Right, so #musk buying #twitter is enough to get me to start looking seriously at the #fediverse and decentralized tools again. Like #mastofdon and here, at #microblog.
I haven’t been posting to Twitter for a few years now in any case. I have used it to follow a few carefully curated lists, most recently on the Russo-Ukraine War. I will miss those - I may continue to use Twitter just for those lists and ignore the rest, though I’m leaning more toward RSS and a few other sites for news. There’s less tendency to doom scroll that way, which did me no good the first weeks of the war.
It’s pretty clear that while Twitter is the best of the centralized social media platforms, except perhaps Reddit, it’s still a centralized platform. We’re about to see what happens to “free speech” when a single billionaire takes a centralized platform private. It isn’t going to be pretty.
It wasn’t pretty before that though. For everyone that’s just now jumping to the Fediverse and Mastodon, the potential problems caused by the Musk purchase have been there for years, you just didn’t notice them. It’s a matter of degree. Twitter leaned somewhat left but has also been a haven for crazies and bots and was clearly weaponized for political purposes ages ago. Musk says he’s going to clean up the bots but it seems equally clear he intends to roll out the red carpet for the crazies that agree with him. My personal suspicion is that he wants Twitter mostly to control what is said about him, but mostly to boost his personal signal so he can continue to manipulate markets. He may very well also double down on the political weaponization of the platform in favor of right-wing politicians, who he clearly agrees with.
Even if I’m wrong, it still is a bad idea to have the “public square” under one person’s control. There’s just no good outcome that way.
For the past few years, I’ve been a subscriber to the Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. I’ve avoided posting much, anywhere. There’s generally not much upside to sharing your opinion online, and potentially a lot of downsides. The large social media sites that ate blogs and other Web 1.0 media that old-timers like me thought were going to change the world aren’t safe or healthy. Honestly, I find most of what passes for discussion on those sites is garbage anyway. Better to keep one’s head down and just consume very curated lists. I started my own small, invite-only Discord, kept a good RSS reader fed with sites, subscribed to a few Twitter lists and DM’d with a few selected Twitter friends. I chucked the rest and stayed low.
Which I may continue to mostly do, but the Musk purchase of Twitter seems like it may be a time to renew my interest in and use of the new versions of decentralized platforms, like micro.blog. I’ll be the first to admit I’m badly out of practice blogging and writing in general. I’m unconvinced I have much to say. I’m even less convinced anyone should give a damn about what I say when I do say it. Still, maybe it’s time to try the new tools and see what happens.
If nothing else maybe Musk buying Twitter will be the spur that prompts a few of this generation of Internet people to also try the new tools and make something new and not dependent on the Zuckerbergs, Dorsey’s, and Musks. Watching that would be worth doing.