Not everyone may know or remember this, but neither Twitter nor Facebook were built on the paradigm of selling user data. That came later.
@miwilc I was there when Facebook's only way of making money off of you was microtransactions on apps like Superpoke. No ads
@plsburydoughboy That's so cool. :)
But now... <insert augment here>
@miwilc it wasn't cool at all
@plsburydoughboy it's cool that you were one of the first adopters
Like both of them literally did not know how to make money when they started out. Facebook would have been hotornot today if they didn't change so much. Who knows how Twitter would be like today if they went ahead with paid accounts
@plsburydoughboy Paid accounts would kill any major social media platform. Even a Mastodon instance with paid accounts (if that's even possible) probably could not stay profitable.
@skquinn It worked for LinkedIn
@plsburydoughboy LinkedIn is a bit different and to just use the site you do not need to pay. My understanding is that the paid LInkedIn features are things like InMail.
@skquinn Twitter would have applied paid accounts the same way
The social media companies all started out frontiering like it was the OId West before they adopted Google's monetizing data model. They didn't use terms like FOSS, but once upon a time, they really did think they were going to give these services for free
@plsburydoughboy What's your point? Giving services for "free" have nothing to do with FOSS (F for Free as in Freedom of speech) and their services are far from FOSS philosophy.
It's not even "for free" since you pay a high price: the loss of privacy
Also, I don't know for twitter, but facebook was built around the idea of collecting users personal data. They even started to ask users to specify their political views and religion (if any). FB is clearly a mass surveillance tool
@plsburydoughboy From a business perspective, originally (2008 or so) social media was about getting exposure for your business/product/service for free. Now, if you want people to actually see your tweets/posts, you have to pay for that.Unfortunately on a personal level I'm starting to see this affect me as well.
@plsburydoughboy I disagree, Facebook and Twitter were built around "collecting" user data.