witter is not a site that I like. Honestly, I don’t! In fact, I think it is getting worse over time. In 2016 it shadowbanned me a lot of times and I receive plenty of abuse there. I now identify as living in the North Pole to avoid messages like “you’re English, so…” (method of shooting the messenger). I only very reluctantly joined Twitter after I had begun participating in identi.ca for the purpose of posting Free software news. Prior to that I preferred just blogging, relying on people who subscribe to RSS feeds to find my writings. At the time there was also Digg.com, which I’m proud to say I was ranked 17^th on (they had millions of users at the time). Having taken a quick look at my Twitter account last night, I noticed that a milestone is approached and will have been reached by weeks’s end. I am nowhere near the most prolific users (like 38 million tweets for this Japanese account; see the out-of-date chart below), but quantity was never my goal and besides, as many people know, I primarily post in Diaspora these days, with posts being exported from there to Twitter. I vastly favour these Freedom/Free software-centric communities (like identi.ca at the time and nowadays GNU Social, Diaspora etc.) and I humbly think that all this social control media phenomenon is a waste of human productivity and a threat to real, in-depth, fact-checked journalism. But no single person can tell the world how to use the Internet and how to communicate; if social control media is what’s “normal” and “necessary” now (adapting to the so-called ‘market’), then so be it.

T IS now pretty much confirmed that GitHub has sold out to help Microsoft cause further damage to Free software (FOSS). In a nutshell, Microsoft’s motivation is shallow enough to see:

1. Microsoft wants to pretend FOSS was never the competition (this causes confusion which serves Microsoft’s bottom line)
2. Microsoft will lie to officials who sign contracts about being an “open source company” (all of Microsoft’s core software remains proprietary with malicious features like surveillance and DRM)
3. Buying out, controlling the competition
4. Patent blackmail, bribery and other attacks on FOSS carry on while Microsoft pretends that all is well (“we come in peace”)

So it’s time to devalue GitHub; it won’t make it any cheaper for Microsoft to buy at this stage (they agreed on the price).

If you have substantial work on the site, migrate away. Here, for example, is how to import your project from GitHub to GitLab.

Then it’s time to delete.

Log in, then enter the following address: https://github.com/settings/admin

Follow these steps:

They then send out an E-mail:

Subject: [GitHub] Account deletion

This email is to confirm that you’ve deleted your account ‘schestowitz’ from GitHub. Your repositories and content have been deleted from the system. If you were on a paid plan, you will not be billed again. We’re sorry to see you go. You can reply directly to this email if you have any questions or feedback, we’d love to hear from you.

Tell others to do the same thing. I will soon urge my wife (when she wakes up) to do the same. Only fools (not her) believe lies like “Microsoft loves Linux”.