So, it looks like Twitter is finally, finally on its last legs (Why couldn't it have been Kissinger!?), and my response is...similar to the "if only this were on better terms" dejection I greeted the death of E3 with. Note that I say "similar": the reason my response to the latter was as dismal as it was is because that even represented not the death of every cultural ill that E3 represented - basically its pioneering the concept of the marketing event holiday - but those ills flourishing to such an extent that they could outgrow E3 itself.
This doesn't really apply to Twitter's collapse. Sure, it may not be clear what's going to replace Twitter, simply because there are so many options for what COULD replace it, but aside from maybe BlueSky, whose appeal I still don't understand (it's just Twitter Again! Jack Dorsey even helped create it!), all those options are, if not better than what they're replacing, then at least different enough from it. In fact, it's not even clear that the set of ideals Twitter represented - users as commodities whose data can be scraped and sold to advertisers, neuroses and compulsion and hatred and every other negative emotion marshaled to keep users in place because what else could you offer them to make this system work - could survive on other platforms. Cohost is predicated on rejecting those ideals, the federated nature of Mastodon makes it difficult for marketers to lay claim to it in the same way they did Twitter, Tumblr is doing whatever the hell Tumblr does, you get the point.
So why the dejection? Simple: we had absolutely nothing to do with it. From everything I've heard, Twitter's only dying because Elon Musk turning his refusal to pay a bill into an opportunity to eke some revenue out of the site has made it too unusable for a significant percentage of its users to tolerate. It's the same as the Reddit moderator strike (wait, this article specifies July 1 as the date for the dreaded API change; has anyone checked Reddit lately?), and to the Stack Overflow strike: the relentless profit seeking is destroying the cornerstones of the old Internet we knew and hated, but it's not entirely clear that the users who hated it are proposing a new model that would replace it with something better. More broadly, recent events served to underscore that we're all just passive spectators to historical change, not active participants within it.
