well my comment was specifically pointing out that giving someone agency is the opposite of “a problem.” i was pointing out that having options to spend your freetime how and where you like is the literal opposite of forcing you to “the will of a server” or whatever their statement was.
to your comment, the ability to keep posts and such is going to vary by which system you’re using, for example:
- twitter, absolutely not. they want to force you to spend your free time around whoever they say. and they absolutely want to make it difficult for you to have freedom to leave or the freedom to associate. in the before times there were sites you could use to move your contacts and follow the same people on Mastodon. elon hated the idea of people having freedom so he shut that down shortly after he took power. for this reason i recommend people start manually building their contacts on other sites now so the move will be easier once you’re ready.
- threads, im not familiar enough with it yet to say for sure. i have a couple of accounts there but honestly, ill never use them, its zuckerberg… facebook… no thanks. been burned too many times by these people.
- Mastodon, almost entirely yes. you can backup and download both your posts and your contacts. i dont worry too much about it, but if it’s something you’re super worried about just do like we all do with photos, docs, etc… keep a backup. i know some people keep a backup federated account mirroring follows, etc… for worst case scenarios. i occasionally download my follows and posts, but im not really too worried about it.
- bluesky, yep. i love blue sky but for different reasons from Mastodon, i use them both all day long. just for different reasons. blue sky doesn’t at all have the same quality of community as Mastodon or even hn. it’s nice, but its not community focused. its more like twitter before eternal september took over. at the end of the day tho, i don’t have a lot of hope for it, the VC people will definitely figure out a way to ruin it.
but to bring it back to my original comment: the important part is that we have the agency to utilize freedom of movement and association. it should creep you out when someone tries to convince you that having agency is a problem. having freedom to jump from place to place, server to server, community to community is a good thing and its crazy when these people keep attempting to convince us that jumping around is "a problem".
when someone tries to force you to spend your playtime somewhere you don’t want to be, or when they try to convince you “no, you should want to be around eric especially when he’s a dickbag.” that should make your hair stand up with red flags. and that’s what these people have been trying to convince us for years—“noooo, why would you want to spend your free time somewhere else having fun? dont go enjoy yourself! you want to be here! no one here likes each other and everyone is screaming at each other! thats what you really want to do with your freetime!”