THE MOST VICIOUS ART CRITICS USUALLY CAN'T PAINT

My experience has been that the Minds founders and staff respond to reasoned, courteous requests better than they respond to being screamed at and denounced. (Go figure.) I've been here on Minds for three years watching Bill and John Ottman and Mark Harding, people who started with a pure ideal -- of an open source, free speech site that wouldn't spy on or sell its users, one that in fact would pay for contributions -- fight hard for their dream as they hit the Facebook/Google monopoly and harsh financial and legal realities. 

With COO Jack Ottman and a growing crew of engineers, the founders have survived and kept an amazing number of Minds' parts intact, expanding under pressure. Are there problems, failures, "features" that I could do without? Yeah. Have the developers altered course in high seas? Sure and I've been tracking those changes. Do they occasionally lose their cool and shake their fists at the monopolies that surround them, posturing, blustering, then have to back off to a more realistic stance? Yes. Their conceptual reach is greater than their practical grasp, but that is not only a complaint but a tribute to their conceptual reach. 

So put your code where your mouth is. Minds is, ultimately, an open source site. That means among other things that anyone is welcome to "fork", to start at the point where they think that Minds veered off course, and, building on top of Minds' years of hard work and risk, create a new social media site. So -- first thanking everyone who is asking questions and reporting problems, bowing to those amazing users who offer reasonable solutions and/or help others learn -- I challenge those who instead or in addition constantly denounce Minds' liver, calling the founders every name in the book, doing all they can to undermine support for the site:

If you're so right, show us. Fork the Minds site and find constant funding for your fork, while actively attracting influencers, staving off trolls and spambots, dealing with legal challenges and totalitarian dictatorships, and mediating screaming bouts between users, while offering mobile service in the face of a cellphone monopoly whose denials of access are backed by Paypal, Mastercard and Visa. Show the rest of us how it is properly done. 

Meanwhile, my hat's off to the small, determined, pioneering Minds crew and to those users who are more-or-less cheerfully building Minds with them. If saying that makes me in the eyes of the permanently pissed-off a "fucking fool", a "candy-assed shill", yada, yada, so be it. I do note that the most vicious art critics can't paint. Sabre-tongued literary critics typically cannot write their way out of a paper bag...