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Here we are, two years on from Musk's purchase of Twitter, and the corpse of it is still staggering aimlessly through the shared space we create for ourselves. The reactionary, or truly principled (take your pick) got out early - nothing good can come of the purchase, they claimed; this place is going to be a hole! We laughed, or kind of ignored them. After all, is there even an unproblematic platform? FB and Instagram (never mind WhatsApp) have Zuckerberg. cohost rides its weak financials and developer passion in a burnout-courting haze. Mastodon, the jewel of the Fediverse, has a reputation for difficulty and scolds (IMHO, only the latter is deserved).
I've mostly settled on Mastodon, splitting my time between that and Bluesky, the other decentralized protocol. Truth be told, I like Mastodon more. Bluesky feels like cosplaying Twitter's better years, minus anything resembling a critical mass of users. But it's fine, it's something, and it has a half-decent approximation of the writing community Twitter had, minus the lit mags. But are these two options even good?
Michael Nordmeyer writes about finally deleting his Twitter account, something I did earlier in the year. Like him, I put it off for a long time, hoping for some sort of miracle, an unexpected turnabout. Maybe Musk cuts his losses, divests, settles for a loss that's only mildly humiliating. Maybe something forces a sale, somehow (I realize this isn't how it works). But of course, none of this happened. We're still here, and he's still posting, desperate for admiration and attention.
Will Weaver on Twitter's newest features
Musk has a platform, and he knows it. And a failing platform, one that resembles Truth Social with a coat of cheap Behr paint, is still a platform. Advertising revenue is down dramatically, but companies are still spending. There are fewer active users, but there are still a lot of active users. On Bluesky, Will Weaver points out that there are now some fun new features on the ol' hellsite:
Twitter has become part of the Trump re-election machine, and at this point, anyone who keeps up an account, who posts there, even scrolls aimlessly for a bit, is in a small way complicit. To use a platform is to endorse it, to say that with what unknown time we have left, it's worth it to spend some of it here.
So earlier in the year I finally deleted my account. First, I used a script to delete all my tweets. This might be largely symbolic, as I assume they're not actually deleted, but the account is gone and the tweets aren't showing up on Google. And when it was done, it felt strangely good. With tweets being hidden behind login pages, I no longer had a way of just checking one more thing. And so I didn't. And two or three days later, I realized just how little I missed it.
At that point, I decided to delete my Reddit account too. Reddit's less problematic, but it was their decision to sell everyone's tweets to the OpenAI slop machine that put me over the edge. I'd been using Reddit for a dozen years or so, and have a lot of good memories tied to one particular subreddit. I still keep up with a bunch of people from those days Elsewhere (Bluesky, Discord), and deleting my posts, including the first announcement of my lifelong project, felt bad for a moment.
But I've always been a little unnerved about how easy it was to see any particular user's comment history, and I've often wondered if anyone I used to know had gone through my own, given that you could get to my Reddit username, and therefore posting history, with not a lot of effort.
I've thought about deleting my Instagram, too, but my partner uses it as her own; ditto my Facebook account, which I post at maybe once a year, but which is essentially hers. For me, like for Nordmeyer, I'm leaning towards the idea of social media being a net negative, finding it harder and harder to find a community like I found in my first few years on Twitter. It's strange to think, with the tens to hundreds of millions of users these platforms have. But as I've gotten older, and maybe more wary, I've found it harder and harder to use social media where there's even the faintest expectation of a wide audience. Facebook is the worst: filled as it is with people I've known from elementary school until my forties, posting there is a special kind of hell, forcing me to ask myself if I really think it's important that every person I've ever met needs to know what I'm about to send. So usually, I don't.
Nordmeyer blames the decline (or maybe the general uselessness) on the smartphone, saying that device was the means for the masses onto these platforms. Maybe he's right. But regardless, I find myself wanting, really really wanting, a way to find community in the clamour, to curate lists of trusted people and easily limit what I write to particular audiences.
Google+ had circles. LiveJournal had filters. Other social media sites have surprisingly little, maybe not surprising when making the engagement number go up is of the utmost concern. But as these platforms have matured, many of them now old enough to attend university, I've found them harder to use. _Do I really want to post this?_ _What if [redacted] reads this?_
What's going to follow social media? Tough to say. Maybe that old horse will endure, becoming something as ingrained to society as various legacy forms of media are today. But sure as these platforms are going to pot, something else will follow. If we're unlucky, just another new platform. If we're lucky, a new paradigm.
In the meantime, I can hope that Twitter ruins Musk in a more meaningful way that it already has. It's funny: if he hadn't bought it, if he hadn't showed his whole ass, he might still have some of that aloof billionaire mystique the media credited to him for the last fifteen years. But because he can't log off, because he definitely can't shut the fuck up, people have started to see him for the moneyed huckster he is, the dumb man's smart man, someone who'll impregnate any number of women but refuse to be a father.
The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web
We live in the dumbest timeline. I don't (yet) believe in the so-called Dark Forest theory of the internet, in which people have retreated to smaller, unindexed places because these allow them to speak more freely, more safely. I don't believe it, because even though I've taken such steps myself (participating in a bunch of big group WhatsApp chats, writing sad gemlogs in Geminispace), I can still see traditional social media continuing at its pace, maybe slightly off its peak, the shine gone, but still going strong.
I don't believe it because we're just not there yet. And maybe we'll get there eventually; maybe not. But regardless, it's become clear to me (and a lot of others) that some part of its thesis has merit. Smaller, safer, curated spaces, free of trolls and tracking, are the future of the online, a throwback to the 90s in which we happily practiced the same with mailing lists and ICQ and AIM and email.
So maybe it's sad that it took two decades to fully realize the extent to which capitalist interests ruin everything online. But a late start is still a start. In the meantime, we can critically examine how we're spending our time online, whether it's good, or just reflexive. We each of us have a declining number of years, an uncertain future which will demand attention, community, and all the love we can give. It's up to us to build the supports we need for a future that's bearing down fast.