It is 1st January 2024, and Meta has shocked the world by introducing a new policy where they will literally murder all of their users using a big gun if they don’t delete their Facebook, Instagram and Threads accounts by the end of the year.
Luckily, the Fediverse has an answer!
It’s a new decentralised social network called 4skin, and its logo is a giant dick with a smiley face. Half of its homepage (which is on Github) is about its specific choice of open source licence (“it’s a hybrid between CC-BY-SA, the Microsoft Public Licence and MIT that we call CLIT”). The other half is about how Meta is bad but doesn’t mention the “will literally murder you” thing; instead it focuses on the idea that if you use Facebook you may, on occasion, see an advert that relates to something you posted about two weeks ago, and how this is a completely unconscionable intrusion of your privacy.
To enforce decentralisation, the primary feature on any Facebook users’ minds, 4skin instances (called “pubes” in 4skin parlance) have a strict one user per instance limit. The 4skin instance software only runs on Amigas that run GNU/Hurd, and the software is distributed solely via Docker. GNU/Hurd doesn’t run on Amigas and Docker doesn’t exist for GNU/Hurd yet, and if the 4skin server detects that you’ve used a binary package to install either of them it will self-destruct out of sheer ideological disgust, so you’ll need to port both GNU/Hurd to the Amiga and Docker to Hurd by hand if you want to use 4skin.
Anyone joining from Facebook is subject to a harsh hazing ritual in which they must choose and draw a fursona, publicly atone for ever having used a Meta product in the first place and also install Arch Linux. The 4skin web interface can be used to open a remote shell onto your system*, while the official mobile app has a “Post” button which does not post the text you input but instead sends nudes to your boss, posts your personal information on KiwiFarms and then makes your phone explode.
Even if you had a hope of finding your friends on their various different instances, which you don’t, you don’t need them. You have 4skin now and that makes you morally superior. Friends are for the weak. Only the worst social media platforms allow you to find and talk to people, and 4skin is the best.
But it doesn’t really matter that the app doesn’t work or that you can’t find your friends or that you had to locate and buy one of the remaining seven Amigas in the world that don’t have blown capacitors, because you’ll have been defederated (“circumcised” in 4skin parlance, and reported via the #cockblock tag) in the first five minutes of usage anyway for not putting a content warning on a picture of a tree you uploaded because someone’s dad might have died from being pushed out of a tree (by them) and they could have spontaneously combusted from the sheer anguish and that would be entirely your fault if it had happened but it didn’t but you’ve been defederated/”circumcised” anyway so tough shit you are about the same as a literal Nazi.
Also, 4skin has lots of Nazis.
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It’s the 1st January 2025 and all of Facebook’s billions of users have been shot to death with Meta’s big Internet gun. Fediverse advocates are baffled as to why people stuck with being literally murdered instead of giving 4skin a shot, but they’re sure that the new decentralised Netflix that has nothing to watch except amateur foot fetish pornography will be the next big thing now that Netflix has threatened to slam an asteroid into the earth if they don’t reach exactly zero subscribers in the next four months.
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