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Like a lot of people on Twitter at the time, I watched the transfer of ownership to Elon Musk play out like two aircraft carriers on an unalterable collision course. He made a crazy offer for $44B, which they said they'd accept; then he said was was just a joke, lol and lmao; then they dragged it to court; and then, likely knowing there was no way he'd win, he gave in.
It played out about as I expected, both faster and slower. He introduced blue checks for whoever wanted to pay $8, had their replies shown before those who didn't pay. There's a lot of other awful things he did - anti-semitic comments, unbanning an account that posted CSE, recommending anti-semitic and disinformation-posting accounts during the recent events between Israel and Hamas - but it feels like the decisions around paid accounts are what's truly broken the site. And if the basic feel or vibe was ruined quickly, people have held on a lot longer than I expected. I have mutuals I haven't talked to in half a year just continuing to post like nothing's going on. I'm impressed with their tenacity, if not their morals. The last year has been an increasing show of what people won't do.
Late 2022, around October when he started taking over, a lot of people started investigating alternatives. I was one of those people. I've been online for coming up on thirty years. I didn't want to leave Twitter, but I didn't see it getting any better, either. And I was in a position I think a lot of people were in: Twitter was my #1, so to speak; I was elsewhere, but certainly not actively. I have Facebook and Instagram, but never use them; they're sort of a honeypot so that people from my past I'm not particularly interested in talking to can find me, and add me, and then continue to not talk to me. People who want to talk to me know how to get ahold of me.
I got into Twitter late in 2016 as a way of doing a little promotion for my big software project, but then I started following a bunch of writing organizations, and saw a call for submissions, and for the first time in a decade, after agonizing for a couple of weeks, submitted a few poems. One of them was accepted. I was finally published. I could take off the "aspiring" from "aspiring poet", replace it with "emerging". In the subsequent years, I'd publish a lot more. It wasn't just because of Twitter, but if we're being honest, Twitter was the strike paper that let me move fully into a version of myself I'd always wanted to be.
That sort of writing community was something I'd never found on other social networks, nothing that big, with such a variety of writers. I'd found writing forums in the old days of the web, of course. But they weren't full of occasional published poets, tenured professors, Pulitzer winners. Twitter's poetry community was representative. And it hooked me, and so I was on Twitter for years, chatting with people, posting dumb jokes (though no "she x on my y till I z", thankfully), and finding new places to submit my work. Life was good?
Life was good. But then Musk bought Twitter, and it went to shit; and he renamed it X, and I still won't call it that, because it's fucking stupid, like him, and because people who aren't terminally online won't know what X is. But even before I quit completely, last July, before I tried to quit the first time, in late April, I had a sense that all this was ending. It was something I should have known from my BBS days, from my forum days: no community is forever. You join, you have a good time, and in the back of your mind, you expect it to go away. Because it will, eventually go away.
I'd held of these feelings with Twitter because it felt resilient, maybe invincible, under its dull, corporate ownership. But Musk changed that. Musk jolted me back several decades to when I'd expect a forum to last six months, a year, where if it lasted three or four, that was exceptional and something to celebrate. And last October, I started taking stock of my options.
First, there were the big ones, immediately eliminated:
Then there were others, which I didn't try, and which I side-eyed:
Plus others I can't even remember. People were trying anything. Nothing took off because there wasn't that collective decision to leave en masse, and the collective decision didn't happen because there wasn't a single, compelling, and complete option available at once.
Watching Twitter collapse due to a feckless admin with terrible ideas and who fired almost everybody at the company was at times both fascinating and repellant, reminding me that ownership matters, that resilience matters, community matters. It's not enough just to have a site, to have some people. Where's it all going to be in five years' time? Ten?
Like a lot of people, I've soured on corporate-owned social media. It's free, but it's not: you're tracked, your data is parcelled up and sold. So I started looking at other options, too:
Okay - now we're getting somewhere. I made a cohost account last October, and a few people from Twitter followed me there as well. Within a couple of weeks, I was the only one there. Cohost works by letting you search and bookmark hashtags, follow people. It lets you see who follows you, but you don't see a follower count. While you can search hashtags, you can't do a general text-in-post search. Again, privacy. Cohost is owned by anti software software club, a bunch of weirdos (complimentary) who care about privacy and safety. What makes discovery hard, makes safety stronger. It's a tradeoff, and if they have to choose the latter, they will. And did. And it shows.
I like cohost, but it's hard to find good stuff on it; a lot of it seems to be jokey shitposting, which is fine, but its design feels like it could've been something a lot more interesting. In some ways, it feels like a lot of people are there to hang out with their friends, rather than to write a lot, a la LiveJournal. Maybe it's just not for me, because I'm cis, and straight, and, I hate writing this, middle-aged. And that's fine. But seeing the potential there, the ability for people to actually write instead of just posting css hacks or making quips on #the cohost global feed, well, it feels bittersweet. I wanted cohost to succeed, and I think it has, just not in the way I wanted.
I'm still there. I still post, kinda irregularly. But it feels quiet, and if it fails I'll be sad, thinking about what could've been.
And then there's Mastodon: I accepted a friend's invite to a smaller server (I think we've got a few hundred people), and found that most of what people were saying about the federated social network on Twitter was absolute bullshit. It's a little more complicated, but not much. You might not see some posts and replies because of instance blocks, but that's good. Threading sucks, but they're working on it. When I joined you couldn't text-search, but they're working on it. Add a few hundred regular posters and your feed becomes a firehose, but you can make Lists to make it all more manageable, to narrow the torrent into smaller, clearer streams.
Overall, Mastodon feels like the option that's going to be around in ten, twenty years, the way people still use one of my favourite piece of 90s tech, IRC. It's resilient. Operating an instance, especially a large instance might not be cheap, but people are spinning up a staggering amount of instances, so it's really only prohibitively expensive if you throw open the barn doors and let tens of thousands in.
Your server's mods might rage quit, but you can start over. Your instance might crash but you can start over. And all of those things suck, but look: you can start over. It's still work, and there's no magic pill that makes starting again easy, but you can do it. It's not like Twitter, where once he fucks it up completely, it'll be gone forever. With Mastodon, there will still be thousands of options to choose from. Given what's happened to Twitter in the last year, that feels pretty special. If my community gets problematic, I can migrate easily. If my instance blows up, I can follow a few accounts I remember, and just start again. It's not ideal, but it's there: that feels like it could be the Mastodon motto.
My fedi posts seem to get more traction, more interaction, than any of the other options. On cohost, they seem to vanish, unless they're tagged with a popular hash tag. And they seem to do better than at the last place I'll talk about, a site I joined only reluctantly late last year: Bluesky.
Bluesky is the other decentralized option. Well, that's what they say: unlike Mastodon, which uses the well-documented and much-implemented ActivityPub protocol (it's implemented by a huge amount of Fediverse software, such as Misskey, Calckey, Firefish, Pixelfed, and others), Bluesky uses a protocol called the AT protocol (like "@"), which is implemented, as far as I know, only by Bluesky. The site was started by former Twitter exec Jack Dorsey. I avoided it for a long time for a number of reasons: it was invite-only, and the people I knew who got early codes were all Very Online, insufferably annoying Twitter mutuals; Dorsey has long been interested in Silicon Valley snake-oil like blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs; and it just seemed like, from what everyone described, a rather poor Twitter clone, an attempt to catch what was special about Twitter in its early days without offering a whole lot else.
Having used it for several months, I can kind of confirm the Twitter-clone feel. The only reason I went there was because that's where the Twitter writing community seemed to be landing, but even then, it doesn't feel like it's really taken off.
By the numbers, I've about 10x the number of Mastodon posts to Bluesky. And while I've been there longer (nine or ten months, by my reckoning, that still puts my Bluesky posting pace behind my rate at Mastodon, even now. Anecdotally? Mastodon feels like a more vibrant community. I've got slightly more follows there than on Bluesky, but even then, my Mastodon feed is like a torrent, Bluesky like a trickle. The latter feels like people are hedging their bets, waiting for Twitter to officially die, rather than just unofficially. People have accounts, but they're rarely posting. When I dip my toe back in on Twitter, I can see they're posting much more. It's been shocking to see people give their tacit approval to Musk and his policies and beliefs by continuing to post there. My only posts since I announced I was out have been to give away invite codes to Bluesky. I've rarely found takers.
Mastodon, on the whole, feels like tech that's going to survive, and if it does, it's because people are out there, using it, actively trying to make a better internet. In contrast, it feels like a lot of what I'm seeing around the new, corporate social media - Bluesky, but also Threads, etc - is non-technical people looking for corporations to extend a hand. The idea that what comes next has to be posting, and it has to be on a platform, and only companies can offer platforms. Looking for a place to happen without stopping to think if this is the best way to spend one's time online.
That's the key thing, the thing that drives me absolutely nuts: we, all of us, have the ability to remake the internet as we see fit. And the internet is in its terrible state right now because we've collectively allowed ourselves to believe that the only way online is through the platforms offered by a handful of companies. It didn't used to be that way - people used to figure out their own fun, and by the number of people who are nostalgic for the days of making things, you'd think more people would start to clue in. But it feels like people haven't, or if they have, they don't care: they're only here for some lols, community feels like work, thinking too much gives you wrinkles, etc, and so options like Mastodon get ignored by the vast majority, and instead, they sign up to sign away their data, again and again and again. I've taken sort of a pragmatic approach the last year: I'm mostly involved in what I feel are the most sustainable options (Mastodon, and to a lesser extent, cohost), but I'm also where others are, at least sort of (Bluesky). I've also rediscovered the platformless internet, the internet of making things, its collection of sites and systems, and most of all, people. I ssh into a BBS once a week or so; I post here, and on my site on the small web. I have a new alias on each, floating free from my real name. I'm still waiting to find the intense community I stepped away from when I created my LiveJournal account in late 2001, but I'm journalling/gemlogging at a pace that I haven't sustained since I was in my late teens, or early twenties. It's good! It's real fuckin' good!
Mastodon feels like the most sustainable option, going forward. And maybe Gemini - the small web feels too tightly clustered around neocities, and with Google entering what feels like its terminal stage, discovery feels like a real problem.
Mastodon is good; it's fine; I'll probably be there years from now, in the same way that I'm still going strong a year and a bit since I decided to sign up here at RTC. I've come to realize that my days on a platform of hundreds of millions might be coming to an end. Obviously, I won't miss most of the millions. It's never the many, but the few. It isn't lost on me that the best time I had online was at a time when communities were smaller, tighter, close-knit. Is it better to interact with a handful of friends, or be seen by a thousand strangers?
This is something I think about a lot, and it's the sort of thing that resists an easy answer, at least for me. I miss the camaraderie of the 90s and 00s. But I want my work to be discoverable and read by others (the right others). But I don't want to see the musings of the 477th person on my follow list. But I don't want my feed to be empty. As I've been thinking about this, I've been appreciative of the fact that Mastodon gives me some tools to do, well, both. Time-limited muting. Being able to follow hashtags, to create lists. It's flexible in a way that the other options aren't, and while I'm making an effort to be everywhere (even if my posting slips to weekly, as it's largely done with cohost), I find I'm using Mastodon the most. It's really not much more complicated than the others. It's resilient to bad actors. And most of all, it feels like the people who are there, are there because they want to be. There's a community, and microcommunities within. And this is what I feel is missing the most about Bluesky and cohost (and also Threads) - there's a sense that it's something that will propel the internet forward, in some way. ActivityPub is just a protocol. Mastodon is just software. Where we'll be at in ten or twenty years is pretty much unknowable, but these at least give us some control, and let us shape the future net in our own way.