Twitter/X is now banned in Venezuela for the next 10 days on orders of President Nicolás Maduro, who accuses Elon Musk of promoting violence and fascism in t...
A) because Venezuela didn’t start this before the Bad Apps got entrenched, and B) because Venezuela has about the same population as just Shanghai alone.
I’m not following why either of these things prevent it. The entire point of throttling the service is so that it degrades it so much that people migrate to your alternative. This is precisely what Russia is doing to replace youtube with a domestically operated version. Yes Russia is much larger but this doesn’t change much, smaller country will have smaller running costs to run the service.
The timing because all these blocks can be trivially VPN’d around by anyone who cares to, even China’s. But most Chinese people don’t bother because by the time the bad apps took over the world China already had its alternatives up and running. And the size because social media, especially the mega world eating social media like Twitter and the Facebook properties like Whatsapp, are all about the network effect. All the reasons nobody gives a shit about Bluesky or Mastodon would go tenfold, a hundredfold, as much for a Venezuela-only Twitter competitor.
For that to really succeed I think you’d need the size and planning of China.
Why? There’s no need for it to be international. Twitter for Venezuelans run by a Venezuelan company would be fine.
A) because Venezuela didn’t start this before the Bad Apps got entrenched, and B) because Venezuela has about the same population as just Shanghai alone.
I’m not following why either of these things prevent it. The entire point of throttling the service is so that it degrades it so much that people migrate to your alternative. This is precisely what Russia is doing to replace youtube with a domestically operated version. Yes Russia is much larger but this doesn’t change much, smaller country will have smaller running costs to run the service.
The timing because all these blocks can be trivially VPN’d around by anyone who cares to, even China’s. But most Chinese people don’t bother because by the time the bad apps took over the world China already had its alternatives up and running. And the size because social media, especially the mega world eating social media like Twitter and the Facebook properties like Whatsapp, are all about the network effect. All the reasons nobody gives a shit about Bluesky or Mastodon would go tenfold, a hundredfold, as much for a Venezuela-only Twitter competitor.