Honeypot pinch
One way to discover identity of social media account people is by their political leaning. "The right" got chased off most social media platforms so Trump helped draw in the crowd to make Truth Social. Now "the left" is being enticed to move from Twitter to several Twitter-like platforms and especially BlueSky Social (or bsky). Furries who left Facebook because of the real name policy wouldn't trust or even be able to go to Threads (or Instagram but Threads is just Instagram in disguise). Because of this, both furries and artists need a non-META platform (not Facebook, not Instagram, not Threads) so bsky is a natural choice. The anti-Elon-Musk crowd came along for the ride. Now Elon suggested Truth Social might merge with Twitter/X. I suspect bsky which was set up by Elon's friends, former investors in the pre-Elon-purchase Twitter, and shady USA government-aligned organizations, may be specifically made to attract the people who don't trust the former Twitter investors (namely Saudi and UAE oligarchs). There were several reasons for me to decide to not create new social media accounts back when Facebook started detecting my identity via Microsoft log in info, public library account, and credit card use online while logged in to Google. To prepare for an eventual boot from Facebook due to never revealing true identity, I erased all old posts and maxed-out my friend list (curiously capped at 5000 which is identical to the 5000 max at Twitter and Google+ ). Trying to stop shadowbans on Twitter, I read that some people cured their ban by deleting the list of topics the Twitter uses to find stuff for your "feed" algorithm. I tried depopulating this list but many topics refused to be actually be deleted (click the check box to select then press the "delete" icon... Refresh the page and these topics return to the list). After a week of effort, I finally got rid of old topics and only seen topics related to recent likes and shares. It didn't fix the shadowban. The only cure for shadowbans that worked for me was blocking any shady accounts who DMed me (DM=direct message chat system in Twitter). The changes to the block system on Twitter started the first wave of Twitter people moving to bsky so I thought I would try unblocking everyone and the shadowban remained off. The next waves of migration to bsky were all connected with the relationship between Elon and Trump with the election win being the biggest and Elon's approval to head his DOGE idea: Department Of Government Efficiency being the second biggest wave... But a big enough wave that the Google app store ranked bsky app as 19th most popular and X(Twitter) app as 20th. I heard lots of lies about this of course with "main stream media" suggesting bsky was more active than X... Nope... bsky never got on the 50 top Social media platforms list but X was always in the top 20 and some lists, in the top 10 (usually 8th or 9th place). Staying neutral used to be easier because i had enough Elon fans on both left and right on my friend list and lots of furry artists and animal fans who don't live in the USA so don't fit in the left-right spectrum (especially Asian countries). Without the activity of the anti-Elon furries and animal fans, the activity is decidedly heavy on "the right" or Chinese language animal fans. Note that many of the first Twitter accounts I loved that left Twitter altogether were mostly animal fans with the reasoning being that Twitter was becoming to accepting of "the right" back when accounts that were banned from Twitter were allowed back. Through all of this, I rarely find anyone who is in the anti-authoritarian political stance that used to be the majority of the political accounts that followed me... Likely due to starting my Twitter activity when kicked off Facebook and Elon suggesting he might buy Twitter (I was avoiding Twitter then because of Saudi ownership levels being high) so I just followed every account Elon followed and later, followed everyone that Elon's active Twitter interaction accounts followed. When I hit my 5000 follow limit, I deleted any of those who didn't follow back but still have a lot of pro-Elon accounts who followed back. Now a lot of them turned anti-Elon adding to the non-artist accounts going to bsky. Conclusion: Truth Social, Mastodon, Threads, and bsky are likely "honeypots" to figure out the political leanings of people so I was good with my decision to not start new social media accounts when booted from Facebook. A "honeypot" in computer security terms is something in the system that looks important to attract the hacker on purpose to identify internal system activity that shouldn't be happening via normal users of the system. This adds to my long list of reasons/design considerations for making my own social media platform software... Using such a system shouldn't be useful to define the user identity or intended activity. Security-minded stuff is a common honeypot such as: buying with crypto... Are you avoiding taxes or doing something illegal? Using a VPN... Are you doing something illegal or doing foreign interference in elections? Got big locks on your garage... You might be storing something valuable in it. This adds to my idea of using a chat format to access social media platforms instead of the other way around (many people use "facetime" app instead of Facebook itself just to access Facebook's chat system)... Twitter now has 3 systems: microblogging, DMs, "Spaces"... that could be replaced with the live "spaces" as the default and the "static" content brought into the "room". This provides a user interface that is completely erased when the "room" is closed or vacated.