I think what kinda stings this time around, different from everything else, was that the "next new thing" isn't really here. It was a forced migration. People jumping ship to here, BlueSky, whatever Meta is doing, or whatever Mastodon instance at this moment isn't coming here voluntarily, per se. And I will go as far as to say that years down the line, Twitter's death or this moment we realized it was FUBAR will probably be a seminal moment for a lot folks.
Much like how people still complain about how Google got rid of its RSS reader, we're going to be mad Twitter became a festering inoperable pit due to some billionaire's hissy fit for years to come and probably blame the fragmentation of its userbase for a lot of why things aren't "as good as it used to be." And that's because, this time, it feels violent.
When everyone stopped using IRC to migrate to AIM to migrate to Discord (and soon, who knows wherelse) the transitions felt more natural. The communities we formed migrated and soon found ourselves comfortable elsewhere. We lose community members and friends, but there's time to say good bye or to fall out of touch. After all, for most of us it's our self who stopped logging onto the one phpBB board one day because none of your friends were posting anymore. The people you truly wanted to keep up with? You probably picked up their AIM or even exchanged honest to god phone numbers. There was time to do this, and as we migrated away from one service, we maintained those relationships elsewhere.
Perhaps another more recent exodus was Tumblr's enshittification where they got rid of porn by way of forbidding "female presenting nipples" whatever that means, but even then, while Tumblr's new policies pleased no one, the site remained relatively operable and, again, users could find something reliable to find refuge and, more importantly, tell people about it.
And to stress this point once more for good measure: for all the horrible policy and feature changes that gradually reduced Skype into a bloated inoperable mess no one willingly wanted to use, our terms for leaving was on our own volition because something inevitably broke the camel's back rather than one day waking up find out one of your most valuable conduits for online interaction just fizzled.
What happened this past weekend with Twitter was violent. It's like waking up one morning and being told "oops, haha, sorry, every cow on earth has died."
Yes, we can maybe ration the last bits of steak we have in the fridge or markets to savor our last time having a nice kebab or something, and, yes we'll find a way to live without hamburgers, but the transition is traumatic. Sure some people can say it's not a big deal because they stopped eating meat a long time ago. Meat was unethical anyway and it's good to stop eating it. But the difference between someone choosing to be a vegetarian and someone deprived of Big Macs from their daily diet is that the vegetarian likely had some time to quit meat on their own terms because they took that initiative.
So the people leaving Twitter today have been pushed to the brink. The ridiculous rationing policy has not only frustrated users, but also condemned users who relied on the service to make a living to be swept away without an opportunity to part on their own terms. And in the panicked swell of mass migration, we are not only hurt because we are violently torn away from what's familiar to us, but also torn away from others without an opportunity to say goodbye.
We are throwing the dice and hoping we've joined the right cocktail of social media sites to maintain our relationship with the people we truly want to stay close to. We're hoping that, by some miracle, that your old followers will remember your specific handle name and type it into the search bar of this specific service and then say "ah yes, Chiaki747, brilliant person. Thought they were hilarious on Twitter, I should give them a follow to continue enjoying their content on cohost dot org."
And this is as someone who doesn't necessarily need social media to survive. For artists, writers, journalists, developers, so many people have lost a neutral ground to network and we don't know if that favorite customer or vice versa will ever join cohost so that you can rekindle your parasocial relationship.
And even if Twitter recovers somewhat and users can come back to scrawl onto their feeds like survivors in a zombie uprising, "Headed to Tumblr. Find chiaki747," we'll never know if it even reached the people we wanted to reach. They might already be gone, or your feed is already buried under a rate limit.
That is why this is a loss, a heavy loss, and it's okay to feel hurt by it. I think it's violent and its fair to need time to process it. This is what trauma is made out of because, even if you knew the end was coming, no one knew it was coming now.
As the previous rechost said, however, we can recover and we'll create new community. We all move on and find new friends. We can maybe do better this time. We may even one day run into an old mutual somewhere. That is true, but I just want to emphasize that it's okay to be in pain, to be afraid, to need some time to process and reorient yourself. Because, no, things really aren't okay right now, and it's perfectly sensible to feel that way.
