Preparing My X-it
Posted on July 24, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 57 Comments
Overnight, not unlike an NFL owner silently absconding with a whole football team to move it to a new town, Elon Musk decided to change the name of Twitter to “X,” which, for those of you not in the know, is a long-dormant domain name Musk had in his early days when he was busy being fired from PayPal. It’s resurrected now because Musk has a grand idea of creating an “Everything App” under that title, of which the functionality of microblogging will be a part. Basically, he wants to create a Western version of the Chinese “WeChat” app, despite the fact that the Western regulatory environment is drastically different from what it is in China, and also, inasmuch as Musk was railroaded into purchasing Twitter by people smarter than him, and then proceeded to lose billions through his incompetence in managing the site, only a fool would trust him with either their money or their information. But, dream big, I guess.
We could go on about how Musk will be an immediate business school case study for taking the value of a unique, universally-known and globally-appreciated brand and absolutely trashing it in exchange for a symbol best known for porn and/or the button you press on your computer whenever you want to leave something, but… well, actually, I kind of want to talk about the latter! With the switchover in name, I think this is a fine time to start disentangling myself from Musk’s Folly, whatever it is called, and manage my presence there differently than I have over these last 15 years when it was known as Twitter.
To present what all this means in readable form, let me bring in my Fictional Interlocutor to ask some questions.
Oh, hello.
Hi there. Let’s get started.
So you’re leaving Twitter forever now?
Well, no. First off, Twitter no longer exists, it’s now that “X” thing.
Okay, but that’s kind of a “Toe-MAY-toe, toe-MAH-toe” distinction, isn’t it?
It’s not! Twitter was its own specific thing, whereas as “X” is meant to be a number of different things, of which microblogging will be only one part, and, one suspects, the part Musk will care the least about. He’s really about finding ways to have people give him their money, either through subscriptions or taking a cut of transactions. It’s a fundamentally different beast, or at least, plans to be.
So that’s why he changed the name, you think.
Also, I think Musk wants to get rid of the Twitter name because it reminds him he got suckered into paying a multiple of what the site was worth to acquire it because he ran off his damn fool mouth and waived doing any due diligence. Spending $44 billion on Twitter? An eternal mark of shame! Spending $44 billion to start-up a “universal app” that will take over banking and communication and life as we know it? Genius! And it’s important for Elon Musk to feel like a genius, the wee lad. Either way, Twitter is dead and X has shambled, lich-like, out of its hastily-dug grave.
And how does this relate to deciding to leave?
Because I had residual affection for Twitter, even after Musk took the wheel and then proceeded to scrape it across several miles of mountain guardrail. I was on the service for fifteen years, and I had a lot of fun chatting, made friends and business connections, and told lots of people about my work and adventures. I don’t have any affection for X. I’m not going to let Musk anywhere near my money, and the current microblogging service, removed from its history as Twitter, is very evidently a flawed entity that valorizes hateful speech and “pay-to-play” positioning in comments and in viewing algorithms, and will not be the main thrust of the X app in any event. I have no more affection for the X microblogging service than I do for Threads, the Meta microblogging service, except to say that Threads is a couple of weeks older and I don’t get nearly as many “verified” users trying to shill bitcoin or porn at me there.
So you’re going to delete your account.
No.
But… look at everything you just said!
I’m aware of it.
I am confused.
Then allow me to explain. First, I’m not going to delete my account because I don’t want anyone else taking over my name. I’ve kept it standardized across several services for a reason. Second, right now, here in July 2023, The Service Formerly Known As Twitter still has some value in terms of visibility and reach — Musk, as incompetent as he is, still hasn’t managed to entirely destroy that. Third, not every person that follows me there can or will want to leave the site, for whatever reason. So I am keeping the account, and will even continue to post. But what and how I post is going to change.
How so?
When it was Twitter, I posted a lot, on all sorts of topics, ranging from pictures of my cats to culture to observations on politics. Now, as X, I’m mostly going to post career news and updates, and links to things I’ve posted on my own site.
And that’s it?
I may also occasionally retweet things other creators are doing to help promote them.
So you will never ever post about anything else, ever.
As long as I have the account, I will never say never. But at the moment, the intent is to use it a whole lot less; a couple of posts a day rather than dozens, which it was not unknown for me to do.
I mean, the fact that you posted dozens of times a day suggests you will have difficulty keeping this resolution.
Fair point! As a counterpoint I’ll note that Twitter is no longer the only microblogging game in town, so my urge to post lots of things can be spread out to Bluesky and Mastodon and Threads (as examples).
None of which, it should be said, offer you anywhere near the same number of followers.
True enough! I have 26k followers on Mastodon, 10k on Bluesky and 6k on Threads. In terms of sheer numbers of followers, they are… less. I will note, however, that I didn’t get to 200k followers on Twitter in a day; it took 15 years. Whether I can do that again is an open question. It’s entirely possible I’ll never have that many followers in a single place ever again.
Which kind of sucks.
It kind of does. But, one, having your career predicated on how many followers you have on a single site is fraught anyway, and two, this is the nature of social media, isn’t it? Think of all those bands who had hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers on MySpace and then that imploded. And then, three, not everything is about the sheer number of followers. I loved being on Twitter not because I had tens of thousands of people to market to, but because I was having fun. And today, I’m having fun in other places; at the moment I’m especially having fun on Bluesky. Bluesky is tiny and invite-only and at the moment absolutely fucking useless to market one’s self on, and I kinda love it and the conversations I’m having on it. So there’s that.
You’ve said before that one of the reasons you’d stay on Twitter is that you thought you could outlast Musk’s ownership. What about now? Do you think you’ll still outlast him?
Well, it’s different now, isn’t it? Twitter isn’t Twitter anymore. He’s destroying the value of the brand name. Even if at some point X fails (and it probably will), and Musk sells off the microblogging part for pennies on the dollar, even if the new owner calls it “Twitter” again, too much damage will have been done to the brand identity, and most of the power users (who aren’t incel bigots either by inclination or for pay) will either have moved on or will have done what I’m planning to do, ie., reduce their reliance on the service. Historically, social media sites get sold twice, first for a whole lot of money, and then for very little. When they’re sold for very little, it’s understood they’re damaged goods, unlikely to rise again to the prominence they had before. And in this case, the new buyer wouldn’t even get the value of the name.
You seem to be taking all of this well, at least.
Thanks, it’s a façade. I’m actually really sad about the Twitter name and identity being tossed. The site has never been what you would call perfect, but there was a good run there when it mattered, and mattered to me. I mourn the thing that mattered. As I mentioned elsewhere, it seems sort of silly to grieve a brand identity, but it’s not about the bird, it’s about the fact that Twitter was a place, with people, and now that place is gone. Musk took a city with thriving neighborhoods and decided to run a fucking interstate through the most interesting parts of it, and the interstate doesn’t actually go anywhere good; it just runs from Bitcoin Town to Fascistburg.
You think he should have just left the place alone.
I think once he made farty tweets about buying the place it was over. He offered too much for the then-current board to ignore — they knew the site’s business model was break-even at best, and it was so rarely at its best — and once they forced his hand and made him pay full price for the place, Musk had to find a way to make money off it to service his debt. Sadly, he’s a shit businessperson when he doesn’t have real executives to hide behind, and he’s dreamed of owning all the money in the world through an app since his PayPal days, so here we are.
And all the conspiracy theories that this is a master plan to destroy the one social media site liberal people organized on?
It’s a really dimwitted conspiracy theory, as most of them are. One, he had to be forced to buy the place, never forget that, and two, everything he’s done since has been a flailingly desperate ploy to build revenue, confounded by the fact he doesn’t understand, and never has understood, the social media business model. To be clear, Elon Musk is absolutely rooting for a fascist overtake of the US political system, because that’s the only way X gets to be the Western WeChat. He needs a corrupt and lax regulatory environment for it to be even remotely possible. But this doesn’t mean we should credit him with any intelligence in going about it. Destroying Twitter’s utility directly in front of an election year is not the mark of a genius. And anyway people organized — quite effectively! — before Twitter. They will do it without the service, just watch.
Where else can people find you, if not on what used to be Twitter?
Why, here, of course (and this is where I remind creative people and anyone else with a desire for what passes for permanence online to get their own domain and create their own site, so others will always be able to find you) and also on the sites listed in this linked post. I’ll note that at the moment I’m most active on Bluesky, Mastodon and Facebook, in about that order, but that this may change over time. Regardless, Scalzi.com and Whatever will always be places you can find me.
Will you miss Twitter?
I will, like I miss college, or living in Northern Virginia when I worked at AOL in the mid-90s, or any other time or place in my life that no longer exists in its previous form, except for in memory. To be clear, Musk’s microblogging service will persist, until it doesn’t, and people will use it, until they don’t. But whatever it is now, it’s not Twitter, and there’s no percentage in pretending it is. It was nice to have Twitter when we had it. But it’s gone. Now we get to find out what’s next.
— JS
Yes. It’s done and gone. I hope I’ll be able to keep seeing your posts somewhere.
It’s disappointing, but not that you’re fading out from (ex-Twitter) but because it correlates to the likelihood that What Once Was Twitter will go away. For me, it’s like when the coffee shop I hung out at went away (because campus was unamenable to people it didn’t like hanging out there). I missed the ability to see lots of people (though some I don’t miss); I saw some people more often elsewhere but didn’t see others easily, and for lots of things, not being able to see people easily means that they aren’t seen. None of the alternatives function that way – to me that seems not good, but it may just be different.
Musk is also making your previous contention that you need to maintain ownership of your social media persona (if you depend on it for anything significant) look even better. Ex-Twitter is making clear that even if you think that your ecosystem can’t go away, if someone with enough money and not enough concern or intelligence steps it, it can, and depending on billionaires for honesty and decency is not a good idea.
“Now we get to find out what’s next” is exactly how adults deal with such changes.
Sigh. Tweetdeck is now breaking constantly due to rate limit, while basic twitter.com still works, ish.
It’s got much less beautiful plumage now, and is clearly pining for the fjords.
I think someone misunderstood when when he was advised to strive for eXcellence.
Lich-like
I got to learn a new word. Thanks
This is my last Twitter/X straw as well. Twitter used to be fun and informative. It’s no longer either of those things. And now it’s not even Twitter anymore. So I’ve requested my archive and I’ll be deactivating (not deleting) my account as soon as it’s downloaded.
One thing: ” at the moment I’m especially having fun on Bluesky. Bluesky is tiny and invite-only and at the moment absolutely fucking useless to market one’s self on, and I kinda love it and the conversations I’m having on it. ”
I’d love to be on Bluesky, but it’s impossible for any normal, non-famous person or entity to get an invite. I’ve been on the beta-request list for about 6 months now and not heard a word. I’m glad that it’s fun for you but I gotta say, the elitist vibe that the site is giving off is making me less and less care about being there. The rate limit would have been an excellent time for Bluesky to open up to a slightly wider audience, but they didn’t. And they haven’t now with the “X” changeover either. And at this point it just seems like they don’t actually want non-famous people on their site, so … eh.
Like you, I mourn what Twitter was. I enjoyed it. I made friends there. But I guess all good things do, actually, end. So farewell Twitter.
I know that I’d be a different person if it weren’t for Twitter. I, too, have been there for over 15 years. While I’ve never had a following, it was wonderful and enlightening to see and interact with SO MANY talented weirdos. Much like Blue Sky is now, it was at its best when it was mostly cute pet photos and bizarre non-sequiturs, which in more than a few cases lead to actual IRL carriers. Remember hashtag games? Loved ’em. Not to mention the real-time reporting from people all over the world as major events (tsunamis, riots, elections) played out. For a moment, it was great. Thrilling, even. Whatever happens next, I hope it’s fun.
You ain’t wrong about how this won’t affect your business. If every Twitter follower of yours always bought your new book, and nobody else did, this could be a body blow to your career.
But that’s simply not the case. I don’t follow you on Twitter. I mean, I would have if I’d ever made a Twitter account, you were on a pretty short list of day one follows containing a few other celebs known to be very active and often funny on Twitter, some personal fiends, and major news organizations…
Yet, I tend to buy your books pretty soon after they come out. I own most them by now. I think I’m missing the stuff that came as audiobooks first because I don’t do audiobooks, wasn’t too interested in limited-edition paper releases, and haven’t gotten ’round to buy them as E-books..
Oh, and some of the non-fiction you wrote early on.
Just never got around to joining Twitter, since my daily time for wasting time on the internet was already covered by FaceBook and Reddit. Anything monumental you were up to I could just read here anyway.
Since I never got around to it before Musk, there was obviously no reason to get around to it after…
I’m quite sure you’ll still keep selling lots of books after the Twitter age is over
You already seem to have a handle on on the personal feelings about it. And that’s no surprise. You’re half a decade my senior, but I’m pretty old too.
We both saw the rise of computer, and then the digital revolution. We saw all the stages come, and then die. The era of BBSés. The era of spaces like AOL and others. The MySpace era and the heyday of personal blogs. And now the era of Twitter and FaceBook.
It’s like what will happen a few months from now, when the summer leaves turn to brown. They’ll die and fall of. Few months later, a new spring will bring us new green leaves. And everything will look bleak and grey for a few months. We’ve seen this many times before.
Both of us have been through several autums and winters before. And when spring comes around again, we’ll figure out how to enjoy it!
That’s cool – no notes about the article. Just your social sharing. I found out about this through Mastodon and yet, it’s missing from your social links :(
If you are using Jetpack, it now supports it. Cheers, and good health!
Your analogy to the Indianapolis Colts is priceless. To this day they are only “away team” or “Indianapolis” when playing in Baltimore. Meanwhile, we’ll be calling the thing Twitter to the dude’s face until he gets embarrassed enough to put it back or just closes the thing entirely.
One of your Mastodon followers here, looking forward to seeing you post more over there (and I’ve already noticed a slight uptick lately). I stopped going to Twitter a couple of months ago and don’t miss it at all. I enjoy seeing fun stuff that other people are sharing there, with a minimum of screaming about how the world is imploding, which is most of what I was getting from Twitter. I’m well aware of the latter and prefer to be ingesting more of the former.
I think EvilElon gave a lot of people thinking about leaving Twitter the perfect opportunity to say now is the time wen he announced the brand X thing.
For a lot of us Brand X was the inferior brand the better brand was always compared to in TV (remember TV) commercials.
When it comes to rebranding of tech companies, few examples jump to my mind:
Borland – the maker of such beloved dev tools like Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++, Object Windows Library, Delphi, C++ Builder – at some point renamed themselves to “Inprise”. Things really went downhill for them, and they had to spin off the dev tools in a separate company named CodeGear, which was later acquired by Embarcadero.
Google rebranding its parent company to Alphabet – but noone uses that name, everybody still calls them Google.
Facebook rebranding to Meta – a name currently associated mostly with the failure of the “Metaverse”.
All the branding fails by Microsoft, like “Metro”, “SkyDrive”, “Zune”, etc.
I walked away from twitter after the first checkmark debacle of his. I was also an earlier adopter and didn’t realize I was on the service as long as you were until you said “15 years” and I did the math in my head.
It was wonderful when it was useful. In 2008 I had a medical emergency in a new city I just relocated to with my family, and being able to “tweet” updates to my dozen or so followers/friends made it easier than using something like a phone tree I never set up.
These sorts of things are starting to feel cyclical. New service gets made, gets market share, clones pop up but aren’t as good, until some unforced error by the original service forces people to search for alternatives. The diaspora never seems to land on a single service again there after. For a year or two it was fascinating seeing everyone connected before desperate shills starting gaming the system for a buck or two. c’est la vie.
Sadly, I find Mastadon utterly impossible to use (and now my instance or whatever it’s called seems to have vanished into the haze) and Bluesky is impossible to get on and doesn’t have very many people I follow.
I posted something like this in June. I’m adding this blog to my Blogspot feed, and hope to see more of it there.
You mean there are still birdsite power users who aren’t either bigots (incel or otherwise) or lazy journalists? A shame. I stopped visiting in early 2023 (leaving the account for the usual reason), and any time I miss the hours wasted doomscrolling (rarely), 15 minutes spent exploring Mastodon is far more interesting and maybe educational–and I don’t have to wash my hands afterwards.
Mastodon is where I’m at. Bluesky is more of the same as Twitter where right-wing libertarians are at the helm, and don’t get me started about Facebook…
I just don’t see the point. I won’t be able to say I’m TwitShit posting anymore. I hardly go on. I’m mostly on
Instagram these days as it is. But if I need to yell about referees or another team hitting Pete Alonso (and I’m a Yankees fan but we watch the Mets because I can’t stand the Yankees announcers.), I go on Twitter.
Been months since I’ve Twittered. Just not very interesting anymore, and of course, now… Thank you for the update. Would you please post (here) a cat or maybe a nice sunset?… Thanks and have a great week. 😘🙏
A very good post. I am glad these posts here get emailed to me, since I don’t know whether I will be at one of the other places you will be posting at in the future, or even bothering to spend much time there even if I have an account there.
You really hit all the key points here, as sad as they are to me personally. I’ve only been on Twitter a few years but I’ve had a terrific time there and made many friends who I’ve met in real life. It remains to be seen if Bluesky or any other social media app can ever take it’s place.
As a Mastodonian, I’ll very happy to see you postingmore there!
I bet the complete lack of advanced notification – a large number of users of Twitter/X (particularly those who are not perpetually online and don’t follow Musk themselves) will see their app or website browser update, the name suddenly change to something porny, and think they were hacked. Or think (if they are right-leaning) that Apple/Google deleted the app from their phone because they were “too afraid of the truth coming out” or some other BS.
That because he did this with zero notice (apparently even to his own employees), and no launch plan – there was no way to prepare users for the change. No popups. No email. Nothing.
In a normal world I would assume a sudden and significant change like this is the result of deliberate actions to avoid a worse consequence. Like a lawsuit or regulatory action.
But with Musk, the more likely reason is pure incompetence. That he decided it will happen at 2:00 am and demanded the team do it the next business day. Damn the consequences.
When NPR gave up on posting to Twitter because Musk falsely tagged it as “state” media, Musk threatened to reassign @NPR. As NPR pointed out, TOS gave Twitter that right if an account did not log in at least once every thirty days, not if it stopped tweeting.
It doesn’t matter to me too much, as I have never used social media, either as a poster or reader.
Correct. OTOH too many jokes.
1) The Twitter is Out There
2) animated 3 panel GIF
1st – X
2nd – Y?
3rd – Z
3) Twitter bird with an X for it’s eye. (Already seen in the wild.)
4) Isn’t that one of his kid’s name?
As long as we’re talking about problematic people, I’ll say that the degeneration of twitter reminds me of Dave Simm’s advice “never fall in love with a bar.” Because in the end what you love isn’t really the place, it’s the community of people… and that is something that’s never static. I miss the old twitter, for all that it had problems, but it just isn’t that thing anymore.
As others have said above, I’ve found a lot of what I liked in old twitter over on Mastadon. It’s got its own issues in technology and moderation but it beats the cesspool of nuTwitter/X.
I found my way here today via mastodon.social , and, too, have reached the end of my patience with Elon’s trashing of Twitter. I chose to deactivate my account today, and will let it pass into extinction at the end of the month.
My guess is that X will model itself on Nextcloud to cobble together a browser-based everything stew, and ultimately fail to accomplish much of anything.
Time will tell…
After 30 years online I’ve gotten used to places disappearing or morphing. Slashdot was a blast a couple of decades ago before it became whatever it is now. Some of us went from there to Kuro5hin, which eventually became a demonstration of what happens when the trolls show up and you don’t begin moderating. Before that it was great. The survivors of that are mostly on a private forum and mastodon now.
The Horde at The Atlantic. What an awesome community. Gone many years now.
It’s annoying how Facebook is deteriorating as it’s great for keeping in touch with old friends and family across the planet. But the usability is declining fast.
The blog section at Tor dot com is hanging in there.
I opened it this AM and it looked normal, then the screen flashed, it showed an X and I got a message that my account was permanently suspended. ?? No idea why. Not like I post threats or racist comments or porn.
So, I don’t have to make a decision, but I will miss it. Next month will be 8 years since I got on Twitter just to tell you where to find a great pie shop in the airport. I followed so many creative, smart people and it really did help through these tough years. So it makes me a bit sad, but not the end of the world.
(I just wish that I had downloaded my data as you recommended. Never occurred to me they would target a nobody like me.)
H/T to Billy Stewart for the Monty Python ref. (Twitter wouldn’t still be around if Musk hadn’t nailed it to the perch! I think the “X” means “dead bird” for Twitter.)
I nuked my Twitter account the day Musk bought it, just because of his history. I figured it was guaranteed that it would explode and crash just like the first Starship launch. You know, the one he tried to make everyone forget…?
I’m not overly impressed with Threads, but I’m still deciding. It’s better then a sharp stick in the eye, but not much. 😉
As much as everyone hates Facebook, it really is the only social media website with a defined use-case. It’s for keeping up with people you know in real life. All other social media websites are for something else hard to define.
I tried Twitter briefly (after Elon’s purchase was announced, but before he’d actually taken over), and I could see the interest, but not anything particularly compelling about the place. I don’t really feel I miss it. I’m now on Mastodon, but am struggling to articulate a reason why. I’ll probably gradually post less and less frequently until I abandon the place.
OK- my account just reappeared. I wonder how many people that happened to? But now it is time to break in the new laptop and download my data before it happens again…..
I think the site should be known as Musk-X, and its members as Musk-oXen. But what do I know?
The best part about leaving twitter is all the extra time you will have to post to USENET!
In my best James Bond voice…
“Mux. Elox Mux.”
I have to admit that I wasn’t paying much attention to social media yesterday and when I heard about X, I thought it was a joke or some other stupid Elon thing, like having the Twitter PR emails autoresponding to requests with poop emoji’s. Oddly, in a weird way…both turn out to be true. Sigh!
First: Ann-Margret is trending. That’s nice.
I only joined Twitter a few months before Musk started talking about buying it. My reasons for setting up an account seem more appropriate to the new name. And I’ll probably keep it as long as that content is available. I haven’t posted anything, and every time some algorithm pops up something designed to arouse me in a different way, and I feel compelled to respond with a bit of wisdom or outrage, I tell myself THIS account is not for THAT.
I’m not convinced that X.com will fail, ultimately. Elon Musk is tenacious. On the other hand, I have no clue how it will succeed, and if it does fail I will feel the same schadenfreude as many others.
I’m excited about Big Freaking Rockets making our solar system more accessible. I like electric cars, and I drive one. I like the idea of underground tunnels as a city-wide turbo-lift. I like that my big glass roof sometimes provides all the electricity my house uses.
But I don’t like Musk on social media and I especially don’t like him in charge of social media.
I think we should just call it “The platform formerly known as Twitter” and let it join LiveJournal and MySpace in the eternal twilight of the Interwebs.
My account has been on “quiet” or mute or whatever they call it since the Musky-acquisition, and I just won’t even check in every couple of weeks any more. No point. The people I followed are pretty much all gone or quiet. I can use those minutes elsewhere.
I’ll see you and interact with you on mastodon. I will never be on one of those billionaire owned algorithm driven versions of twitter. I understand your reasons, but they don’t apply to me unless my books become famous overnight.
Feels like most of the people I want to follow have decamped to Bluesky, which is a problem because they are still throttling who can join. maybe I’ll kick the lurker habit in the meantime, I guess. I don’t even care if they don’t let me make an account to post, but I can’t even read anything on there so it just makes me sad I’m missing out.
Back to finding these updates on RSS, instead of on Twitter then on RSS, I geuss…
Y’all could join us weirdos on Tumblr…
In my feed today:
https://mastodon.social/@Popehat/110771068441930191
I used to track a few people on Twitter – not as a member, simply as an outside observer. One day a week or two ago (maybe three…), the links I used to visit their particular pages suddenly are re-routed to a login screen. After a couple days, I shrugged and deleted the links. A day or so after that, I read of Mr. Musk complaining about ad revenues dropping. I can’t help but to wonder how the decision to allow only members to view the site cut into that ad revenue.
An interesting perspective from Platformer
“this framing misses the true shape of Musk’s project, which is best understood not as a money-making endeavor, but as an extended act of cultural vandalism.”
https://www.platformer.news/p/twitter-becomes-x
So, if it is no longer called Twitter, does one still tweet?
I suspect that man-baby Musk will be deeply irritated by people still referring to “tweeting,” so I really hope people still call posting a microblog Tweeting.
For those new to Mastodon, who don’t want the learning curve of switching from Twitter, I strongly recommend doing three things:
1> Go to https://joinmastodon.org/ and create a Mastodon account (easy.)
2> Visit https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ . Sign in with your Mastodon info. It will help you add all your Twitter friends to your new Mastodon account. (easy.)
3> Go to https://elk.zone/ . Sign in with your Mastodon info. Now whenever you go there, you will have a very Twitter-like interface and experience. Except that you won’t be spending $96 a year to edit your posts. Or to get verified. Or for anything else.(You’re encouraged to contribute a bit to your host, though, if you can. Or just spread the love.)
About the only reason I still check in is for some of the folks tracking the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian unpleasantness, and most of those people also seem to be making other plans.
As an ordinary person with a tiny social media presence I found several people I grew to like and respect on Twitter. You are one of them. I will continue to follow you and your cats as best I can on Twitter, Threads, Facebook and Instagram and here at whatever.scalzi.com
Life changes all the time and sometimes in ways that open us to new experiences and people. I’m grateful to be a small part of such large communities.
Meanwhile, the other big addictive online forum is having its own CEO-led meltdown, causing a lot of people to become “Rexitors”.
I gather Reddit was never a major Scalzi outlet, but should you want a sub for that also, among the many Fediverse-based mini-blogging sites, I found Squabbles.io to be most congenial. It has a slick, friendly UI in a desktop browser, and several mobile apps.
Missing Twitter, “like I miss college, or living in Northern Virginia when I worked at AOL in the mid-90s, or any other time or place in my life that no longer exists in its previous form, except for in memory” is an excellent way to keep that stuff in perspective. I lived in Southern California in the 80s, which wasn’t prime time by any means but it was better than today. A friend who lived there then and for another decade is always going on about how no other place measures up to his memory-standards. Of course, like most of us economics forced him out of SoCal in the late 90s.
You can’t go back home and you can’t stop dumbasses like Trump and Musk from breaking things. You just have to learn to disconnect and move on.
Seen somewhere on line…
“Tweets are now to be known as:
X-crements”.
In further comedy about all of this, Twitter Japan, will not be transitioning to X Japan, because someone else has had the trademark for decade(s).
It’s almost like he doesn’t think through things, before jumping into them.
https://geekculture.co/elon-musks-twitter-x-rebranding-is-now-live-but-faces-trademark-issues-in-japan/
I joined Twitter when you created The Scamperbeasts. I left it when Elno bought it. Will you be putting more cat pictures here on Whatever? Ijoined Mastodon but I don’t actually understand it and I’m really not willing to read another explanation of it. I just want to see your posts, Athena’s posts, and posts of the cats and Charley
I left Twitter as soon as Musk took over. I do follow you on Threads now but not real active on there. I am on CoSo and even though it’s small I found a lot of nice people on there and no bots or trolls. I think of it as a little island of sanity.