wikt | beyond twitter

is Twitter actually gonna be over?

my relationship with this website is strange.
on one hand, it has been a source of opportunities - to practice Japanese, to connect with worldwide and Japanese fans of VTubers, I met my girlfriend partly thanks to Twitter, so I do feel a little indebted... I browse it every day for interesting political discussion, for illustrations of anime girls, I post a little, it's fun.

on the other, it's hard to ignore how Twitter is currently being mismanaged by the richest normie to ever exist. it would be easy to say that people are doomsaying, trying to fulfill the self-fulfilling prophecy of "Twitter's gonna die, time to leave".
but now some of those people are advertisers. they don't put it so candidly, but they're saying it with their feet - leaving Twitter. (Musk managed to actually get offended enough at one of them to block him lmao)

that said, who knows. there's plenty of reason to believe Twitter is definitely circling the drain. Musk is slashing out workers from Twitter left and right, cutting the corners that make Twitter a functional website. lawsuits are knocking at the door over an illegal mass layoff, while Musk iterates on his newly acquired product in front of us, taking random suggestions from Stephen King, arguing with Hank Green and generally coping at full dose.

I have a feeling there might be a bailout, though, a desperate attempt to save Twitter from Elon by some outside party? hell, will we even make it there? what will go down after midterm results in America?
from what I can tell, on Japanese Twitter, there's hardly a stir, though I'd have to ask more knowledgeable people.

and even then, the network effect which Cory Doctorow often discusses - leaves us in this awkward position, disinclined to abandon Twitter altogether, held captive by the things we actually care about. will Japanese businesses eventually start looking for alternatives? will users? and who will migrate?

even now, the most likely fates I see for Twitter...
either it limps on as a zombie platform, much like Facebook, because only people with obligations stayed around people who refused to move, and those people are more active somewhere else anyway...
or it becomes so dysfunctional that it runs into the ground, unless someone scoops it out of Musk's hands.

where should we even go?

as for Mastodon, federation poses its own challenges - you have to trust the instance administrators to keep up your server and handle your private data, you might find yourself separated from people if they make accounts on servers your instance does not federate with.
and people don't quite... get Mastodon. I don't blame them - I know enough about IT to understand the general idea, it's really just like Twitter crossbred with email (but that "email" comparison itself is apparently a meme too). But this is a big ask of people who are used to Twitter just being one app...

Tumblr... I've heard they relaxed the restrictions on sexual content, but it's still lacking. that's another thing - it's really annoying how the App Store breathes down everyone's neck to make sure they're staying nice and proper, and only Twitter and Reddit enjoy an exception. this puritan bullshit sucks.
Mastodon doesn't suffer from this problem as much. granted, I've heard there was lots of drama focused on instances blocking each other... but in a way, that's just how it'll shake down when you take freedom of association seriously. there are some ways around it, but it's another thing to keep in mind when choosing a Mastodon instance, which only makes registering an account a bigger hurdle.

an informed nostalgia & looking forward

more now than ever, I find myself nostalgic for the old days of the Internet, before we all started hanging out in the same room with each other and before so many things about technology became commodified or exploited to amoral ends... and we got trapped in walled gardens, simultaneously connected and terrified by this connection, always within reach of the worst opinions and of your worst enemies.

thinking and talking about this with people got me to make this very Dreamwidth account. i do have a Mastodon account as well. but Dreamwidth serves a pretty different purpose to social media - it's a blog. this blog can also be read on my neocities website, with some clever JavaScript/RSS trickery I found online.

we can look for inspiration in the days when we had interest-based forums, we had blogs, IRC channels, instant messengers, and we had a nice balance of opportunity, freedom to associate, choice of community, a mix of private and public spaces. the right people would find each other, they would form subcultures and stake out their own digital zones.
it's something of a lost art, with some people keeping it alive and bringing it back... teaching others. i think it's beautiful.

I do hope we keep developing new Internet protocols for the modern age, as well. I think Mastodon is nice in principle. Matrix is basically IRC 2. we don't have to go back to old protocols and old web-design principles - we're still gonna keep our smartphones, after all. even my neocity is designed with mobile displays in mind. but hey, expression is much more free on web 1.0...

I think the potential for change is exciting, as much as it is also scary. I hope we keep thinking about how to build better communities.