Like a lot of other folk (“all the cool kids are doing it!”), I’m suspending use of Twitter for the indefinite future. I’ve already been cutting back substantially the last month or so, but between the likelihood that the system is going to crash and burn technologically, if not socially, and that most of the key folk I followed on Twitter have departed — well, there are not much reason to be here, and many reasons not to be.
So my @Three_Star_Dave Twitter account, and the automatic quotation tweets to @WISTquotes will go silent unless things substantially change on Twitter. That’s unfortunate, because Twitter (while always having had problems) has been an amazing global resource, and an avenue to contact people in an remarkable array of walks of life. It’s been a precious news and communication channel in a way I think we haven’t realized. I’ve learned a ton there, and stayed in touch with a lot of people there. It wasn’t as satisfying as my previous social media community on Google+, but it had many great moments.
But the onset of Elon Musk — who I’m convinced got sucked into taking over Twitter in as inadvertent and self-inflicted a fashion as Donald Trump turned a publicity stunt into an unexpected term in the White House — has ruined the place for me. The growing, free-wheeling hatred and deplorable culture that Musk is so amused by (and that he is encouraging so as to drive up numbers and sell lots of advertising) is too reprehensible for me to support by even my small sliver of traffic.
A number of thoughtful people have suggested continuing to fight the good fight there. Don’t give up. Don’t let the bastards win. And there’s something to be said for that. But as a tactic it assumes that actually being there can make a difference, and that it isn’t actually hurting the cause by keeping up the numbers Elon keeps waving at advertisers to bring them back.
It’s still a legit tactic. But not one for me.
So … where to now?
My own blog here has lain relatively fallow for a while, except when I choose to make long-form writing stuff (usually reviews). I have utterly no desire (still) for Facebook — if Twitter is turning Chaotic Evil, FB has for a long time been the social media face of Lawful Evil (as a company).
Instead, for the last few weeks I’ve been using Mastodon. It’s a marginally clunkier version of Twitter, stylistically, but its diverse federated nature means it’s less vulnerable to take-overs like Elon’s, and elements of its design — most particularly, a lack of “algorithm” to drive the most infurating info directly into your face — make for an experience much more pleasant, and a culture that’s a heck of a lot more civil (in my experience) and less doomscrolling than Twitter has been for a long while.
It’s not perfect, by any means, but it’s pretty decent. As a small pond, still, I’m getting a lot more engagement from others than I have on the birdsite. And a lot of the voices I was most interested in following on Twitter have shifted full- or part-time to Mastodon.
I’m not deleting my old Twitter accounts — at least not yet. I may still poke my head over to see what’s going on (or to steal some material). But going forward, my former Twitter @three_star_dave sort of content can be found at https://mstdn.social/@three_star_dave, and my WIST stuff is being rebroadcast to https://zirk.us/@WISTquotes. Running on different instances means I can keep both accounts open in my browser, which is handy.
And I’ve figured out a decent RSS feed of the Mastodon stuff in the right margin of my blog here, too. So … commitment!
Hope to see you there.
