It really is time to leave Twitter (and other centralized social media)

Dan Gillmor at Techdirt wrote a very thoughtful essay on why journalists in particular needed to abandon Twitter. I'd recommend reading the post and completely ignoring the comments. Those are a shit show. Twitter is a special case at the moment simply because it is now owned and operated by a man who displays the symptoms of several personality disorders and who will suspend accounts, including those of municipal public services, on a whim. That is just not a sustainable situation. 

His primary point throughout is that Twitter's users need to exit in an orderly manner. That means having presences on platforms that are far less toxic, use those regularly, and then use Twitter more or less as a friendly reminder that a lot of their real action is elsewhere, and to go there if they don't want to miss out. Gillmor is very critical of journalists and most news media corporations. In the case of Twitter, Elon Musk is essentially naming the tune, and the media corporations and most journalists simply dance. It's hard to stop dancing, say "I hate this tune" and walk while flipping the bird on the way out. Doing so means meandering into the unknown, and that can be scary. Maybe all those wonderful monetized clicks go away. There is no guarantee that one will have the same following as before. But if Twitter implodes, and you're trying to escape on one of the last helicopters on the rooftop, you're in an even worse spot.

He has some very practical ideas for journalists and media organizations leaving Twitter for Mastodon. One is certainly to look for servers (known as instances) on Mastodon geared toward journalists and join one of those instances. If that doesn't work out, migrating to a different instance (and maintaining your followers) is not hard. Better yet, news media organizations could simply create their own instances. Smaller organizations may or may not have some spare coin to start a server, but surely the legacy media corporations have plenty of coin to spare, along with the tech people who can make it work. So, basically, do that bit of legwork while keeping a foot in the door at Twitter until it no longer makes sense to do so. 

As for those of us who are just regular end users? I'm back to personal/political blogging for the first time in a bit (aside from a bit I do for Progress Pond under a pseudonym). Why? Because even if the blog in question is itself owned by a large conglomerate, I don't have to worry about being cancelled because some entitled narcissist thought I said mean things about him. I set up a Mastodon account late October last year. I log on daily and post and boost others' posts daily. I committed to posting a nightly series of Oblique Strategies. It wasn't even all that hard to get set up. I found an instance that was intuitive to me. I wanted one that welcomed users who were seeking a general purpose server. In my case, my interests are eclectic, and so I needed a server that would easily indulge that. I still have my Twitter account. I log on enough more to remind people who still follow me there, and whom I care about, that I'm really somewhere else now. Want to know where my head is at? Want to interact still like we used to? Here's where to find me. I'll toss in a couple shitposts at Twitter to let folks know I am alive. But that's it. I've had a Facebook profile since around 2006 (I think). Someone at the university where I worked sent me an invite and I created an account. I now mostly shitpost there. I have had an Instagram account for a while, and I used to display some of my photography there. I haven't been active on that account since around the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, and that was to boost a couple video artists who were chronicling the early days of that awful invasion. Regardless, I have developed a deep distrust of anything owned by Meta, as it is now known. For me, I need to know that I can speak freely, that the structure is ideally decentralized (think about what Usenet was like), and where I don't have to deal with algorithms or targeted ads. I have no use for Russian troll farms to feed me disinformation. 

The vibe of online life for me is slower, calmer. I like that. There were things about Twitter that I liked, but there were always things about Twitter that annoyed me. I will log on to check in on some friends who just can't seem to take the leap to something different. And yes, that something different will not be perfect. Whenever there is a mass migration from Twitter to Mastodon, the servers slow down a lot. Then they go back to normal once server owners do the work they need to do. The online culture seems to emphasize hashtags and content warnings to a degree I find excessive. Then again, I'm the one crashing someone else's party. It's best to soak in what the online culture is about and adapt. In the meantime, I am meeting some new people and finding some familiar people. It's a different experience, but in a good way. 

If you're familiar with The Books of Bokonon from Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, you know what a karass is. It's a group of people you stumble upon seemingly at random. Karasses wax and wane. In other words, the social forces that bring us together are also the same forces that will tear us apart. If we're meant to stick together for a while longer, swell. If not, it was wonderful while it lasted. That seems to be a basic Bokononist mindset. In a sense, it also seems to be a nod to Stoicism. When the circumstances at Twitter became untenable for me, I knew that I was about to lose touch with some people, but also be put in touch with new people. One karass wanes as another karass waxes. And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut might say. 

The main thing for anyone still harboring any illusions that the days of Internet 2.0 will continue indefinitely is to accept that was not an option. It was going to fall apart like everything else we do as humans. Let's lighten up. Let's accept that change is inevitable, and let's make sure we're ready for the changes that are happening as we speak.