I am leaving Twitter for Mastodon
Elon Musk is now in full control of a powerful network, that I am part of and in the past he has made it clear that he wants to turn it into a un-moderated, free-for-to-strongest opinion machine that supports his narrow world views. I have no confidence in him and the leadership he is going to install to change #Twitter for the better, to improve the efforts to reduce hate speech against minorities and to work against troll armies being able to use the platform's reach for their sinister purposes.
Musk taking over is going to be a mess, and yes, I could wait it out, until he gets bored and leaves the platform's smoldering ruins, but I also need to address the bigger issue here. A single, privately run business is in control over my main communication channel with friends, industry peers, customers of my employer, etc. It tries to monetize every interaction on the platform and by doing so incentivizes content and interactions I do not care about and are actually harmful to what I want to do: have honest connections and conversations.
That's why I am leaving Twitter and will stop posting content there.
You can follow me on Mastodon (a distributed social network), where I joined the chaos.social instance: I am @[email protected] there.
I have published my Twitter archive on this site, so it's not lost and can be accessed anonymously.
Leaving Twitter will suck, I am noticing it already while going through my private Twitter list I call "tribe" which has 225 members and which I use as timeline in TweetDeck; very few in there are on a Mastodon instance. I don't depend on Twitter for my income, so the impact for me should be quite manageable. It hurts to know that I am leaving some amazing connections behind because I do not plan to keep using Twitter in reading mode. So many of these daily inspirations will be lost for me.
It will not be easy for a while but in my experience we can always get used to a new way to connect to people. And it might even open up entirely new connections.