Fuck Twttr

Twitter used to be my social network of choice. It was largely text-based, super easy/quick to use, and bite-sized so it never felt like it was trying to take over my day or life like Facebook and others.

And then Memelord Musk decided to buy it for $44 billion dollars (or about $100 per account), and that was the last straw.

There were many other signs that things were going downhill before this... buying and killing Vine & Periscope were both shitty decisions... scrambling to catch up and steal another app's audience with Spaces felt like a real Zuck move... adn don't even get me started on pushing valuable features behind a subscription with Twitter Blue.

But there were also spots that gave me some hope! Their accessibility efforts were growing quickly and getting a lot better than other social apps. That work is super important and something of a passion of mine. But, as cool as that work is, it was still playing catchup to the features available on Mastodon! And that service isn't owned by an evil billionare that limits 3rd party apps from using it's APIs.

Honestly, if you were an early user of twttr, Mastodon feels like a different timeline where they decided not to chase the money or fight Facebook directly, and instead created an open-standard like e-mail. That was the future most of us wanted anyway. One where influencers and corporations have way less control of the timeline and there's no algorithm deciding what you see and when.

Are there some technical issues? Sure. But there were on Twitter too! The "fail whale" was so prevelant in the first few years. But a little patience can go a long way! After all, was what you wanted to send out into the interweb's aether really that important? If so, put it in your Notes app and toot it out later. Otherwise save us from another food pic or lunch status.

We didn't need it anyway.

And we don't need Twitter either. We have options. We can make that $44 billion dollars a complete waste.

We have the power, not the billionares, because we're the users. So let's fuckin use it.

04.28.2022 / milwaukee, wi