Remember what I said earlier about not being able to be in bed with bad people without being complicit? Sure enough, here comes Phony Stark, the pioneer of the money thinking it’s the brains, to buy Twitter and take it private off the back of sales of/loans against his inflated stock – to purchase a company whose revenue stream is smaller than Kohl’s, a company with mindshare out of all importance to its user base because every reporter lives on it 24/7 and it makes a cheap content stream for cable news, a company that everyone insists for some reason should be like Facebook.
This is going to be an unmitigated disaster, mainly because Phony Stark is determined to do for the first amendment what the NRA did for the second. His notion of “free speech” basically boils down to “freedom to deceive” or “freedom to intimidate” or, as usual, “freedom from consequences for the sufficiently rich and white.” Which is par for the course for an apartheid heir, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is, Twitter is about a year from becoming the new 4chan: the result you’d get if you gave the internet an enema.
Twitter isn’t perfect, not by a long shot, but in the last couple of years I had just about beaten it into something useable, thanks to Tweetbot: an ad-free chronological stream of posts from people I know personally (or am otherwise willing to), with a separate stream for allowed updates from approved entities like sports teams or foreign media or the like. The question is, once Twitter starts ripping up the guardrails in pursuit of making itself a safe space for alt-right edgelords with anime pillows they won’t fap to, what happens to the accounts for Vanderbilt baseball or Freewheel brewing or just friends I might not otherwise hear from? Will it be like Facebook, where you feel you have to be there for promotional reasons but your contents gets lost in the sewage? Or Flickr or Tumblr, where one day people just drifted away and forgot to post for three, six, eight, eleven years?
Or what if this is finally the push we needed for enough people to take the plunge on something else?
My first Mastodon account was enrolled in the spring of 2017. I made one post and didn’t touch it again until August of 2018. A couple of posts and that was it until October 2018. And then maybe a post a year. Until yesterday, when things started to speed up. All of a sudden, I have a couple of extended family members using Mastodon who weren’t there 72 hours ago. There are people on Twitter talking it up as a viable alternative – a sea of federated interoperable servers, like email, with the ability to move between them and screen out undesirables. And importantly, without the capability to name-search or algorithmically promote or quote-tweet or engage in the kind of sea-lion dogpiling that Felon Musk actually encourages from his drooling minions. (I’m seriously about to put the ONE LESS TESLA sticker on the ID.4, bet.)
The problem with social media is that it’s no good without the people you want on there. It’s how the wave carried us all from listserv and MUSH to LiveJournal, then on to Friendster and Myspace, Vox and Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook – and then stopped, because Facebook bought or ripped off every new thing that came along thereafter. Vine, Foursquare, Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok – all either shamelessly duplicated or bought outright. And every subsequent attempt at an alternative – Path, Peach, micro.blog, Cocoon, HalloApp – failed to gain traction.
But now there’s a push. Now there’s an urgency. Now there’s word of mouth evangelism. And the thing that people most instinctively recoil from in Big Tech has been taken away: you’re no longer under the thumb of a single shady individual’s absolute control, whether it’s Werner von Zuckerberg who doesn’t care where the rockets come down or that gurning adolescent who’s going to increase the character limit to 420, I’ll bet my whole liquor cabinet. The push is going to be bigger abroad – just like WhatsApp or Android – but it doesn’t take much. If the right couple dozen people will make the shift, I’d be set for good.
Get yourself an account on a Mastodon instance. I can help. Then less tweet and more toot. We can save ourselves, if only we will. Let’s do this.