Leaving the nest

I’ve decided to leave Twitter.

Elon Musk has made the site more hostile to queer and trans people, women, and people of color by amplifying the messages of those hostile to diversity and reinstating homophobic, transphobic, antisemetic, misogynistic, and white supremacist accounts. While the content moderation practices of pre-Elon Twitter were far from perfect, they at least represented an effort to do what was right and consistent. Elon is a troll looking to empower and encourage those like him, period full stop. He is actively destroying a thing I love.

As a content creator who has used Twitter, at least in part, to promote my content, I am providing a very small molecule of value to the platform by putting there the stuff some people are using it to find. By participating on that platform, I’m giving people a reason to use it. Any value I create for Twitter is now value I’m creating for Elon Musk directly. I cannot, in good conscience, do that.

I was hoping a clear Twitter alternative would emerge prior to coming to this conclusion which, it has been growing increasingly clear, was reaching the point of inevitability. I’m on Mastodon and Hive but I don’t really think either of these seem like a good solution at present. Hive is a nice little app with (apparently) pretty reasonable rules regarding NSFW content, but it doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of adoption from the Twitterati and, even so, its performance has been suffering and it’s run by two people (literally). Mastodon is giving me strong mid-2000s web forum vibes with each instance being run by one or a handful of moderators. In essence, each Mastodon server is tiny little version of Elon’s Twitter with each being run by someone who sees themselves as a benevolent dictator.

I will be posting new blog links on Mastodon and Hive going forward and even Tumblr (where they’ve always been going). I was considering using Twitter only for links back to posts here but, again, that creates value for Elon Musk, if even just an infinitesimal amount. So I’m going to stop doing that, too. This will be the last link I send there.

I will miss engaging with the community I’ve found on Twitter. A lot. I hope if you’re there and reading this you’ll either engage with me here or on one of those other platforms.