Twitter and identi.ca

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 11:14:37 GMT

I'm thinking of leaving Twitter.

It's mainly because they force that damn t.co URL shortener on all links posted via the service. They don't do this for user convenience, because they even apply it to links that are already shortened by bit.ly or similar. No, they're doing it for analytics; they want to know what people are clicking on. And I'm damned if I'm going to give them that information. I wrote a Greasemonkey userscript that prevents my browser from going to t.co URLs that I click on the Twitter site, but it seems they still have some analytics that run when you click a link, separate from the t.co shortening. I still need to disable that, too.

(And yes, I know that I already give Google that information when I click on a result on searches. Or rather, I did; I just looked and found that it's trivial to stop the URL mangling that Google does when you click on a link, so I just wrote a Greasemonkey script to stop that, too. This also gives me the advantage that I will no longer bombard anybody with long Google URLs when I right-click a link in the results and copy it to my clipboard. But anyway, this is kinda beside the point.)

I would use https://identi.ca/ , but their Terms of Service state:

By submitting Content to Operator for inclusion on your Website, you grant all readers the right to use, re-use, modify and/or re-distribute the Content under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

I wouldn't have a problem with this if "Content" just meant the text, but if you look to see the definition of "Content", you find that it means anything covered by the action of "[making] (or [allowing] any third party to make) material available by means of the Website". In other words, if you link to a photo/fanfic/tune/etc. of yours via the site, whatever you submitted is then (assuming you have the rights to do so) released under the CC-BY license, because you made it available by means of the site.

I can't agree to that. If I submit any creative works to identi.ca, I don't to want to be forced to release it under a CC-BY license. So, I haven't signed up for it, much as I want to move away from Twitter.

By the way, the ToS are not shown to you during registration, or at least not on the first step. You do get a checkbox that you have to select to move forward, labelled "My text and files are available under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 except this private data: password, email address, IM address, and phone number.", but no direct link to the ToS. This makes it even worse; legally, there's nothing there to stop someone from interpreting it as "All your files are licensed under CC-BY, even if you didn't submit them to the site". Obviously, if it came to that then this would be legally unenforceable (and of course it's not what identi.ca are talking about anyway), but still, I have a mistrust of the legal system to get things right.

It's a shame that Twitter are driving me away, because I really like the service. >_< And identi.ca is the only alternative I know that's even remotely popular compared to Twitter...

comments

Sophie

Twitter and identi.ca