On Leaving Twitter
So long and thanks for all the Tweets?
This is an essay explaining my position and reasoning behind moving away from #Twitter.
If you simply want to know about what I'll be doing moving forward: I made a separate blog post detailing specifics for handling my content, how to keep up with what I'm doing, and and where I hope to go from here.
I will also be emailing that out to people who have reached out to me on Twitter.
About this blog
Having a place to call home on the net is the first step toward freeing myself up from centralized services. This is why I bought this WovenSoup domain and created this subdomain to host a blog.
I'm hosting this blog via Write.As. You can subscribe to it as a letter via email (subscription box should be down at the very bottom of the homepage).
You can also follow it via most popular ActivityPub capable accounts. It is currently sharing under the handle “@ultimape@scat.wovensoup.com” It should be as simple as typing the URL https://scat.wovensoup.com/ into your client's search.
That's right! With ActivityPub, you can host your social media account alongside a blogging platform and have someone follow both! As someone who is more comfortable with social media than with email, the flexibility of potentially following my favorite blogs via the Fediverse is awesome. Having social sharing built into the platform here is a really nice feature.
I've been using this platform for a few years now to host the occasional bit of writing. I highly recommend write.as if you want a simple blogging platform with none of the needy garbage that sites like Medium push your readers into. I actually like it enough that I bought a pro plan on their hosted service for my website here. I did this because I feel confident in being able to migrate to write freely in the future and don't feel locked into their service.
I want to support the developers who are building out these decentralized tools. @matt@writing.exchange has been building out something special and am looking forward to seeing this platform grow (along with the ActivityPub/Fediverse ecosystem as a whole!) in the future.
So long Twitter, but not forgotten.
I have long since lost trust in Twitter as a platform. I wanted to think that the direction they were heading would be a good one, but recent doings have ruffled my feathers enough that I have decided to just leave.
I was hoping that Musk might come in and fix some of the cruft that has been building up over the years. Many of his decrees up until now seemed good from a strategy perspective. Fixing some of the distortions caused by the algorithmic timeline and making the platform more sustainable so it can be more selective about how it gets it funding are both noble goals to work toward. Overall I am very impressed so far.
But these last few weeks has been uneasy time to experience as heavy Twitter user.
Over the years I've been slowly working my way into being able to remove my twitter content (external brain, really) from that platform. I've had a couple of false starts and my health has made it a challenge to get things together.
For example, I've been keeping an export of my tweets available on keybase.pub, in case I get banned for some reason like so many of my friends have. I've also have been slowly building up the foundations of a “Digital Garden” to house my firehose of content as a companion to my research repository I've been keeping on are.na. And a number of my core twitter clades have been chatting in discord and slack for a few years now.
The only reason this hasn't been a focus of mine is due to my GF's health issues over the past year, and the Grant to work on Project Viril taking up the rest of my time. Getting kicked out of our lab space on short notice wasn't really helpful either. I have been up to my nose with trying to keep my life going. Working meaningfully on things that aren't tied to these concerns has been hard.
But I have to escape Twitter before It's too late. The massive shake up and chaos on Twitter is an existential risk to the network of people and ideas I have built up and encoded into my web there. I need to just rip the proverbial Band-Aid off and commit to migrating my external memory to another platform entirely.
I can't handle this chaos and I don't want to be on an unstable platform who would choose to enact a rule that limits me over something as simple as saying “follow me on mastodon”.
I do have a mastodon account, however it is not anywhere as useful as my current Twitter and I am not happy with it's current location. So if you do wanna follow me on the Fediverse, I recommend following this blog first as discussed above. I will be figuring out how to host my own single-user instance here on WovenSoup, likely using Pleroma or another lightweight service.
Policy Grind
I was prepared for some 'dumb' stuff to happen under Musk's management, but what's happen right now isn't just dumb, it feels actively malicious. Even if it wasn't, I am worried enough about that I don't wanna deal with it anymore.
I could forgive wanting to delete old accounts to help avoid the heavy costs of hosting large swaths of twitter data. Deleting my long dead friends from twitter was something that had been threatened in the past and I had prepared for that emotional damage. Still annoying.
But the rest of this seems to stem from drama around a real-time dox'ing account.
One dox, two dox, red dox, blue dox.
I'm lowkey a fan of Musk, and hearing his kid got harassed was saddening to me. I care a lot about dox'ing. I am deeply against dox'ing behavior because I know how hurtful it can be to be wrongfully targeted. So watching this situation unfold has been upsetting.
One of the reasons I got so good at doing research stems directly from a time when my own house got dox'ed due to some script kiddy pulling shit like that against a Kickstarter campaign. Our house got put on a list because someone who used to live there was listed as a backer. It was scary AF to feel like we were going to get swatted or some other asinine behavior. So I don't blame Musk for wanting to enforce anti-dox'ing rules and I think it is about time that twitter has acted on content that was already in their policy.
However, the rapid change in Rules and Guidelines that lead to a blanket ban on content linking to a real-time dox'ing account was alarming. The resulting drama it has caused is tiresome and approaching asinine. From my perspective Musk effectively instigated a Streisand Effect in some weird crusade to stop people from looking at that dox'ing account? I'm not a fan of journalists having free reign in spreading what amounts to promoting a way to harass someone, but even I can see how the way that this was handled was ungraceful.
On top of all of that, the use of suspension as a heavy handed method of enforcing these (effectively new interpretations) of the rules was obnoxious. I can understand having tweets removed on an individual basis like how Kanye's offending tweets were removed (at least before he was banned again). I feel like using the suspension as a punishment is really shitty. It's punishing more than the person using the account, but everyone who follows them too. Combining all of this with the rushed nature of these changes and a sudden change in rules against the account? It was a recipe for a disaster.
Hairy Elephants
This situation was (and still is) quickly becoming out of control. Seeing Mastodon's joinmastodon account get suspended peaked my attention. Of course their tweets are back up thanks to pushback, but the tweet was removed with a notice (like it should have been the whole time).
That mastodon's biggest server “.social” supports a real-time dox'ing account has soured me against that particular host. I was already planning to move my account elsewhere on the fediverse simply because of it's size and wanting to self-host, but seeing that account be promoted has strengthened my resolve. For a platform that champions safety features, it was gross to see them promote content that had directly lead to someone being stalked. So really this whole situation has disgusted me.
It is very ironic because I had just finished reading a piece about how that space is focused on safety features.
“But what happens if hateful people do set up a server? Well, obviously, they don’t get promoted on our “Join Mastodon” website or in our app.” https://time.com/6229230/mastodon-eugen-rochko-interview/
But while I am saddened that the .social host has done this, I think the overall response from Twitter's end has been handled poorly.
The straw that broke me.
The last last straw for me deciding against my use of Twitter was the most recent changes to their policies. Specifically the addition of a draconian set of rules regarding “Promotion of alternative social platforms policy”. I originally saw this via @TwitterSupport's tweet. It has since been deleted.
TL;DR: The new rules said they won't let me link to my mastodon account?
I literally made my mastodon account so I wouldn't kill myself if twitter suspended me. Holding my network hostage is a direct threat to my well being. That it was even conceivable to do what they did has shaken my trust entirely.
I can't put up with this anymore. Every link that I have ever made to my other account on the Fediverse is now being flagged as unsafe and I am unable to link to my own content there? This ridiculous and clearly an over-reaction.
As I said in my final thread on twitter:
“I am directly hostile to a platform holding my social network hostage.”
So I must bid Twitter Adieu.
With friends being deleted, accounts being suspended left and right, and the chaos that is currently unfolding, I don't think my Memex is safe there any longer.
Twitter is a powerful thing and these changes have been wielded too carelessness. All of this doesn't give me a lot of confidence in future direction of Twitter here.
Twitter is more than a business. And while I believe one of the richest man in the world is more than qualified to run a business, that doesn't mean he's going to do a good job at managing the other part of twitter. And while I think move fast + break things is a good strategy when you're building out a fledgling startup and trying to nail the fundamentals, Twitter has long since moved past that phase as a company.
From where I'm standing, Twitter can also be thought as an organism. A hive mind made of the people who's lives have been intertwined with the platform. Damaging this community by moving fast and breaking things to improve the product in ways that make it more resilient is one thing. And taking steps that are a necessary evil to maintain the platform to house us and ensure it lives despite it's insane costs is a good idea. Some estimates suggest it's hemorrhaging 3 million dollars a day? at the time Musk took over? (That fact alone makes me think I better relocate before it's too late.)
But to directly attack the denizens by restricting them with asinine rules that amount to restricting our free association? This goes directly against the magic that makes Twitter so powerful. Doing that was unacceptable to me.
The organism can move on.
Sadness
I love Twitter. I love learning from others and sharing my ideas. I love exploring the world together with my friends on there.
I'm really just some troubled autistic guy with basically no real life friends and a fucked up life. I've got my GF and my best friend that I see regularly, and that's basically it.
But thanks to Twitter I've not felt so alone.
I've met people who've invited me to places and visited me. I got invited to a wedding! I've spoken with fellow Vermonters, made friends with people in Australia, Sweden, England, Belgium, Germany India, Vietnam, Nigeria, Tibet, and China. I once even got an internship working on software I loved doing.
I enjoyed hanging out with internet people working on video games, and spread memes about Ancient Sumerian dogs. The impact of shitposting on my ability to be creative has been phenomenal. With the ingroup diaspora and the various permutations thereof I have found like-minded people exploring their own health and finding meaning among the chaos that we call our lives.
I have had influence over people's ideas that extend far beyond my wildest dreams.
I've been mutuals, followed by (and unfollowed by) some of the most amazing people over the years. Some of the notable names people may recognize by: Marc Andreessen, Sonal Chokshi, Naval Ravikant, Amber O'Hearn, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, Sonya E. Mann, Vitalik Buterin, Hosea Frank, Corrie Moreau, Saul Williams, Meredith L. Patterson, Chris Dixon, Grimes, Peter Hintjens, Elisabeth Bik, Austen Allard, Riva Tez, Venkatesh Rao, Sarah Perry, Vinay Gupta, Joscha Bach, Suchaone, Simon Sarris, Roon, Eigenrobot, Chris Dancy, Kiki Schirr, and Visakan Veerasamy.
There are far too many accounts to list. Many that I have made friends with and learned from and spoken to at length. I plan on writing something more direct soon to memorialize you all. Some of you have literally saved my life and deserve a special mention.
But more than that, every day now it seems someone is @ messaging me about how my crazy mazes of threads have helped them. It makes me so happy to see.
Thank you for being there for me, Twitter, when I needed you.
Maybe the real hivemind was the friends we made along the way. 💌
'Scat Sense' is a personal blog written by Nicholas '@ultimape' Perry. Follow them on the Fediverse here: @ultimape@mastodon.social