eel

enough friends coming here that I can have a working private account, instead of leaving to platforms that don't have private accounts and/or ones where federation renders the concept of a "private account" a bit of a sham

i keep saying this to my friends every few weeks...

For me it was getting suspended for suspicious behaviour (browser shenanigans) and deciding it's not worth the trouble of solving a captcha to unsuspend myself.

The site isn't even usable for me now. I don't care where people go to and I expect that eventually people will just kinda disperse to various platforms, but it's wild that so many people insist on staying on twitter and not using any other platform.

its both friends and work that keep me there. i managed to lead a shift with my friends from using skype to discord but that came out of the functional issue that skype just stopped working on a lot of our old computers at the time.
and i am an artist on the platform and the problem for me is that while it is incredibly necessary to maintain online presences for my work it isn't feasible for me to actively make playing the social media game a part of my current art practice with how much stuff im already doing and how time consuming it is. maybe for digitial art and illustration people it'd be easier, but there isnt quite a platform that can showcase and elevate a lot of different mediums of work like twitter can just yet.
and with the ones that have something comparable and do, unless there is a large cultural shift like tumblr to twitter those long years ago, there's not really anything i can do and not burn myself out supremely.
edit: and i acknowledge that the site sucks real bad and i want to get off of it as much as the next person, but the work and effort needed to do so while im in the middle of a million projects and trying to maintain connections with long distance friends makes it hard to fully get myself off it

i'm someone who's constantly always half-trying to leave twitter but keeps getting sucked in, and it's interesting to see people say things like "all my friends are there" or "its the place i get the most reach for work"; my issue getting myself off of there is both very different and incredibly simple: poor impulse control. i just cant stop scrolling. it was/is physically and mentally very hard for me to stop scrolling even when i don't want to and am trying to stop

for the longest time (like, 5+ years) it was mainly "corkboard-red-string-esque keeping up with dozens of people i dont follow (and by extension their Opinions) in certain cliques by just manually scrolling their accounts and following breadcrumb trails via replies, retweets, and likes" on twitter specifically, and within the past month or so it was the algo timeline (which i succeeded in avoiding for the longest time ) when i eventually realized those people would now show up on there. now that i've found myself using cohost more than twitter, i'm finding that it's not really twitter-specific -- i currently have ~10 cohost tabs open doing the same thing i did on twitter. i commend staff for their decision to try and build a website that rejects the behaviours that twitter fosters, but its very hard to design around a user's persistent desire to make their own life worse

what would it take for me to leave? i set myself the ultimadum of "if they get rid of the chrono timeline entirely" but 1. as i mentioned above, the algo timeline has started getting its hooks in me so i dont know if that would ACTUALLY be enough to make me stop, and 2. im sure people will just come out with browser extensions to restore the algo timeline and i know my twitter-loving brain would rather just use that than leave, so who knows at this point