Everyone has a breaking point, and I reached mine nine days ago when Elon Musk endorsed the German far right. “Is the German public aware of this?” he asked while retweeting a call for Germans to vote for the increasingly extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD), and suggesting it is scandalous that the country pays for the rescue of migrants who would otherwise drown in the Mediterranean. “Yes. And it’s called saving lives,” the German government responded. “So you’re actually proud of it. Interesting,” Musk chin-stroked in return, making reference to “invasion vibes.”
Thus ended a decade and a half of my active—and occasionally hyperactive—participation in Twitter, then X. I am not shuttering my account, in case new management comes around one day, and because my job requires me to visit the site from time to time. But I’m not contributing to the platform anymore while it remains under its current leadership because I feel that now amounts to supporting someone who doesn’t merely have inhumane views, but who has done his damnedest to chase away those who disagree with him, while financially rewarding those who seek to fuel discord and hatred. Fine, X is what it has become, and I’m off. Now I’m spending all my microblogging time on Bluesky and Mastodon.
Do I miss X? Really not—my brief time off the platform has already spared me the confusing consequences of Musk’s decisions to scrap headlines and to throw unmarked, unblockable programmatic ads into the mix. I do miss Twitter, but Twitter doesn’t exist anymore. Are those other platforms adequate replacements for Twitter? Kind of.
Bluesky, which is enjoying an extremely visible influx of Twitter evacuees, is fast becoming a lot like certain aspects of old Twitter—the left-wing cool kids and the policy people, who also tend to skew progressive. It’s a bit too echo-chamber-y, but on the other hand, most users currently seem to be enjoying the chance to bask in expertise and mutual respect. I will be interested to see how Bluesky evolves once it inevitably moves from an invitation-only model to something truly open.
Mastodon is…Mastodon, only far more active these days. Again, there’s a leftward tilt, and some policy wonks, but it’s still largely old-school tech people hanging out. It’s also fun, but it feels as if the more usable Bluesky is achieving greater momentum right now.
So now I’m actively using two platforms instead of one, but I would say my combined time spent still doesn’t match that from back when Twitter was fun. That’s probably because I’m not following as many people as I did on Twitter, so there isn’t as much content to read. The volume of content is growing quickly as the migration continues, though. On Bluesky and to a slightly lesser extent Mastodon, it is now possible to abandon X and find a rewarding experience on the other side.
But again, I miss the Twitter that doesn’t exist anymore—the place where everyone agreed to hang out. Things did sometimes get nasty when ideologies clashed, and it’s frankly therapeutic to have a more harmonious environment, but I’m not sure it’s healthy to have a situation where people risk losing touch with what the other side thinks. On the old Twitter, for all its faults, that was impossible.
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David Meyer
