a farewell tweet

Since Elon Musk has purchased Twitter and taken it private, I’ve decided now is as good a time as any to say goodbye to Twitter. I’ve fetched my archive (almost made it to 40,000 tweets!) and I’m deleting all my tweets, likes, etc. I won’t, immediately, delete my account however. There’s a lovely network of friends and acquaintances I cultivated on the site, and I’d hate to toss that out right away.

There’s a chance, however slim, that Elon finds someone else to run the site, that he rescinds ownership of it entirely. I would, then, be interested in returning. So while I’m burning 90% of the bridge, I’ll leave this little rope across the gorge, just in case. I do not expect to use it, though.

contact me!

Were we Twitter buds? I’ll miss you, but I am not going off the grid, so here’s a few ways to get in touch:

email: wd@teleri.net
discord: doubleyewdee#2884
matrix: @doubleyewdee:matrix.org (for now, this will likely change if I get into matrix)
xbox: doubleyewdee
FFXIV: Pan Kirjava @ Gilgamesh (seriously, say hi if you play, it’d be a delight)

I’m not really on any other social networks (Mastodon / CounterSocial / etc) right now. I think I might be done with them for good, we’ll see. I’ll keep posting here, and maybe I’ll post more!

EDIT 2023-04-26: Turns out I was full of shit and I’m trying out Bluesky for that good classic Twitter vibe without a petulant billionaire owner fucking it up. @wd.teleri.net is me.

why leave?

In the summer of ‘22 (oof) I took a ~90% Twitter break, deleted the app from every device but my iPad, and broadly stayed offline. I think it was net beneficial for my mental health. The reason I did this to begin with was that I had caught myself awake in bed at 5am, still not asleep, refreshing the damn bird site and looking for that next hit of bad news. Doomscrolling personified. I would literally swipe back to my phone’s home screen, only to immediately find my fingers, almost unconsciously, swiping right back to the bird app.

Absolutely untenable, unhealthy, and frankly a bit pathetic.

Beyond that, Elon Musk seems to be a uniquely awful owner for a site that millions have poured trust and energy in to. He has overseen abusive, racist treatment of workers, been unabashedly pro-Russian, and gotten extremely cozy with alt-right nutjobs whose authoritarian bullshit would set the entire world back immeasurably. He’s about the least trustworthy owner possible who doesn’t bear a Trump surname.

He will, absolutely, read the DMs of every user he wants to. He will almost certainly force moderation decisions in a direction that prioritizes “freeze peach” over the health, safety, and sanity of the most vulnerable users. The guy, not to put too fine a point on it, is a fucking chud. He’s a mediocre /b/ shitposter with billions in the bank. He will do things “for the lulz” that, quite possibly, will result in people dying. He will laugh as this happens.

My relationship with Twitter, and really any other social site, is one where I get great content, and I give them my content in exchange, and they go and make money with all our content mixed together and that’s what makes their service good. If I don’t believe in the mission, or if I find the owners repugnant, I will withdraw said content. I noped out of Facebook for similar reasons, and I haven’t missed it. I will undoubtedly miss Twitter far more, alas.

As a clumsy analogy, if I frequented a restaurant and subsequently found that the owners were using their business profits to boost hate speech, advance malign political agendas, etc, then I would stop going to the restaurant. Surely, not all workers would necessarily agree with that agenda, but I’m making a calculation that the negatives outweigh the positives here. I’m hopeful that the team of bright, passionate people at Twitter will land on their feet if their employer is no longer suitable (or extant), but in the interim I’m not going to be a part of it.