Notes on leaving

Note: If you don’t want to read another take on ~the discourse~ just click out. There’s nothing new here.

I really liked Twitter.

I joined over a decade ago, back when you had to manually retweet people and there was actually a 140-character limit. At the time there were lots of websites: Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr and my online identity was split between them but eventually they all coalesced on Twitter. It was easier that way and it was genuinely my favourite place to hang out on the internet. It exposed me to people and ideas I would have never encountered before. It let me listen in on conversations in other parts of the world and other walks of life without demanding my participation — and when I did weigh in I could get feedback from people way smarter than me, from all over the place. I genuinely believe it made me a better, more emphathetic person.

It was also fun: Memes, trends, worldwide in-jokes, little niche communities, all happening at once. It was, and still is, a thrill to think about some of the people who followed me and, even more surprising, kept following me and sometimes even replying to or favouriting the things I had to say. There have been movie stars, award-winning authors, academics but honestly, just as importantly, people who aren’t well-known and who likely never would be well known except they had this platform where they could also share their thoughts and ideas that I learned from and admired. That idea of it was, and still is, incredibly cool.

But you know why I’m talking about it in the past-tense. I’m not going to argue it was perfect before and I’m not going to argue you should leave, we all have different lines and reasons and I’m not going to pass judgement. But the Twitter that was is not the Twitter that is and we’ve all been able to see it in real-time.

It’s no longer a company that is slow to act or sometimes messes up but at least has checks and balances, both internal and external. It’s a company run on the whims of a man who has demonstrated repeatedly who he is and what he stands for based on who he welcomes, who he bans and the way he wields his words towards people who can suffer harm at his expense.

To be honest the actual experience of being on Twitter has not changed for me — the ability to mute and block and autofilters have all served me well, but the key difference is it no longer feels fun to be there and trying to pretend it is means ignoring everything else that’s going on around you. I stopped using Facebook after it became clear that is rewarded bad behaviour with real-world consequences, I can’t really imagine why I would use a site that is run by somehow who epitiomizes that behaviour.

And here’s the thing: As much as I liked Twitter, it is not some public good. It’s not a home or neighbourhood we can stay and fight for. It is a private website and that website is under new ownership. You can stay and dunk on the new owner all you want but the only consequences are either 1. you will be banned or 2. you will contribute to him being able to brag again and again that engagement is up, actually.

And feel free to do so! But me, personally, I don’t see the upside. If you’re going to post content on a site of dubious moral value at least do it on Facebook or TikTok that have higher user engagement and more real-world reach.

Find me at:

mstdn.ca/@akurjata

akurjata.tumblr.com

akurjata.substack.com

(Some people have asked me about Post.News. My take: If we’re all leaving a website because it was bought up and run on the whims of a billionaire, why would we go somewhere else where the same thing can happen. Mastodon and Tumblr are both either open-source projects that can’t be purchased or in the hands of a company that has proven itself to be a good steward of the open web. As for substack — yeah, some issues, but you can export the subscriber list to any new service you want so there’s freedom to leave without losing the network).