The future of my online shizz

I don’t know what to do for the best with my social media. Twitter is all I have. Zuckerberg is worse than Musk in many ways, so I’m not going to those places. Mastodon is not a replacement for anything, it’s a unique flavour of online community that will take effort from everyone who goes there.

Blogs are the obvious answer, but who will have the taste for that these days? It’s effort. Twitter removed the work of posting and consuming, a bit like fast food, and now we’re all a bit flabby and useless, technologically speaking.

Perhaps Twitter got people online who would never have blogged. The numbers suggest that’s true. But the global social experiment is being stress-tested by a panicking billionaire man-child in hock to illiberal, possibly evil-intentioned, investors.

I refuse to join in the panic with my own Twitter account, but then I’ve never wanted news or big-P politics on my feed. It started as a place to be anonymous and play around, then it became somewhere I could present myself as a writer, and now it’s also where I mingle with peers and friends. Until I see my experience change, I’m staying put, spreading my version of the world to all who’ll listen while I can, and sticking with those who stay true to their creative visions.

But I’m also going to diversify — more writing on my blog, more writing on Patreon, and well, let’s see what happens next. Substack has an RSS reader built in now. The Open Web is a powerful thing. Somebody will build something new. Or maybe something will be repurposed?

And my own writing practice? This could be exactly what it needs. I’m excited. I’ve cursed Twitter as much as I’ve appreciated it. The choice of leaving may soon be taken out of my hands. If it burns down, the writing goes on, conversations will still happen, and we’re not going to lose each other. It’s just a fucking website.