has. If you want increased reach, there’s a cost. (Or control). Handing you a flyer won’t cost me as much as putting an ad in the paper.

If you are not prepared to do the work to increase your reach but then depend on a platform that gives you reach. Don’t cry foul when they pull the rug underneath you. Owning your reach always outweighs outsourcing it to a third-party.

No amount of work allows you to send posts to a website you are not on. Im not sure what youre trying to say here Do you think its simply lack of effort that keeps someone without a Mastodon account from seeing Mastodon posts?

Not an honest, executable solution.

I'm not convinced that they still shouldn't be hauled before congress, just that there is no long term future in trusting any of them.

Nah let’s just make their platforms ghost towns & take away their power. Literally nothing stops us from doing that but ourselves.

That too, was my point.

I’m for this. Facebook brought us trump in 2016.

One comment that came through is that Facebook should be pushed to admit they make those editorial choices. They hide behind this veneer of neutrality when their thumb is on the scale. If it’s on the scale they should own it. And yes, there should be AT-based clones for Insta and Facebook. Please.

They have never hid behind "neutrality." They have always said they have editorial rights. And they do.

I don’t want to get into a semantic argument. The only thing I wanted to add if that Facebook has engendered the idea that they don’t pick sides in political fights. Others have punctured that veil, and it’s clearly not true. But knowledge of their favoritism isn’t widely known.

Not sure I buy this because *we can do two things*. Bill Gates got yelled at for two days in the late 1990s and Microsoft strategy changed for a decade following largely because Bill Didn't Like That. So until Instagram isn't a political force, let's make Zuck uncomfortable dicking around.

"It's just a tripwire" nah this is a massive company with better ops than that. They have to be accountable for the choices they make.

Users go to biggest platforms where their friends and associates are. The reach of Meta easily exceeds the reach of atproto-based platforms. Until that changes, the reality of size and reach wins - and the billionaires have won that battle for now.

Or moving to a nation which is both a liberal democracy and also regulates billionaire-contrôlées businesses effectively and subordinates them to the rule of law. Ludicrous utopianism, I know. How did the American trustbusters do it a century or more ago?

The Bilbo strategy with respect to X et al bsky.app/profile/patd...

Haven’t had Meta/FB/Insta for about 18 months now, after Zuckerberg announced he was going to support Trump on “immigration crackdown” (which was always a euphemism for the ICE human rights abuses we’ve been reading about since early 2025).

I think I missed that re zuck (or just forgot) but I hardly ever use it and just have it as a spot where I’d be able to have a way to connect with old friends/acquaintances

I mean, this sounds great, I'm all for it. But if you're trying to organize mass events, only being present on small upstart social networking sites is insufficient for mass mobilization.

There were mass protests before social media

There was a good decade where corporate media did not cover left wing or democratic protests. Then social media demonstrated that you could get clicks by showing them. Then corporate media started covering us again. I did press for protests during the dark age. We need social media.

yeah people spent their time differently before social media.