I am no stranger to watching things on the internet go up in proverbial flames: Livejournal, Myspace, Xanga, the chat rooms on Morpheus. If you’ve been around online long enough there’s a good chance you were part of something ruined by Yahoo!
Honestly, Yahoo has a specific skill set in that if the company obtains your favourite sites, it’s going to suck. That was one of the many reasons it was branded Yahell by its users. I was part of OneGroup before it merged with Yahoo!Groups. Geocities was another dumpster fire in the end, and of course Tumblr.
I was an active member on Tumblr for years before Yahoo! managed to get its greedy fingers on it and ruined it, and yet - and yet! the Tumblr-Yahoo merge wasn’t half as bad as the bullshit going on over on Twitter. I still occasionally use my old tumblr for random fandom related stuff.
But now! Now, Elon Musk wants to charge us for the pleasure of using Twitter. The pleasure of not having our tweets buried by the algorithm if we want our stuff to gain any traction. The pleasure of getting rid of bots and misinformation. That’s just not going to happen.
I feel a little like Black Widow when she says, “Regimes fall every day. I tend not to weep over that, I’m Russian.” Social media changes frequently. It’s more of a matter of when, not if, and I will absolutely go where I feel I will get the most out of that.
The thing that sucks the most is that I met a lot of great authors on Twitter. I’ll probably lose touch with most of them, and I hate that, but also? The worst thing of all is that a lot of people will miss out on the money they make off Twitter - all those creatives who had a virtual home.
For me, the timing of this whole debacle sucks! I didn’t need to be doing all this change over shit in the middle of NaNoWriMo, when it was the first year in five years I was going to be able to take part without stressing myself out about doing it around the kiddo. Nor did I need to do this around my birthday (shout out to fellow November/Scorpio babies!), but here we are, doing this shit. Finding our new virtual homes.
What makes an ideal virtual home? I’m on Mastodon and Tumblr, and both require a certain learning curve. Mastodon because it’s new. It’s decentralised - what does that even mean? And Tumblr because it has changed in the last 10 years, because of course it has. But that’s an entirely different blog post.
This post is to commiserate with everyone who has lost something they built due to the hubris of a man with more money than anyone should ever possess. There isn’t another Twitter. The communities you built there will likely be flung off into the far reaches of the internet, and you’ll lose touch with many.
The impact of that will be felt for a long time. Likely longer than I could foresee, but I hope everyone finds somewhere to go. Somewhere they’re supported and uplifted. Right now that place for me is on an instance on Mastodon, and I’ve gone back to Tumblr. I’m still on Twitter, too, but for how long I can’t say.
If you’d like to connect with me on any of these platforms, please do!
Or if you don’t like any of these options, why? Where are you going to plant your virtual flag?