I’ve always loved the format of Twitter. I loved how immediate and succinct it was. It was punchy and fun, so direct and frivolous. Who actually cares about your every little thought? No one! But that was kind of the point. It was appealingly self-involved, but also a great place to build a platform around a topic or cause. It had such limitless potential.
Twitter is In Its Villain Era
When Elon came onto the scene and turned Twitter into X, it declined quickly. His personal brand of willful ignorance and fascist misogyny bled into the bones of Twitter immediately and it began to rot from the inside out. None of the social media platforms are perfect, by any means, but something happened with Twitter that was unexpectedly dark. With the puppet strings clutched tightly in Elon’s talons, it became a space that brought out the worst in people, myself included. By the end of my time there, it felt almost masochistic to post because virtually anything shared would be attacked, reduced, and trolled by energy vampires. The brief, punchy concept of a tweet was overtaken by long, rambling posts, and as the Nazis and other hate groups moved in, it all started to feel like it was coming apart at the seams.
Change is Surprisingly Hard
Walking away from Twitter/X and an audience of 7000 followers was hard, but I haven’t looked back. What I have come to realise is that numbers don’t make community and the landscape of social media is forever in flux. Lots of us spend a ton of time online and these virtual communities are more and more “real”, which also makes them more nuanced, and makes our sense of connection more personal and meaningful. When that space is compromised or we feel the need to move on, there’s bound to be some feelings. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m grieving the end of my Twitter era, I do feel it for the change that it is. Like any relationship that has run its course, leaving can be hard because it’s familiar, even if it’s no longer serving you.
Making X My Ex
It would be easy for me to say that the social and cultural shift that we saw as Twitter became X was a Jekyll and Hyde type transformation that I had nothing to do with. But the truth is, when you spend time absorbing negativity, whether you want to or not, over time you’ll become more negative. The worse Twitter got, the easier it was to unleash into the void. In retrospect I think I became much too comfortable expressing my frustrations and pain in that space, in part because that was simply the energy that was already there. That’s when it began to crystallise for me that perhaps it was no longer a community that I wanted to be a part of. Further to that, the more unhinged Elon becomes, and the closer X gets to being a dating site / data mining monster behind a paywall, the less I want to be counted among his users. But this isn’t really about Elon. This isn’t really about rebranding from Twitter to X, it’s about looking inward and examining my relationship with social media, and not liking what I saw.
Where To Now?
The jury is still out on where the next best platform is. The Twitter style format is popular for a reason and while lots of folks are loving Mastodon, I’ve found it frustrating to navigate and nothing about it has bowled me over. Bluesky is much the same. It seems more sex-positive than some other spaces, but I haven’t had any luck getting any conversational momentum there. BUT! Despite my ongoing frustrations with Instagram for their unreasonable and inconsistent censorship, I have found their Twitter-like platform, Threads, delightful. Cool people, a sensitive algorithm, a strong feeling of comradery, especially around reporting and blocking bots and bigots. That’s refreshing after the mess that Elon made of Twitter.
Moving On From Twitter
All break ups suck, even the metaphorical one I’m clumsily describing here. Again, I wouldn’t call this feeling grief, but there is a sense of loss. There are people I’ve now lost touch with because they haven’t left Twitter yet and joined other platforms. There are other people who I would seek out if I could remember their handles, and just like those people’s connections slip through my fingers, someone out there will have forgotten their connection to me. This is the nature of para-social relationships, they tend to exist in a myopic state where out of sight is out of mind. I wish I could say that it’s just social media, but we are kidding ourselves if we deny how seamless the overlap is between “real life” and virtual life. All the more reason to think about how we spend our time, and how we use our words online.
So far, Threads has been a joy and a soft place to land after the tire fire that is Twitter/X. Connections seem easy, finding like-minded folks has been a breeze, and with no DMs everything is up front and public, so the creep factor is massively reduced. For now I’m using it as a headquarters and home base. There’s an appetite for sex positivity and the kind of work that I do, so I’m running with it. Will it stay the utopia it seems to be? Who knows! But for now it feels fun and easy, like social media should.
