What To Do About Twitter?
I have a standard footer for this blog. My new post script adds it to the file first thing. You can see it below, but it basically asserts that Twitter is the comments section of this blog.
I wrote that when smart people I sometimes disagreed with but wanted a usable service were in charge of people. This is no longer true. I oscillate between “Twitter is being destroyed” and “Twitter is being Gab-ified”, but in a practical sense, the two are the same. If Twitter is made into Gab, nobody with any sense will use it, and the value of having discussions about my content there will decrease.
Beyond that, Twitter was my chat app of choice. That is, for many people I interact with, given the choice between going into (Google Chat, Facebook Messenger, IRC, SMS, etc) or sending them a public tweet, I would often just tweet at them. It’s my default method of checking with friends, finding out what’s going on in the world and in my city, etc. I checked Facebook just after Thanksgiving and I don’t expect to do so again until February, but Twitter and Tweetdeck were always-on things for a while. Twitter was my first-pass helpdesk for services I use and for the programming languages I write in. And a lot more. I guess my biggest love-letter to what Twitter was is this piece on #FollowFriday and the Emergent Behavior of #FakeNerdFightFriday, and today, not too long before I started writing this, I shut it down. I’ll still save the tweets I write and the tweets I like, but I will no longer list my most-favorited accounts on Twitter.
I am being pressured to do so on Mastodon. I just might. Each social network has preferred behaviors, and I feel better automating such stuff on Mastondon than I would Instagram or TikTok. (I’m mostly read-only on Instagram and very read-only for TikTok. I won’t tell you my accounts there.) I might. I don’t know that the same GIF madness that made Fridays fun will be reborn in the Fediverse.
I can’t say at this point that I will never tweet again, but it is increasingly becoming the dead-mall of social networks. I’m slowly learning how to make Mastodon my web home, and there I am currently @jacobydave@mastodon.xyz. Soon I will elevate that in my footer and remove the Twitter link, I think. Until then…