Elon Musk said he will charge all X/Twitter users a fee to be on the platform. He suggested that such a change would be necessary to deal with the problem of bots on the platform.
“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots," said Elon. I can’t believe that this is the only solution he can think of.
Dealing with bots would be Elon Musk’s responsibility, considering he’s the only one profiting significantly from X, not us. Elon Musk steals our data and censors each of our posts, now he even expects us to pay to clean up the mess he created.
Plus, the problems with X go beyond just bots. The algorithm and programming decisions are negatively impacting user experience and manipulating people’s minds.
We want a town square where everyone is free to have & voice an opinion. I do not believe we have to pay ”a small monthly payment” for such a place, especially in a country that should value these freedoms & suppressing ideas.
I mean, I already recommended firefish.social, but you are under no obligation to try it. My point is that your experience is very much not typical I think.
In any case, if you plunk “left leaning mastodon instances” into your search engine of choice that would probably work, but you could also try a popular instance which would address several of your concerns. If firefish doesn’t interest you with its various improvements to the UI, why not just go for the original and (I think) biggest - mastodon.social.
https://mastodon.social/auth/sign_up