💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 7-25.gmi captured on 2023-09-28 at 17:37:59. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Yesterday, completing what felt like a weekend whim by its owner, Twitter rebranded to X. I refuse to call the new service X, in the same way that the stadium the Blue Jays play at will always be the SkyDome, and not the Rogers Centre: the people in power can change an official name, but you don't have to go along with it. You can call things whatever you want.
Cool website you fucking idiot
A few months ago I said what I thought were my goodbyes, left the site, and dropped in once a week or so to check if I had any DMs. Invariably, I didn't. But something drew me back, and I found myself slotting in Twitter next to all the other ways I spent my time online.
The last few days the feeling on the site's changed again. I've said my goodbyes again, albeit in a loose way: simply saying I'm not going to Bluesky or Threads, that I'm easy enough to Google, that I'm if anything Very Online and if you want to find me, just type my name into a search engine. Search has gotten worse, but I'm still there to be found.
Bluesky is only 2.5x the size of Cohost?!
Though its interesting in terms of the conversation around what comes next that it's assumed it's either Bluesky or Threads. One of the people who runs Cohost mentioned that Bluesky was only 2.5x larger, and that's Dorsey's plaything aggressively courting Posters and creating the artificial scarcity of invite codes early on to make it someting that people thought they wanted. And I think it's worked - I've seen more and more people posting their Bluesky info, basically nobody posting Threads. But it's fascinating that the narrative has been about this Twitter replacement that just happens to have former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on its board, while other social networks, run by anticapitalists who're queer-friendly and run a place that keeps out TERFs and other types, don't ever seem to warrant a mention.
I don't think that's a coincidence. And I'm tired of being someone else's product. So you'll find me here and in other spaces run by good people. The way things used to be online, before we let the companies take hold.
Normally at this point in the morning I've been scrolling Twitter a bit. I checked notifications, that's it. Having a cup of strong coffee, need to do my Irish practice on Duolingo, and then I've got an hour or so before work. I'm in the middle of "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept", Elizabeth Smart's gutting long prose poem/loosely autobiographical work that I'm glad I found comparatively later in life, because if I had read this when I was 18, I probably would have set my life on fire in any number of ways.
As it is, it's enough to come back to her explosive prose every year and marvel that this was being written while Europe was under the existential threat of Nazism. ("Is maith liom an leabhar sin." - did I get that right?)
Every year I read John Thompson's "Stilt Jack" in the spring, and Smart in the summer. That draw of desperately tragic figures, the pull of acting on first wants, when one knows how ordinary their own life is. Will always be.