If there's one thing that Twitter collapsing has solidified in me, it's this; Queer creators and queer people more broadly have to fight for spaces, even online. Let me explain what I mean. Queer spaces in the physical world exist. Most people will be familiar with things like gay bars and night clubs which are not bad, but they're limiting. Access to those spaces is something that comes with an expectation. You're going there to drink. You're going there to socialise, and more often than not, you're going there to spend money. Money which statistically, queer people are less likely to have. There are other spaces that exist too, like Cafes, games rooms, book stores, etc. Generally these also rely on having an income to keep going, but they generally have less of an expectation and pressure to people using them. They for wider age ranges, wider incomes, and often actively assist or are part of queer support networks. These might be the closest to 'third spaces' that queer communities have. Third spaces here meaning spaces where one can relax without the pressure to spend money, but where they can also socialise and gather. The lack of third spaces is a problem for everyone of course, with the disappearance of these kinds of 'free and open' spaces negatively impacting communities all across the world. For queer people though, who already feel alienated broadly by large parts of society, this problem is particularly acute. what has this got to do with Twitter though? Well, Twitter, and some other online platforms were a huge boon for the wider queer community. open and free, easy to find people and connect over like interests and issues - sounds a lot like an online version of a third space. But here's where it gets tricky. Social media platforms, and content sharing platforms are at the end of the day - companies. They have to make money to survive. And if there isn't a subscription service, the money has to come from somewhere. This, online, is usually advertising. Advertisers, you will be unsurprised to hear, do not like advertising on platforms that are hostile, associated with negative feedback, or things that would hurt their brand. For this reason, a lot of these platforms have Terms of Service which limit what users can post and say. This in theory isn't a bad thing. It's moderation, even if it's moderation for the sake of monitisation. The trouble for queer people happens in how that moderation is applied. Generally, such ToS will include limits to 'explicit' content. Burger King doesn't want to advertise on a site full of explicit content. But these sites are huge, and moderating and enforcing the ToS is rarely done by real people. instead, it's done by bots. How do you program a bot? Well, you give it a bunch of key words and things to search for and enforce automatically. And here's where it becomes a problem. You see, a lot of what is counted as 'explicit' is determined by whoever makes the bots. Which means there can be bias in them. One of those biases is, unfortunately, that anything queer, is inherently explicit. There are countless examples of this - and a good one is Youtube. Youtube doesn't permit explicit content. A video talking about sex education might get listed as explicit, but if your sex education video is specifically about queer sex education, it's almost definitely going to get listed as explicit. Sex education is no more explicit if it's queer than not, but that's not how those ToS bots see it. And the same applies to other sites. This is what makes it hard for queer people to access third spaces online. the ToS often unfairly targets them. Now you might ask why a youtube video of queer specific sex ed is important - well, it's because it doesn't exist most other places. Especially in parts of the US where it's being taken out of other places because of fears it'll indoctrinate people. And for avoidance of doubt, I grew up under section 28. Not knowing queer people existed didn't make me less queer, it just made me feel more alone. So. Twitter: Twitter was not perfect, but it's ToS was at least a little more friendly to queer people, and queer creators who wanted to talk about queer things. Now that it's going the way of the Dodo, the queer creators I know are struggling to keep the networks they've since built. Even a lot of art platforms have content policies that end up targeting a lot of queer content just by accident. There are ones that don't, so what's the problem? Well, Reach and Size. Twitter wasn't the biggest, but it was big. Big enough that people who typically didn't get a lot of eyes on their work, and struggled to get seen could actually gather an audience. But now that one big place is going away, leaving a lot of other, fragmented, smaller places. It's going to make finding and staying in contact with these people harder, and more than that - if twitter dies and goes down - all that content, all those creations and thoughts, the digital oral history, will be lost. And as a community, queer people have already struggled to maintain an oral history as it is. The internet and sites like twitter offered an online third space to queer people who didn't have a physical third space. Without it, it'll be hard to build back up, and more so, a decade of oral histories and personal stories will be lost. Online media is not, in fact, forever. it's only there for as long as the servers are. And servers require a lot of maintenance and money. So, to all my queer friends I say: Consider buying a journal, and keeping it safe. Because in the information age, it's tempting to fall back on the internet, but we've already lost a lot, and media preservation is not something most web platforms take seriously or care about. and we're going to need something to hand down to the next generations to let them know we were here too.