Over the past few months I've been increasingly disillusioned with British government policy and have taken to Twitter to contribute to the discourse there. I don't have a high follower count and don't care for one - but I did feel my views were suddenly being heard. It felt nice to feel 'not alone' with quite a few tweets getting decent numbers of likes and retweets.

Most of my tweets objected to government policy in certain areas and often linked to news articles contradicting official narratives. Some of my tweets were lightly humorous. I took care to avoid anything that may be illegal, hateful, distasteful, etc.

Then, a few days ago, I suddenly noticed my tweets and tweet replies were barely getting any views at all. And no likes at all. I suspected something was amiss. I checked Twitter without being logged in only to find my tweet replies had vanished from general view and my hashtags weren't even appearing in the 'Latest' section of Twitter. Everything I'd ever posted, hidden from general view.

In a recent blog post Twitter posted here https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2023/freedom-of-speech-not-reach-an-update-on-our-enforcement-philosophy about their 'Freedom of Speech, Not Reach' policy they go on to highlight how they might mark tweets with limited visibility but in my case my tweet replies are no longer shown at all, not even in the 'Show additional replies, including those that may contain offensive content' section. That is complete censorship with no warning that I'd ever done anything wrong. The blog post even says 'Authors will be able to submit feedback on the label if they think we incorrectly limited their Tweet’s visibility.' which isn't true in my case because there's absolutely no such notice on any of my tweets.

I know Twitter under Elon doesn't have a good rep. around here and perhaps I was wrong to give it a shot. But I am an advocate of free speech (not absolutely free speech, but I do believe its essential to be call out problems in society and government especially when there is a general clamp down on things such as protesting peacefully). So now as a disillusioned ex-Twitter blue subscriber (who's asked for a refund) I'm left reflecting...

My view is that quietly silencing views is quite far from any definition of transparency I recognise. And I would still like to have a voice, so more than ever I believe there should be an alternative to Twitter. So my question is, (aside from Mastodon which seems quite complicated), what alternatives are there? Who is building solutions in this space?