I enjoyed blogging till I fell hard for Twitter, circa 2010.
I enjoyed many wonderful years on Twitter, learning a ton by following fascinating people and mostly re-sharing their great Tweets. Alas, in 2022, Elon Musk’s arrogant incompetence destroyed Twitter overnight, and now I’m back to blogging!
I’m horrified the beautiful knowledge-sharing town square Twitter once was could so easily be bought and contorted into a corrupted shell of its former greatness. I loved Twitter and the people I followed there. Many of those people are now lost to me forever. And I will never learn more from their wisdom. Those days are gone forever.
I’m now https://mstdn.io/@lavin, but Mastodon is not (yet) nearly as engaging as Twitter. It’s harder to find people to follow, and you can’t add a comment when retweeting (or is that “re-Tooting”?), which is how I (and many others) prefer to re-share content. I spend far less time on Mastodon than I spent on Twitter.
But constraints often lead to surprising discoveries, and I believe good will come of this. Socially minded engineers are innovating toward a truly public and possibly even greater Twitter-like experience. New communities will re-form post-Twitter… built on a more solid foundation, not easily subverted by a petulant, self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing billionaire.
Perhaps some good will come from rekindling my blog.
And perhaps Twitter’s death will lead some Americans to re-think their blind faith in billionaires and corporations and private enterprise and “free” markets (few of which are remotely free at all… American industries have largely become oligopolies, in part because industry consolidation has generated market power that has generated windfall profits, a fraction of which is spent lobbying and bribing politicians to deregulate everything, which fuels more industry consolidation, etc.). If you want to be depressed, read Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money”.
(With appreciation to Gene Gallin for the photo on Unsplash)