Much to the displeasure of everyone, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter went through over a week ago, and since then everything has been terrible on the site. From Musk firing over half of the company to Twitter Verification becoming a subscription service (though not just yet; the latest report suggests Twitter will be holding off on that change until after the U.S. Midterm elections this week) to advertisers backing away ( for example, the Canadian Federal Government has “issued guidance” to its departments to pause any current or future ad campaigns on the site), to Elon apparently begging for the people he fired to come back. The mood on Twitter can be summed up by the phrase “The End is Nigh.”
I’m not exactly happy at this turn of events. My social media use and presence has never been big to begin with, and both with my own changes in creative ambitions and changes to the services themselves, I’ve backed away from a number of social media options. Apart from this website, Twitter and Discord are practically my only social media presences now, and my presence on the latter is somewhat niche, to put it mildly. Twitter is hardly perfect, but it remained the one place I could buzz about and keep up with various news sources I might not find elsewhere as well as funny, heartfelt, and/or thoughtful tidbits. That Twitter might become unusable or toxic in a matter of weeks (and that’s being optimistic) is not a nice thought.
To be fair, I don’t have all that much to lose, as I don’t have much of a brand and certainly no real income depending on Twitter. I have 48 followers, of which I might actually interact with about three, and those because I know them personally. What few tweets that seem to get attention in the wider world do so only by riding the coattails of some more popular tweet I chose to reply to or retweet with my own commentary. With the new algorithms set to go into effect once the new Twitter Subscription/Blue Check system goes online, I can expect any tweets I make to essentially be buried, never to be seen outside of my followers and probably not even then.
I don’t plan to leave – I don’t see how my leaving Twitter will help things – but I am doing a serious rethink on my reasons for being there, and what my goals are Re: Social Media in this new era. If things do indeed become toxic over the next few days or weeks, I will certainly leave for my own mental and emotional safety, but I suspect I will still have a presence when the servers go dark.
But if and when my Twitter presence dies, will I go elsewhere? I have been hearing good things about Mastodon, though it seems on the surface to be more complicated to set up and maintain than other social media sites have been. But ultimately, it will boil down to what my new goals for social media will be once I’ve re-examined them, and it is not impossible that my final decision might be to stay away from social media entirely.
Whether or not Twitter survives the coming days, and whether or not I set up a new social media presence elsewhere, this website will still remain my home on the internet. It at least is not subject to the whims of narcissistic billionaires.