Is this really it?

The number of occasions I've heard masses of people say they're going to walk away from Twitter now numbers in the dozens over the years. The company has demonstrated contempt for the users that can be rivaled only by Meta, having pivoted many years ago from adding features based on usage (Retweets) to generally delivering weird non-features that even the advertisers don't really want (Blue).

But now it's being bought by a guy who has latched onto the "free speech brigade" not because he's particularly pro-free-speech (he's not), or because his politics align with those kinds of people (they do), but because he seems dumb enough to believe their spiel (he might be). A union-buster, an apartheid-profiter, and a guy who has used the platform that will soon be his to:

• Get yelled at by a Wachowski
• Libel the guy who saved that Thai sports team after nobody liked his coffin submarine idea
• Predict the end of COVID-19 with the accuracy of Nate Silver picking numbers out of a hat
• Generally sound like a dumbass who'd be cringey and goofy if he wasn't so simultaneously powerful

Anyway. Doesn't bode all that well. Maybe it's time.

What is Cohost? I dunno. Probably another thing that'll come and go quickly. I still get spam emails from Ello, the supposed Facebook-killer that was all in black-and-white Courier font and whose name I had to look up.

I don't know how to Mastodon despite being acquainted with its founder and signing up for many servers over the years. Somehow the email model of "different servers but everyone can talk" fails to make sense to me in a social media context.

But I use Twitter less and less every year, and these days even the months show decline. And maybe it's time for us all to stop trying to post through it anyway.