I have Tweeted my final Tweet. 😢
That Twitter is now a private company, beholden to just one man, is unnerving.
What’s unforgivable is even reconsidering the Trump ban for disinformation and hate speech.
I’ve such a sense of nostalgia for Twitter’s early years, the Fail Whale, the programmed account that composed sonnets line by line from random posts, Florida Man, Shit My Dad Says, and much more.
That’s what nostalgia is for.
Where to next, gang?
Yeah, I left my account up in the off chance I need to refer back to a million retweeted story links, but I’m never logging back in.
I am not that optimistic about alternatives. Though the co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, set up an independent company last year called Blue Sky to create social media protocols and standards for the future. (I don’t know if I can post the link, or if WordPress will block my post with it.) But if you search for Blue Sky Jay Graber you can find it. They don’t have anything yet.
There’s a distributed, decentralized Twitter alternative called Mastodon that has been around for years. A lot of people are moving to that. The Mastodon software is excellent, I ran a copy. The problem is, each person running a Mastodon server has to pay their own server costs, make their own backups, and most importantly do their own content moderation against spam and illegal material. I ran a server for two years and then deleted it. A lot of other Mastodon servers exist for a while and then the costs or the moderation headaches get too high, and owner shuts it down and the server and all of the user accounts on it vanish. 🙁