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Comment by MickerNews | Hacker News Reader

Are you seriously trying to say that he can't make this point unless he builds his own twitter?

https://i.imgur.com/iBAIRqF.png

I'm both a programmer and a pedant, so my opinion is that he's allowed to make this point and be an active Twitter user if his domain is OwnYourPlatform.com, but not if his domain is AlwaysOwnYourPlatform.com. :)

Or maybe 'AlwaysOwnYourMainPlatform(s).com'?

He can always own his own platform and still use others'. Just the keep the pedantry going...

The original comic implies that abstaining from owning an iPhone is equivalent to not participating in society. Basically if your principles are so weak that you can't abstain from owning a luxury phone brand, which should take a literal bare minimum effort, then you don't really have these principles.

A Twitter account is not a requirement to participate in society either. You don't even have to build your own Twitter, there are a few open-source clones that can be self-hosted.

As a long-time holdout when it came to smartphones, and a big believer in things like personal privacy and having control of your own devices, I can't agree with that argument any more. Smartphones are ubiquitous, to the point where everyday public services do assume that almost everyone has one and there are significant or even prohibitive barriers for those who do not.

Sadly, the best you can hope to do now is to turn everything off that you don't want (which will probably mean fighting the defaults for at least an hour when you get a new device and still hoping you didn't miss something important) and stick to the essentials.

It shouldn't be this way. We have failed on this one. But you really can't avoid some of these modern technologies entirely now, unless you're willing to become some sort of modern-day hermit and not participate in a lot of normal parts of society.

It seems like Purism has a pretty decent user-benevolent smartphone in the works. If most services are available via website, it may be clunky but it'd work.

And many public services are offering APIs, so I can imagine their app store getting a pretty decent range of clients before long.

I was really hoping that one of the explicitly privacy-focused and user-controlled phones was going to hit the market before I gave in and bought, but sadly too many things were starting to get in the way and effectively forced my hand. At least for now, it's an Android/iOS duopoly for a lot of practical purposes.

Why would this person use Twitter, and why wouldn't the reasons he comes up with for using Twitter not also be valid for using Facebook or Medium as well?

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