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Back in November, it seemed like every week there was another bad decision driving a nail into Twitter's coffin. $20 for Blue. Wait, no, $8, but only because of Elon Musk bartering with Stephen King or something? Letting the fash back on. Stupid fucking polls. Then, miraculously, somehow, the bloodletting stopped for a couple of months. I wouldn't say things stabilized, but the bleeding slowed, at least until a couple of days ago, when Twitter announced it was ending its free API, basically serving notice to the (huge) bot ecosystem that they were fucked, sorry, so long and thanks for all the fish!
Twitter to Remove Free API Because the Only People Left Are Bad Decision-Havers
I've assumed Twitter is on borrowed time for months, especially when its money-shedding owner is a dumb fucking idiot who can't log off. So I've been trying different things, within reason (ie, not Hive or whatever that was), and after a few months my current opinion is that:
Starting with Mastodon: I'd thought of trying it out for ages, but it seemed to be a few people talking back and forth on isolated servers. That's not totally true, but it's harder to find people (by design), it's harder to rack up Twitter-style engagement numbers (by design?), though on the whole, if Twitter would hurry up and collapse already, I think it would make a pretty reasonable Twitter alternative. No ads. Chronological timeline. Better filtering/blocking/muting options. It sure beats going back to Facebook.
I love cohost but it's going to fail. When I first signed up, in that burst of like 10-20000 users, there were a few others I knew from Twitter who came as well. We followed each other. Only two of us actually posted a thing. Three months later, I'm the only one still posting. And cohost makes discoverability very difficult: you can't global-text-search, you can only discover via tags, which I understand is something of a safety mechanism the devs have put in place, but if your site has relatively few users, and it's hard to find interesting people and content, well, what're you doing? I wanted to use it as a semi-private LJ, and I've kind of been doing that, but it's clear from a lot of what I'm seeing that it's most people's shiny new shitposting device.
I've found a few interesting people there, and followed them, but most don't follow back. And that's fine, but a little sad, because I'm trying to get back to meeting interesting people again, rather than flooding my brain with rage-chemicals as I read dunks and injustices on my timeline.
I'm finding cohost less and less compelling as time goes on, but I keep posting periodically, reminding myself it's there, hoping some update will bring it to the point where there's a diverse user base and more interesting stuff going on. Because right now, it feels like a really unpopular tumblr. I want it to be a little more like LJ.
So, finally, the last one; last two. Small web and gemini and the particular beauty of self-owned spaces. Discoverability in geminispace isn't great, but it's in some ways better than cohost. I can go to the big tildes, see user lists, check out their capsules. There are search engines; they're not great, but they're something. There are some hangouts. Gemini suffers from the same diversity problems as cohost (it feels like it's largely technologists), but it also feels a bit subversive. On the internet but off-web. If we've being honest, the worst people who've crossed your life are not going to find you here.
And, the small web. I started up another website, at neocities, a while back. I'm writing a lot there, as I am here; different themes and tone, but still writing. I don't know how long I'm going to carry that on for. To be honest, I never did before. I started journalling when I was 16 or 17 and did it seriously for a few years, and as a habit for well over a decade. Later I realized how vital the practice was, all the details I'd saved that felt maybe a bit mundane then but are wonderful to read now.
Maybe my journey back into life-writing will peter out. I hope not. But I've got some stuff going on the backburner here that's feeding my small web posts, and this feels like a period of sudden and unexpected creativity. It feels good. And if I'm going to spend time online, why not spend it well?