My Personal Twexit Thoughts

A first love is hard to forget. Well, except for me, as my memory is legendarily unreliable. Still, Twitter always was my favourite Social Media platform. Exit Facebook? Not a thing. Remove Instagram from my phone? Sure, healthier anyway. Exit Twitter? Hold on…

The recent developments over at Twitter HQ don’t impact me personally. Too thick is the coat of privilege. It does even offer some level of entertainment, once you detach yourself from the political- and socio-economic impact a broken Twitter could have.

While I moved most of my shortform commentary over to the Fediverse, I’ll still keep Twitter as a news source. But redelegating Twitter, was also that easy, because my Twitter usage has dramatically.

I vividly remember some very personal Twitter moments. And with the exception of Ryan Gosling retweeting me¹, they were all extremly local happenings. Meeting people in real life, noticing how their online-persona sometimes strongly deviated from their real persona, viral-ish events in the company, where new users “swarmed” Twitter and discussions had a real impact at work. All those were extremly entertaining and gratyfiying. I was never impacted by the real virality of a algorithm driven social network. None of my tweets were retweeted or liked outside of my well established little niche. And I am completely okay with that. Acknowledgement by people I know and value is much more valuable to me than the artificial dopamine hit of a viral tweet - says the person that never experienced it, but ey. But, the circle of people that I interacted with on Twitter, shrunk over the last years. A lot of them seemingly lost interest in Twitter, and I can relate. I see Twitter more as a addiction I accept, than as a valuable part of my internet diet.

So moving more and more to Mastodon is not some grand statement, just a next step. A lot of people I respect and appreciate made the same step. And my careful attempts in sarcasm were so far mostly understood. This can be a place I feel entertained in. And if the lack of algorithm and sheer amount of news is less, maybe it is even healthier.