Twitter and the void beyond

Some thoughts on Twitter. Perhaps I’ve not much to add beyond what others have said, but I want to say it anyway. (This was, after all, the point of Twitter.)

Twitter has been the most significant digital space of my life. I met my wife there. I met my community there. I made lifelong friends and a few mediocre enemies. I loved it so much I worked there. It was a mixed bag: pockets of excellent people stunted by woeful morale and exhausting leadership flux. The IPO was, I think, the reward these workers deserved for making Twitter a success despite everything.

And now, it belongs to one of the worst owners I could think of.

Everything we say on Twitter is now raw material for the world’s richest man to squeeze profit from. Every tweet is validation for his free-speech absolutism and teenage trolling, a vote for the weird-nerd Muskian cult.

I’m not going to leave entirely: there’s too much emotional geography there. Those walls hold memories. But I certainly won’t be around as much. I don’t think I’m going to Mastodon: from here, it looks like a nightmare. I will have to be on LinkedIn more, because I have a niche consulting business to run amid a grinding recession, and capitalism forces us to constantly pursue our own debasement.

Beyond that, I expect I’ll be screaming into the void on this here website, and hoping others see it somehow. We’ve always needed better indie-web connective infrastructure (readers solved only a marginal use-case); that need just became more urgent.

More than anything, though, I’ll just be elsewhere. I need to excise the social media brainworms, to unlearn the habit of thinking in short-form and seeking validation from numbers in blue dots. I hope to bump into you on those muddier roads.