In a roundabout way that he most certainly didn't see coming nor in any way intended, Elon kind of ended up doing me a favor with his bullshit shenanigans over on Twitter? Effectively nixing third party client support is what finally pushed me off that place altogether and while on some level I still miss being able to keep up with what's happening in people's lives with relative ease, it's... even avoiding the usual pitfalls of falling into arguments over misunderstandings, harassment upon being noticed by the wrong crowd or obsessing over numbers and what they signify instead of the actual relationships you have with other people, even at its very best, it was bad.
For context, I struggle with loneliness - a lot. Have all my life, and I'm sure at least some of y'all who knew me back there have seen some of my screams of anguish about it; even surrounding myself with people, for the longest time that feeling has managed to creep in from time to time regardless, feeling like a stranger to nearly everyone, and I hadn't really been able to identify why exactly.
Until now, at least. Being forced to change my social habits, deftly sliding into new social circles and finally managing to shrug off anxiety I've had for the better part of a decade as a result of previous bad run-ins and fallings out ended up greatly improving my overall mental health. A lot of that is being able to trust people again, but that trust still has to be built on something which ties right back to what was making me feel so horribly alone even with a plethora of people around me - which is that Twitter is fucking horrible for anything beyond the most casual of social interactions.
Like, from an engineering perspective, Twitter (and other social media that functions like it) occupies kind of an uncanny valley in the way people communicate. It's not akin to IRC or instant messengers that mostly serve to emulate face to face or telephone conversations; short messages of a fleeting nature, sent at a rapid pace, that you have to be in the same room for to witness - Twitter is too open, has too much overhead and is in the entirely wrong format for that. Yet, it's not like forums, blogging sites like this one, Tumblr, or in the olden days LiveJournal (or if we want to get even more quaint with it, writing letters) either; the message limit is far too small for the "get all your thoughts out in one piece and let others respond to that" mode of communicating either. The result is a place that feels open, where you can talk to anyone, anywhere in the world, whenever you so please; but is nevertheless actually quite closed off in what you can efficiently get out to them. You can't really get to know anyone on Twitter, or places that function the same way; at most, become acquainted and get the actual knowing each other out of the way elsewhere.
For me then, a vaguely mixed if horrendously white passing disabled queer from the Netherlands, by far most of whose friends live at least a sea if not an ocean away, this basically translated to it being kind of a bread and circuses of social interaction with others. It fulfilled the immediate urge to keep up with people, it made me feel, at least on a surface level that I was out there in the world and not just secluding myself in a room with a computer, but it was ultimately... hollow. Surface level comments, teasing, maybe even a quick conversation here and there - but nothing with actual depth. I was decently well known at nearly 2,400 followers while not throwing much out in the open other than shitposts, but yet I didn't feel like I was occupying any space in people's lives - nor like anyone I didn't already keep in touch with elsewhere was taking up much in mine, and furthermore helped make me actively afraid of actually reaching out and doing so. Poking them there was the more casual, safer option after all. If they want to talk to you, they'll reach out of their own accord surely; after all, why assume that just because you shoot the shit there, they'll be open to you approaching more closely? That assumption has bitten you in the ass before.
... Except that's not how that actually works in the grand scheme of things, prior experiences be damned. Turns out actual friendships are a back and forth, and me being burnt and looking for the safest options I had at my disposal meant I was, for all appearances of being an open book, doing absolutely jack shit to actually open up to others (something I already was very good at thanks to the home I grew up in - but that's another story altogether); try as you might, regardless of how positively you feel about each other, people won't gravitate towards someone who doesn't seem all that interested in talking to them for long.
So yeah, thanks I guess Elon. Finally took the jump into going back to actually connecting with the people around me thanks to your dumbass power trip.
