A Smaller Circle Is Not a Stronger One

Last week, a MacStories link turned up in my X timeline. There had not been one there since 2022, when MacStories stopped posting on the platform, along with many of the people I read, in the months after Elon Musk bought Twitter and began rearranging it into whatever it is now. He would later rename the platform X.

Federico Viticci and John Voorhees, who run the independent Apple and app site, explained the return ↗ on August 21. Many readers had never migrated off X. Google's increasing use of AI summaries was putting more pressure on the business. Other subscription services were competing for the same money as the MacStories membership program. Whatever X had become, part of the audience was still there.

The decision was also made without telling the rest of the team. Viticci and Voorhees acknowledged that this was wrong and apologized. An editor published a goodbye ↗ the same day, saying the choice to leave was his even though the circumstances leading to it weren't. The business pressures explain why MacStories wanted to return. They do not excuse how the people who worked there found out.

That should have been enough to argue about: a small independent publication under pressure, two owners making a bad internal decision, an apology, and at least one person deciding that the breach was serious enough to leave. Instead, the argument quickly widened until MacStories seemed to be standing in for X, Musk, and everything that has happened there since 2022.

Underneath the dispute was a question that will outlast it. When an institution is controlled by a bad person, what does participation in it mean? An owner can shape the place, profit from it, and use it to cause harm. Does everyone who remains inside become an extension of him too?

On Mastodon, some people treated the return as a broken promise. MacStories had left X when leaving felt like a collective project, then gone back after the project failed to carry everyone with it. For people who understood the original departure as a statement of shared values, the return felt less like a distribution decision and more like betrayal.

Others made an instrumental case. Posting on X gives the platform activity, attention, and legitimacy. It puts MacStories back inside an environment whose incentives may eventually shape the work itself. A publication goes where the audience is, then begins responding to what that audience rewards. That is a prediction about what the return might do, and it deserves to be taken seriously.

But much of the reaction went further. People announced that they were unfollowing or finished with MacStories altogether. The publication's return to X became evidence that it had crossed from one moral category into another. The distinction between posting on a platform and endorsing what its owner has done began to disappear.

Not everyone reacted that way. One person asked MacStories to keep posting to Mastodon and Bluesky rather than making X the only place to find its work. Viticci said that was the plan. Two days later, someone else asked why he had been active on X and quiet on Mastodon since. That was criticism with an object: keep showing up here too, and let us hold you to it.

I want the open web to win. I would rather publish somewhere I control, read people through feeds no company can take away, and find conversations that do not exist at the pleasure of a billionaire who can change the rules on a whim. The proprietary web concentrates too much power in too few hands, and some of the hands are plainly unfit for it. Musk rules X like a mad king.

The practical problem is that people are still there. Not only propagandists, grifters, bullies, and generated approximations of human beings. Good people are there too, doing good work and having interesting conversations. Some never left. Some left and came back. Some maintain an account because their livelihood depends on reaching people who did not follow the migration to somewhere better.

The reverse is true on the open web. It is full of generous people building things for reasons that have nothing to do with extracting another minute of attention. It also has cranks, bullies, petty tyrants, and people who discover that decentralization and federation give them more places from which to be cruel. An open protocol does not produce an open mind.

Nor does the absence of a platform owner make every corner of the open web a democracy. Mastodon has no Musk who can dictate the rules for the whole network, which is an enormous improvement. Individual servers still have owners and administrators. Communities still develop hierarchies, enforce norms, decide who belongs, and punish people who test the boundaries. Some of that work is necessary. None of it becomes democratic merely because the software can be forked.

The difference between the open and proprietary web matters. It matters enough to build for, publish for, and keep choosing even when the easier audience is somewhere else. It does not divide the people who use them into good and bad.

Henry Ford was an antisemite who used his wealth and influence to spread lies ↗. Ford Motor Company carries that history because institutions do not become innocent when the people who shaped them die. But Henry Ford did die, and the company continued. Other leaders made other choices. Generations of people worked there who had no part in his campaigns. Buying a Ford today is not commonly understood as an endorsement of its founder's politics.

Companies have afterlives. They survive founders, owners, executives, strategies, scandals, and sometimes the ideas they were built around. They change because companies are made of more than one person, even when one person has gathered an extraordinary amount of power inside them.

No owner or leader is permanent. Musk's control of X and influence over Tesla will end through death, sale, succession, or collapse. The companies may not survive that transition. If they do, they will change, just as every institution changes when the person at its center is gone. Their present belongs disproportionately to Musk. Their entire future does not.

That possibility does not absolve X of what it is now. Present ownership causes present harm, and participation gives a social platform some of the attention and material from which its value is made. Leaving is a legitimate response. So is staying to reach people, preserve relationships, earn a living, or continue a conversation that does not belong to the owner simply because it happens on his servers.

I am not defending X as an institution. I am defending the legitimacy of choosing to be there. Treating every participant as an extension of Musk grants him a more complete kind of ownership than the corporate paperwork does. It concedes that the people are his people, their conversations are his conversations, and the platform's future is his because its present happens to be.

America offers a more consequential version of the same distinction. Donald Trump returned to office after winning a majority of the Electoral College ↗ and more votes than any other candidate in 2024 ↗. That did not make every American an extension of him, but it did not leave any of us outside the consequences. His government acts in the country's name. Its decisions shape our lives and reach people far beyond our borders as expressions of American power. We are implicated in what our institutions do even when we oppose it, but we are not implicated equally, and we do not become identical to the person temporarily controlling them. The country is older than its president, larger than his politics, and responsible for surviving what he does with it.

The same tension exists on X at a smaller scale. Staying supplies the platform with attention, material, legitimacy, and value; it is not a morally neutral act. But implication is not endorsement. Musk has more direct control over X than Trump has over America, and X's users did not elect him. Citizenship, unlike using a website, is not voluntary. You cannot delete your America account and move your family to another country with anything like the ease of moving to another platform. That makes the choice to remain on X open to criticism. It still does not turn the work, relationships, or politics of everyone there into extensions of its owner.

MacStories belongs to this community. It has spent years covering independent developers, small software companies, personal publishing, automation, and the tools people use to make things of their own. Returning to X does not erase that work. It does not place MacStories on Musk's side of some clean line with the rest of us safely opposite him.

Treating it that way may feel like defending the boundary of the open web. I think it weakens the thing it means to protect. If participation requires leaving every proprietary platform first, then the open web becomes a refuge for people who have already arrived rather than an alternative capable of reaching anyone else. The people with one foot outside become suspects precisely when they are most useful as a bridge.

Manton Reece made a version of this case ↗. Growing the indie web means welcoming people who are also somewhere else. His suggestion was practical: post to X if that is where some readers are, but mirror the work to a place you own. Give people a route out instead of requiring them to have completed the journey before they count.

The angriest responses did the opposite. They took anger properly aimed at Musk, X, and the harm the platform has enabled and cast MacStories inside the same shadow. A small publication making a business decision under pressure became an acceptable substitute for the people who made the environment frightening. MacStories was close enough to reach, so the anger landed there.

That is the part that feels punitive. Not criticism, cancellation, or the decision to stop reading; people are allowed to spend their attention and money wherever they choose. The punitive turn is the public conversion of disappointment into a verdict, the insistence that returning to a website says everything necessary about the people who returned. X has no monopoly on that behavior. This incident is evidence that the open web does not either.

There is nothing fascist about leaving X, refusing to support someone who returns, or drawing a boundary around a community. Fascism is a political project, not a synonym for exclusion. But if the purpose behind leaving is resistance to authoritarianism, the tactic can still make authoritarian politics easier or harder to resist. A coalition that turns imperfect allies into enemies, abandons contested spaces, and treats contact as contamination may preserve its moral clarity while surrendering its ability to persuade anyone outside it. The coalition gets smaller. The people who might have connected it to somewhere else learn to keep their distance. The shared space loses dissenting voices while the worst people remain.

That does not make every bridge worth keeping. Boundaries protect vulnerable people. Leaving can deny attention, money, and legitimacy to a harmful institution. A coalition that accepts any conduct in the name of staying large is not a coalition; it is an audience. The question is which boundary helps accomplish the work, and whether posting on X is the right place to draw it.

MacStories was not recruiting people into Musk's politics. It returned because readers were there and the business was under pressure. Turning MacStories into an enemy does not isolate Musk from anyone he needs. It isolates the open web from people MacStories might have helped it reach. This is a time to build allies and bridges broad enough to matter, not to mistake a smaller circle for a stronger one.

What did the people turning on MacStories want to happen next?

If the goal was to keep MacStories active on the open web, ask for that and notice whether it happens. If the goal was to persuade it to leave X again, name the exit condition: what would bring MacStories back into good standing? If the goal was deterrence, making an example of MacStories may cause the next independent publication to think twice. It may also teach that publication to keep its distance from a community ready to discard it.

If there was no goal, that is an answer too. Sometimes a door closes because someone no longer wants what is on the other side. Nobody owes MacStories a subscription, a follow, or forgiveness. But a personal boundary does not need a public campaign, and a verdict does not become more principled as more people gather to deliver it.

The case against X is long and well documented ↗, and the man who controls it has done horrible things with it. That is exactly why the distinction matters. MacStories is not X. Posting there is not owning it, governing it, or endorsing everything it contains. Collapsing those differences does not make the case against X stronger. It only gives the anger a nearer target.

I hope some of the people who chose that target reconsider. Not their disgust with X, and not the standards they want the open web to hold. I hope they see that those standards can be defended without turning them against people who have spent years helping build the community they want to protect. We gain nothing by making MacStories an exile. We might gain something by keeping it close enough to hear us. The open web will not become stronger by getting smaller.