Dex 🔞

Interesting to see how folks' stubborn habits about spreading stuff have largely remained unchanged since twitter went down the second drain. I still see twitter links on discord all the time even though half the folks I know consider it dying and it's unusable for anyone without an account. bluesky is largely the same deal wrt inaccessibility, but folks have been responding to both by just pasting in screengrabs of posts instead.

given the nitter shutdown due to twitter shutting down the creation of guest accounts, i wonder how long fxtwitter/fixupx have

and what happens in discords once they go as well

(my understanding is bluesky is at least a little more public now without an account. still)

"why do you stay on twitter when it's borderline unusable and operated by nazis and all the engagement you've ever received on your personal craft is mostly fake or meaningless"

those are all totally valid points! you're right, genuinely. I guess I'm still there because I've spent more than a decade there and I just know people, people I like to talk to or even just softly interact with every day. and if I suddenly deleted my account most of those relationships would suddenly evaporate into thin air because I don't have the social energy to contact people constantly 1-on-1. that's too gruesome a bandaid for me to rip off myself, so I need the piece of shit running it to just absolutely fuck it up beyond repair and have it explode overnight so the decision is made for me. I really, really hope he does it soon so I can stop being assaulted by crypto bots

I feel like most people talking about leaving twitter don't have a response past "don't worry! your art/music/games will get seen elsewhere" but like. okay what if I legitimately just shoot the shit and talk to people on there. I'm not even mad at the people suggesting it, I'm mad at myself and mad at the situation (and mostly mad at Elon Musk)

twitter sucks shit and it sucks shit to still be on there but there are ways, at least, to lock things down so hard you both can't see any of the garbage.

the site was an active detriment to my mental health for a long damn time and i'm glad i'm mostly off it. occasionally i check into my public one but mostly my activity there these days is on my private accounts. i've been running the main private with everyone's retweets turned off for years, so that i only see what my friends have to say.

you can use control panel for twitter (browser extension, also has a $5 mobile safari version) or aerowitter (patched android twitter app) to turn off the vast majority of the site's features, including the "for you" algorithm timeline, or even turn off the timeline entirely to force yourself away from it if you need to. you should be running an adblocker whether or not you use those. don't let the bastard motherfucker, who stole the place we made our friends in, make any money off you

the core of why I'm still on there at all is: i still have friends who use it, and a lot of them use it for the same reasons. if twitter falls apart some of them are just gonna quit social media entirely. and i'm going to miss them. i already miss talking with a lot of the people who decided to make bluesky their thing.

if you just used the site for business and networking, consider chilling out on criticizing people who used and use it as a way to talk to their friends and maintain interpersonal relationships. we're not using it for engagement.

when it goes, it's going to take half our cultural memory with it, too. conversations lost, things that could only be reassembled from half a dozen people's personal data archives, using software nobody's written. things that will be forgotten, because we can no longer refresh our memories.

we know it sucks. we're acutely conscious that it sucks. but: our presence or absence there doesn't really make a tangible difference. nobody's signing up for twitter because we still use it, and it's not going to die faster if we leave; most of us use adblockers so they won't even lose any money. even if every single queer and every single communist on there left, the site's set on its course.

and if you didn't have strong enough ties to keep you there, or could transplant the ties you had: i'm happy for you. please let us mourn what we had in peace, as it slowly sputters out like a dying candle.

yeah

we'd recognized the impact it was having on mental health and made efforts to cut back; turning off notifications, deleting it from phone, setting time limits. started making copious notes on where to find people, assuming that it would have entirely imploded by now

it was july when we made the decision to private main account when the rate limits started hitting people hard, assuming things would only get worse for accounts that refused to pay. turned off a lot of RTs, and minimally check back in usually when there's something to crosspost.

has it been better for productivity, of wasting less time on social media? yes, debatably
but it's sure as shit lonelier

like, i fucking hate the phrase "watercooler moments" when it comes to companies trying to get people back in the office.
but when it came to twitter... yeah. on the rare time i check back in, i skim through a curated list of friends, and there's always some conversation i can send a quick reply to; helping to brighten someone's day or a quick tease or whatever. either that or someone having a major life event that it's helpful to know about
for whatever reason, that's just less common on masto, here, and the occasional check of a bluesky timeline

(i have to wonder if part of it is the worse handling of private accounts on masto and here, and bluesky's protocol making them impossible)

i could message people one-on-one via telegram or discord, but i'd feel like that was bothering them

and so a lot of stuff now only gets either journaled privately, or in select discord group chats that each only have a cross section of the friend group

the realisation was sudden, but it made a pattern of gradual behaviour make sense

we'd been using "the royal we" in work emails for years, even in situations where it could not refer to the wider team.
it felt wrong not doing so.

our twitters are locked, but there was a pattern going back years of referring to "my roommate", "my friend", "nsfw sona" (me to 💜)/"sfw sona" (💜 to me, even as that label sometimes made less sense)
and sure, some people keep their AD accounts at arms length, but not to that degree

but we can't be plural! that'd be disrespectful to our friends who are!

at 5am, we don't remember the catalyst for fully acknowledging it, it's probably either in our journals or twitter archives somewhere but we'd have to get out of bed for those
but musk's takeover of twitter rapidly accelerated things, because we suddenly had a reason to hold hands and immediately tear down at least some of the barriers - given our usernames on things like Telegram and Discord use what we now acknowledge as one of the names for the system as the username there

started the morning productively at 6am with a useful(?) doodle for anyone still only following us on twitter, should the "not a bot" subscription be inevitably expanded