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The title is a hairy meme template on Twitter; I was wondering if it was some product of the site itself (like dril, who so many find funny but I've always found to be kind of tiring), but KnowYourMeme says versions of such go back to, of all people, Billy Graham.
Anyway: I was thinking about this the other day in terms of my exodus from, and return to, Twitter; my precarious homes at Mastodon, cohost, and elsewhere; and just generally trying to reconcile the complicated feelings and relationships I have with Twitter and my communities there.
On Mastodon it's almost a truism that if you talk about how you miss Twitter, you'll get dogpiled by people who tell you that Mastodon is better (it's not), that it can replace it if you try hard enough (it can, but only if you lower your expectations), and that if you can't find community there maybe you're the problem (okay, granted). Here's the thing: Mastodon, as a rough replacement for Twitter, is fine. It's a bit clunky but it's resilient to catastrophic events because the whole multiple instances thing really does work. It may not work _well_, but if mastodon.social goes down, I'll still be able to see what everyone else on the other instances are posting. That part's fine. That part's great.
Where Mastodon fails is that while some communities have moved over wholesale from Twitter (I hear InfoSec largely has, but I don't keep up with InfoSec), others haven't. I've tried so hard but the poetry community on Mastodon is unbelievably weak: people posting haikus, people posting prompts, people posting about what kind of eggs their MC would have for breakfast. Whereas on Twitter there are lit mags and all my peers in North American poetry. People I read but would never meet if not for that stupid, awful, wonderful site. Twitter has, overall, the best online poetry community I've ever seen. And Mastodon has nothing on it. Not even close.
The worst part: not only have basically zero poets left that site since the Musk takeover, but nobody even really tries. I can think of a half dozen poets out of the almost a thousand that I follow on Twitter that have made Mastodon accounts and kept up with it. And only one or two who had the guts to park their Twitter account (to avoid impersonation, etc), delete their tweets, and move over completely.
I wish that was the end of it, but with the fallout of the rate-limiting saga of early July (in which Twitter was rate limiting unverified accounts to something like 600 API calls/day due to what's widely suspected to be catastrophic capacity issues, probably from unpaid bills), I've seen more and more poets finally scoring invites, and screenshotting their Bluesky info. Which, fucking fuck off forever. Jesus Christ, we're in the middle of the collapse of one platform due to shit ownership and poor decisions, and you're signing up for Jack Dorsey's definitely-not-gonna-pivot-to-crypto round 2 bullshit?
I wish I could say I was surprised, but I'm not; I wish people would try, actually try other platforms, but they won't. While I've found a kind of happiness here, on the small web, and in Mastodon, writing and posting to a much smaller community, it's clear that a lot of other people aren't interested in anything like that. That instead, to have thoughts is to demand an audience, and if something doesn't allow you to quickly build an audience, or if there's the slightest bit of friction, well, why fucking try, right?
The "complicated" part of my feelings and relationships that I mentioned earlier comes from the fact that I can't leave them behind. I have spent most of my life online, first on BBSs, then on message boards, Usenet, social media, and elsewhere. And for almost as long, I have wanted, desperately wanted, to be a poet. I've always loved to write, and somewhere around 14, 15 most of what I write shifted from prose to poetry. These days, I'm probably writing a lot more prose again - though instead of literary fiction, it's journals and gemlogs. But I'm still writing. And still at the heart of it what I'm doing is looking for community. I've found some of what I'm looking for in geminispace. But like Mastodon, this isn't where the poets are. They're still elsewhere.
Some part of me wants to feel ashamed for wanting more than the community Mastodon and geminispace currently offer. For wanting to do something other than planting a flag here at RTC and, by writing and emailing and whatever else, meeting new people. But both these places lack the "everything" factor that draws the technologically incurious in. Right or wrong, most people are resistant to new things, especially when you have to, God forbid, pick a server; or, worse, learn to use the command prompt or WinSCP or equivalent. People would rather use something that looks like something they're already familiar with. God knows I'm doing that right now, or whenever I update my HTML journal. The golden age of exploration online is long since dead. Not to say that you can't, anymore, but I think it's probably not wrong to say that most people don't want to explore. And if they're aware that you don't have to be bound by a particular's app's affordances, that you can sit down at a computer and make anything you want, they don't care. It doesn't appeal.
I say this thinking about the girls I journalled with who now just post pictures on Facebook; thinking of the girl who mesmerized me in the summer of '99, who I talked with for years after, who now maintains only the most basic online presence and for whom this online world no longer holds any sort of wonder. I sort of understand. If I look around now at what people are doing, if I wasn't aware that there are these thriving little communities that Google will never take you to, well, I'd be discouraged too. Who wants to hang out in the SEO sludge?
People will stay on the beaten track for a variety of reasons. I think for most of us, it's because that's where our friends are. Or in my case, my existing community. Most of them aren't ever going to show any interest in building something outside of what social media allows, other than maybe a linktree, or a hamburger menu WordPress site. So that's where I am, sometimes, in part. I'm there because I need to know what the poets are doing. And I'll still work on my professional website, designed from scratch, with handwritten HTML. And I'll still add to my small web site, my gemini capsule. I'll still, to borrow an awful corporate term, model expected behaviours. And I expect I'll still be disappointed, in six months, a year, or three, when personal sites and capsules remain a relentlessly niche thing, and when everyone's talking about how they're glad they discovered that great new site, the one that lets them hang out and post with their friends. Not Mastodon. You know, Bluesky. (Or worse: Threads.)