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The End of Twitter?

Twitter is a shit show right now.

Those of us who have been around for a while know that Twitter is on metaphorical life support right now. Elon Musk has been treating the platform he now owns like it’s an A/B test of stupidity. Testing dumb idea A against dumber idea B — constantly, on real users, with real consequences.

Understandably, lots of people are getting a little fed up, and are looking for alternatives. But what are the alternatives?

I’m not going to be so bold as to recommend what you do, but I will go over what my thinking is.

  • I will be staying on Twitter as long as possible. Twitter is comfortable, and I’ve been using it since it was only available via SMS. I have extensive block and mute lists on Twitter, so my experience is probably more positive than a lot of people’s. I follow lots of tech folks, Apple pundits, media types, and some comedy stuff. That’s the good part. I also follow news and politics people, and that’s where Twitter gets shady. I will be culling my follow lists not only to clean up the negativity, but to reduce duplication with other online places that demand my attention1.
  • I have jumped back into Mastodon like everyone else. It seems all of us nerdy types have had Mastodon accounts for years, but didn’t really use it. I’ve been on since 2018, and have used it more in the last few days than in the preceding four years. My plan with Mastodon is to keep it to following individuals that I tend to respect. A lot of the bloggers in my RSS feed are on Mastodon, and that’s mostly who I follow at this point. Mastodon will be a politics-free place as long as I can manage.
  • Speaking of RSS, I’ll be revisiting my subscriptions to better align my new outlook on the internet. If I’m not dipping into Twitter as much, I may need to subscribe to some more sites with RSS. We’l see. I signed up for the beta of a new service called Post2. It claims to be a Twitter for news”. If it pans out, it will be nice to get a feed of news that is not clogging up my RSS and social feeds.
  • For work-related things, I’m reluctantly on Linkedin, but don’t follow me there unless you’re interested in re-posts of Product Management nerdery and Disney press releases.
  • Also reluctantly, I’m on Instagram. I don’t post there much anymore, but since I quit Facebook in 2016, it’s a nice place to see family and friends post their pictures.
  • Other than that, I’m on a couple of non-work Slacks and a Discord or two for some software communities to which I like to contribute.
  • Then there’s messaging. iMessage, SMS, WhatsApp, and Telegram. iMessage handles most of it, but there are still a couple WhatApp and Telegram groups I’m a part of.

That’s it. All I need to replace Twitter is Mastodon, Post, LinkedIn, Instagram, Slack, Discord, messaging, and, uhhhh… Twitter.


  1. By demand my attention”, I mean receive my attention because I’m weak”↩︎

  2. Using the code in this link will move me up the queue to get into the beta earlier↩︎

🗓️ November 18, 2022 🏷️ Personal
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