Twitter hacked: Why we need decentralized social media

Yesterday, Twitter was hacked and hundreds of high profile Twitter accounts such as Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk and many crypto-related Twitter accounts were hacked and the hacked accounts all tweeting giveaway scams where you send in Bitcoin and they send out double the amount. The scammers were able to amass $100,000 worth of BTC.

This incident is a warning to never store sensitive information in your DMs. Such is a problem with centralized internet services like Twitter, Facebook and Google. I don’t think no one can be able to twart hacking attacks forever, unless of course if you keep your data offline. But that is impossible in the connected world we live in now.

So I was thinking about a decentralized version of Twitter. I knew of Mastodon and many former Indian Twitter users have already migrated to it. This post by Kev Quirk explains how Mastodon works in a more understandable way - learning about decentralized things is hard to grasp at first. But people will be forced to learn as the security of centralized services becomes more weak.

These group of people whom believe in taking back control of one’s own online presence call it “Indiewebbing your content.” My suggestion to Amit Gawande is to not use Wordpress at all because your data is still hosted in your webhosting. You might get caught with your pants down in between backups. The best solution is static webpages like Github pages using Jekyll. This site is one example and all I need to do is upload a copy to Github and it’s published.