So Twitter got bought – like, actually got bought – and people are pissed. And rightfully so. Musk seems like either a lunatic or completely in over his head but either way, the outcome is the same – people are bailing. It’s kind of a shame, because Twitter is the only social network I ever cared about over the long term. Every time I notice that my account has been active since November of 2007, it catches me off-guard a bit. Think about what’s happened in your life over the past 15 years. Like, actually think about it.
Anyway, it seems like people are trying to form new networks elsewhere. A bunch of people are moving to Mastodon, but that seems like that’s way too fiddly to work for most peoples’ needs. And that was always the biggest value of Twitter; people were accessible and it was totally frictionless to use. I’m skeptical that people are going to leave in meaningful numbers, but I’ll be sad if it really does go that way. I’ve made a lot of friends there over time, and the instant nature of it is really compelling.
One possible upside is that people seem to have a renewed interest in blogging. I’ve been a huge fan of feed readers since way before Twitter, but it’s been sort of a ghost town for years. But over the past couple of weeks, I’ve noticed it’s been so much busier and I kinda dig it. It feels old school. It makes me realize how nice long-form writing can be. Tweet threads and screen-shotted notes have been a means-to-an-end sort of hack all along and I won’t miss them.
Anyway, I’m writing here for the first time in ages. I have no idea if it’ll stick. Habits are a hard thing to break and even harder to make, so who knows?