I dumped the Ivory app off my phone this week. I can still access both my Mastodon accounts over the web, if I need to look, but there has been no uptake for Mastodon from the people I needed to move there. Too many friends have replaced Twitter with nothing at all, for better or worse, and my friends are of an age where that makes more sense than looking at Bluesky or Picnic or whatever the latest alternative is.
Part of the problem, honestly, is that Twitter’s engineers built a system that failed mostly safe. There are numerous technical issues with the site, but it can be kept limping along in day to day use. It’s only when they try to do something exceptional – like the DeSaster – that things conspicuously break. There has been a steady slow degradation, but if you have a private account following only friends and make a conscious effort not to click on the For You tab, you can still approximate a reasonable experience for now.
Outside that bubble, of course, it’s a disaster. If I use a VPN to Europe, or Safari, it’s mostly dog pictures and soccer news, but for whatever reason, going to Twitter with Firefox on a US IP address offers you a cavalcade of anti-woke zombies, crypto hustlers and general shitposting before you even try to log in. Twitter’s target audience is the well-off fifteen year old boy with no positive male role model and plenty of time for gaming, because that’s who runs it.
The wild card in all this is Instagram, which I crawled back to for want of a viable alternative. It’s still where’s it was in 2016: the safest social network, thanks to only accessing it through the mobile website to cut out the preposterous avalanche of ads. What’s interesting is that Facebook is apparently serious about “Instagram for text”, aka Barcelona or P92 or some such, which would basically be Twitter but using your Insta account for credentials.
And this is a huge deal, simply because people already have Instagram. People already know who they follow on Instagram. The people I miss on Twitter – Greenock Morton Football Club, the San Jose Giants, Vanderbilt University – they’re all on Insta and would have very little trouble migrating their text posts there as well. That might be what it takes to dislodge Twitter: just shift into something else you’re already using. And if people were to do that, I’d be hard-pressed not to pop the app on my phone and call it a day.
And then there’s the wild card, one I described with Announcements ™ last year. People on Signal have not really taken up Stories, but I have a lot more people on iMessage than Signal, and if Apple is adding a journaling app to Health, it’s a short hop to tying everything together in some kind of sharing service. Maybe I’m just desperately trying to will Pal About into existence, but that Cocoon app is sitting out there untouched and un-updated and could probably be bought for a song as part of the framework. It would be nice to have some way to have an ambient presence of friends in your life, especially at an age and in an era where the effort required to maintain the ties can be more than you have in the tank at day’s end.
In any event, it’s important to keep eyes open here. Just because Twitter is Trump and Facebook is Bush doesn’t mean the latter wasn’t a disaster. It’s just the the former turned out to be even worse. And we won’t get better until we wrench the wheel away and demand better.