Back in the good old days of Twitter the length of a tweet was limited to the length of an SMS. The aim was to make it possible for people to tweet and have conversations using GSM phones. With short messages we could leave the keyboard behind and read messages on our mobile phones.
Jaiku was similar except that it was more advanced, having an app that played well with Symbian devices. With time, and the advent of the iphone and ubiquitous data plans so platforms like Twitter and Jaiku could add images and more. With time Seesmic experimented with video and instagram with images. Instagram thrived because it made uploading and sharing images fast and easy, even in the days of limited bandwidth.
Over the years Twitter and other social media platforms have forgotten about their origins and now a single tweet can take an entire 27″ computer monitor, let alone a laptop screen. What was one short and succinct became long winded, and inefficient.
Twitter wants to extend the character limit to 4000 characters, but that’s absurd. The entire reason for Twitter being, is to have short messages, that are quick to read, a list of headlines, rather than full blown essays.
Remember that blogging platforms have snippets and sub-headings for a reason, to make them easy to skim.
Twitter has lost its bearings now. They are trying to be different products, at a high price, rather than highlight their unique selling point. I don’t want to read long tweets. I want short tweets. I even want to turn off images, to make the feed shorter and more succinct.
And Finally
I want to joke that the reason for “cargo pants” or cargo trousers as I prefer to call them is to store FFP2 masks during a pandemic. They are the ideal size for masks. It’s easy to store them during your outdoors walks, and pull them out once you are back indoors, or near people.
Social networks and social networks are based on people connecting with other people. Twitter is a glorified chatroom masquerading as a microblogging platform. As twitter shifts from being free, to being paying, it is losing it’s appeal.
Fifteen years ago there was plenty of discussion about Social Media silos and the social graph, and discussion about ROI for businesses, PR firms and personalities. They always forgot about the user. They exploit the user because the user, in their eyes, is an addict. This attitude make it okay to exploit social media users, in their eyes.
Screen capture of twitter dev account tweets about paying API
I am not worried about losing bots. Bots make a lot of noise, but don’t help Twitter, as a social network. What bothers me is the phrase “Twitter data are among the world’s most powerful data sets.” Facebook said the same thing, and then we read about Cambridge Analytica, emotion experiments, phone draining potential and more. We also read from books like Mindf*ck that Facebook was used to manipulate people to vote one way rather than the other. We learned that FaceBook could not be trusted with our data.
Now Twitter is using the same phrases. As I see the changes made by Musk I see that Twitter is becoming a silo, like FaceBook and Instagram. Twitter is no longer a social network. Twitter is a data farm where we are expected to pay, for content to be pushed on us, rather than seeing organic tweets, and where our data is mined by untrustworthy groups.
Through his actions Musk is turning Twitter into a data silo that I no longer want to be a part of.
Techcrunch addresses the topic from the reverse angle. “Twitter’s new announcement might impact research in different areas, including hate speech and online abuse.” On the one hand Twitter is making it harder to police what content is posted whilst encouraging others, with deep pockets to exploit that data.
TechDirt thinks that this move will encourage developers to move towards Mastodon but Mastodon is just one of many alternative websites. I would go further. By blocking access to the API twitter is encouraging people to lose trust in the company. First it blocks the apps people used to post and read tweets, then it blocked the API for bots, and tools for checking account related information, for example “map my followers” and other functionality. With the decline of those tools such actions will need to be manual.
The Washington Times phrased it as “Twitter shutting down free access to its public data”. Twitter should have become Not For Profit. It should have been made sustainable, whilst allowing people to converse globally. It is now sliding in the opposite direction, to become a silo, for people who want to exploit the data to manipulate people, rather than help spread news, information, friendships and conversations. Twitter, by moving towards becoming a silo, is removing the features that made it the strong, vibrant community that it was.
The Instagram API
I posted over 4000 images to Instagram over the years, until FaceBook bought and then destroyed the app. I used to post every single day, until I found that the app felt more and more lonely, and more and more of a waste of time. It had switched from being a social network to being an influencer network, where loneliness was the cost.
I tried to play with the API, to use Instagram externally but because of the blocks in place I couldn’t access my own data, without first proving that I should have access to it. That is what encouraged me to spend a few days trying to import the Instagram JSON file to WordPress. It worked, and I was happy. I had found a workflow to recover my data, and use it for my own website, rather than to provide content for a platform that did not respect me as a user.
Twitter is now doing the same. If we can’t access the API to use twitter as we want, then it does encourage us to move along, to the new alternatives, or, as I am doing, to write blog posts every day. This is day eighty of writing a blog post every single day.
If it wasn’t for the community I would have dumped Twitter years ago.
I took a short twitter detox for two days. For two days I didn’t look at tweets, replies and more. For two days if I wanted to rant I couldn’t. For two days I couldn’t see replies. For two days I couldn’t read people complain.
It is good to take a break from twitter sometimes. I don’t believe in social media addiction. Social media is a conversation. If you can get addicted to having conversations then the world is messed up. Twitter is a social network, not an addiction.
What triggered me to take a twitter break, aside from the ownership change and the negativity I see on a daily basis, is the inability to change from the “home” feed. Until recently we could swap between algorithm driven timelines and chronological ones. The ability to switch between both has been made much harder.
Twitter is making the same mistake as Facebook did, which Facebook then did to Instagram. It decided that Twitter will now be a Right leaning tool for propaganda and disinformation, rather than a chronological timeline of tweets by friends and friends of friends. It will throw in sponsored content.
And Finally
You can get Twitter Blue for 8-11 USD per month, to get the blue tick, or you can get Wordpress Premium for 8 dollars a month, if you pay for the year in advance. This allows you to monetise your content and more. It also gives you full acess to a blogging platform, rather than simple microblogging. For four dollars per month you get the personal option, and you can get a personal blog. There are cheaper options. The point is that 8 USD per month for a product like Twitter is extortion, especially given the volatility of the site.
Mastodon is also an option, that is free/donation based depending on whether you choose an existing server, implement your own, and whether enough donations have been made to be sustainable.
For the first time since I took a Twitter break in 2007 I am taking another in 2023. The first time I took a twitter break I deleted my account but got asked to talk about Twitter for the RTS (TSR) back then so I went to my secondary account and started using twitter again. Since then I have continued to love and hate twitter in equal measure.
I don’t like that a billionaire could just buy Twitter because of a bet he made with web users on another site. I don’t like that no government system could stop him from making the purchase. I also don’t like that the board of directors didn’t block the acquisition.
Twitter from 2006-2007 was a communal social network where people conversed online before meeting in person once a week, and meeting at conferences on a less regular basis. It was a network of friends where everyone was connected to everyone else. Since 2007 it has been a cult of personality, but at least we could converse with each other.
With Musk’s purchase of Twitter it feels more hostile. It feels as though the Far Right is being made more visible. It feels as if trolling is being encouraged. It feels as though conspiracy theory spreading is being encouraged.
I stopped using Facebook and Instagram because I saw more junk than posts by friends. Before deciding to take my twitter break I noticed that I could no longer choose between a chronological timeline and an algorithm driven one. I am now stuck with seeing what the algorithms want me to see.
Twitter is now driven by the algorithms rather than the network of people we follow, and their friends. Musk and his teams choose what we see, how often we see it, and who can see what we tweet. Twitter is no longer what we make of it. It is what Musk and his teams want it to be.
I don’t want to be part of it.
Social media should be about fun, about friendship, and about personal connections. Social media now seems to be about being negative, complaining, and protecting ourselves by being anonymous on the one hand, and private on the other. On a good social media site we should use our names, rather than nicknames, and we should trust people not to blackmail us.
At this point I don’t know about social media. I want to revert to a smaller network of friendships, where we read each other’s content, comment, and develop friendships that lead to us wanting to meet in person. I don’t feel that way about social networks like Twitter anymore.
Since 2006 I have thought of Twitter, Jaiku, Mastodon and Plurk as conversation channels, rather than microblogging. I go to these places and use them as chatroooms rather than microblogs. If I want to blog I have my full scale blog. This website, to keep me entertained.
I bring this up because at lunchtime today, the time at which I usually get tired with social media, two people frustrated me. One person asked for what reason Musk should have been stopped from buying twitter. The second said that without hashtags they wouldn’t be able to find content on Mastodon.
I might be argumentative on social media but that is not why I use social media. Ideally I want to use social media to have pleasant conversations that eventually lead to me wanting to meet people in person, or failing that, to collaborate online on projects. This lunchtime I found two arguments and my reaction was “I don’t want to invest hundreds or thousands of hours on a social network, like Mastodon, to have it be as big of a waste of time, as twitter, in recent years. I use social media to be social, not to argue.
Social media is an investment in time, attention and more. I stopped using Facebook and Instagram because I felt I was making money for others, without having any benefit of my own. The more posts you see, the more Instagram and Facebook earned. In the end I was tired of giving them a steady stream of cash. At the time I thought, If I took the time I spent on IG and FB and invested it on my own website then it would do better, and I’d get just as much engagement. This is tongue in cheek. If I am being ignored I might as well be ignored on my own website.
At the end of today I will have gone two days without tweeting. If I manage two weeks then I will have kicked the habit. I need to find a replacement. Blogging is one productive distraction.
Today during the walk I saw an orange van moving by the side of the road slowly. It was stopping regularly. I crossed the road and looked towards it. I saw an open door and a person placing traffic snow poles into the bollards at the side of the road. Winter is coming and the roads are being made ready for when it snows. I wanted to film but I was told not to, so I didn’t.
It would have been nice to film such a scene, because it signals the change from Autumn to winter. It doesn’t matter. I respect peoples’ right to privacy. I can’t think of a security reason not to film such an event.
Mastodon
Through Musk buying Twitter, and through its swing to the Far Right people have finally decided to dump twitter to try something else. That something else, for many, is Mastodon. People are re-discovering what some of us have longed for, for a long time. Social media and the social web, without adverts, once again. For many years the web was seen as an expense, and everyone questioned whether it was profitable, so it was filled with enthusiasts, rather than others.
Today, with the slow demise of Twitter (theoretically) people have chosen to emigrate from Twitter due to political differences. Instead of going to a centralised network with a single point of failure people are migrating to the federated web where activitypub is used to share content between web servers. In theory every individual and business could have their own server.
This is good. The flaw with Twitter is that it had a board of people who decided that they would agree to sell Twitter to a single individual. This move has made a lot of Twitter users uncomfortable, me included. Social media and social networks are about conversations and communities, and what Musk has done, and those that agreed to sell to him, is show that social networks with a single point of failure, are bound to fail at some stage. Twitter won’t vanish overnight but the golden age of capital driven social media is over. Users are regaining hold of the social web, and people like Musk will have spent 44 billion, for a network where users are volatile.
I don’t mean that they’re flaming each other. I mean that if you open the jar usage stats will evaporate. As Mastodon picks up users at an increasing speed, so it will be more interesting for people to migrate from Twitter to Mastodon, and leave the sinking ship behind.
The Internet, and the web, were designed to be modular and adaptive. If one site or node is taken down, we just move to the next, and the next after that. Wordpress has provided bloggers with this flexibility for decades. Now Mastodon provides the same, for microbloggers.
Le Roi est Mort, longue vie au Roi (article) is a popular phrase in French. It signifies that if the king died royalty would continue and he would quickly be succeeded. Social media has just entered a new age, I believe. Twitter, Facebook and other giants have grown too big, and algorithms have destroyed the sense of community. That an individual could buy Twitter, and affect it’s political leaning has affected people’s perception of Twitter.
People have reverted back to Facebook, moved on to Mastodon and more. People have reopened their eyes and are ready to try new social networks once again. This is a good situation to be in. According to one calculation Musk has valued each Twitter at 167 dollars. (If we assume 44 billion divided by 250 million).
The problem with social networks is that their value comes from two places. The first of these is the user community. Social networks have value because they have people coming back day after day for months of years, and conversing with each other. Instagram lost its value when it was bought by Facebook, ads were added, and influencers. rather than friends of friends appeared in timelines. A social network is about friendships. Instagram became a glossy magazine so I stopped using it.
Social networks are dependent on their users but they are also dependent on the programmers that are working on them. To set up a twitter clone on a small scale takes about two hours if you use the Laravel framework. I know, because that’s what I did twice this weekend. The challenge is in scaling up, and that’s why Twitter had teams of engineers working on various aspects of the platform. By scuttling the engineering teams Musk has removed the people with the skills and experience to prevent the website from collapsing under its own weight. When React or some other framework updates their code Twitter will struggle to keep up, and that’s when I expect it to collapse.
While Twitter fights for its survival other networks are grabbing the opportunity to grow. Mastadon is growing, Post.news is growing, Facebook might see some people reverting to their network.
The discussion has shifted from the Open Graph as Zuckerberg called it to ActivityPub. The current area of focus for many is to create a syndicated/federated network of networks where people communicate with each other across platforms and websites.
We used to transfer our contacts and other information from one platform to another when we joined a new network. Now the idea is to share that data between websites in real time. I look forward to a more diverse social media landscape. I look forward to a more resilient network of social networks, where one individual cannot buy an entire social network on a whim, and destroy it.
Those that agreed to sell Twitter now have billions in their pockets, but in the process they have allowed Twitter to be destroyed. Websites such as twitter should be turned into organisations, for encouraging thought and discussion on an international scale.
I don’t want to be part of Twitter now. I’m tired of social media. That’s why I am blogging again. I want to invest my “social” time into something constructive. The development of thoughts and ideas, through the writing of blog posts.
I find myself tempted to give up on social media and focus on blogging instead. I am tired of social media after decades of use. I am tired that users, that provide all of the value are ignored, and that greedy boards of directors can sell users as if they were lumps of coal or sugar beets.
By being sold to Musk Twitter has become a symbol of the Far Right, and Far Right ideologies are being pushed. Musk pushed a poll asking whether Drumpf should be reinstated and for now Drumpf is winning. This means that in a few days Musk will be able to say “I brought back Drumpf because that is what people wanted.” He already said that he would skew the algorithms to favour what he thinks of as positive.
That’s why I don’t want to use Twitter anymore. That’s why the last social network that I have been using discourages me from staying around. It’s not that I don’t like the community. It’s that I don’t like what the person in charge represents.
Yet again, we, the early adopters, who provided a social network with value, and the inertia to become one of the leading social networks, are homeless, and in need of a new place to use socially.
I am not convinced by Mastodon because people are too eager to onboard, get people to add alt text to images, and use hashtags. It doesn’t feel like a community. It feels like a sect trying to find converts. I want to have conversations, not be nagged about alt tags, and the use of hashtags.
When twitter was young, around 2007 or 2008 the introduction of hashtags, to a large degree destroyed the conversation, and turned social media into a popularity contest, rather than a network of friends, conversing with other friends. I am on social media to be sociable. Social media is a shell of its former self. I’d rather revert to blogging and generate content that will benefit me, rather than billionaires who do not see any value in users.
Before I end this post, it feels as if social media has become like normal life. The loud popular extroverts have huge followings and we are competing against them, as introverts. Fighting for attention takes away a lot of the pleasure of social media. I might as well meet people in the physical world, for that type of competition.
I might as well blog. If I am heard, then that’s good, and if I am not then I have practiced writing.
Twitter was bought by an individual that many of us do not trust, and we fear that it may no longer represent the values that we cherish. That Twitter is bought is nothing new. Myspace was bought by Murdoch, many years ago. Jaiku was a great competitor to twitter but it was bought by Google to become Google+. Eventually Google sunset Google+ and we were left with identi.ca but that soon fell flat.
Mastodon is just another attempt to get the same type of community as Twitter managed to find, but distributed across a multitude of instances that do not always say yes, and that do not always show everyone’s every tweet. Add to this that they’re smaller, so policy depends on one or two individuals in some cases, rather than a team.
Through Mastodon people are discovering what Twitter was like when it was still an alpha, beta and other stages. They are discovering why we enjoyed being part of that smaller, more personal community. I am not hooked to Mastodon yet. I haven’t found a worthwhile community yet. It still feels like talking to a small group of strangers rather than a group of friends.
I currently play with two accounts, one anonymous, and one with my name. I used to feel comfortable posting as myself but with the pandemic I prefer to protect how I post. I also don’t have the warm friendships and constant in person meetings that I had with Twitter people. Whether you know people or not, in person, does affect how you behave online.
Twitter hasn’t imploded yet and people haven’t migrated to other networks. Mastodon will grow. The question is how fast, and whether people from other networks will come through and recreate their networks.
I saw one plugin that allows people to important their twitter friends. The best way to migrate friends is via e-mails that are hashed, and compared.
Twitter is alive and healthy, with vibrant communities and an opportunity to converse with people and find information that mainstream media are sometimes slow to report on. Over the last week that balance is swinging towards less positive times.
In Europe, freedom of speech, and freedom of expression require people to say things that they can back up with evidence and facts. If you say something that is demonstrably false, or demonstrably misleading then you are held to account for this.
In the US they believe that freedom of expression includes the freedom to lie with impunity, to spread disinformation and to mislead people, without consequences. By doing this society is vulnerable to tyranny and fascism. If we are told a lie that we want to believe then we are less likely to quibble its veracity. We will repeat the lie, and if we see people who enjoy the same lie, then we will repeat that they have told the same lie. Disinformation is a positive feedback loop of false information being spread as real information, once it gains enough traction.
By buying Twitter, and by saying that Twitter wants to bring freedom of speech, and freedom of expression Musk is saying something that we all value and think is important. The problem though, as I have mentioned above, is that the freedom of expression that Musk is talking about, is not a European freedom, but an American one. It is suspected that he would bring back people like Trump, and that he would make twitter a welcoming place for people to spread lies and disinformation, in impunity.
There is another larger scope to this conversation and that scope is that Twitter is a global social network used by over a billion people a day. During this pandemic it has allowed people who want to find information about the risks presented by Covid-19 to follow experts in their fields, to hear accounts from sufferers of Long Covid, and to get a global appreciation of the risks of the disease. When the WHO backs up what the experts have shared on twitter, and vice versa, when the information makes sense to our moral compass, then Twitter is a great resource for information. It should be protected. It should not be possible for one individual to buy a network with over a billion users.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,”
There are plenty of ways in which people can be proponents of free speech. They can invest in education, they can invest in newspapers, they can invest in library projects and more. They can invest in making sure that people are granted free and equal access to information. You don’t need to buy a social network to promote free speech. Remember that freedom of expression comes with the obligation to be well-informed, and knowledgeable. His “freedom” is to spread rumours and opinions. These undermine, rather than help democracy. I believe that he wants dismantle the gatekeepers, so that it is even more challenging for people to have access to trustworthy information.
On Monday, he tweeted that he hoped his worst critics would remain on Twitter, because “that is what free speech means.” He added in his statement that he hoped to increase trust by making Twitter’s technology more transparent, defeating the bots that spam people on the platform and “authenticating all humans.”
When Google bought Jaiku, and when Facebook bought Instagram we stayed on the networks. Jaiku eventually became Google+ but Google+ was then dumped. Instagram, after being bought by Facebook lost its soul. Instead of being a network of friends, and friends of friends it became a network of adverts and influencers. I dumped the network because I no longer derived pleasure from the network.
Now onto Twitter. Musk “… tweeted that he hoped his worst critics would remain on twitter because ‘that is what free speech means.'”. Free speech isn’t about whether we stay on a platform or leave. It is about the freedom to be on a network that is not owned by someone we do not trust. It is about being on a network that is not owned by a temperamental individual. It is about being on a platform we trust, with values we cherish. I do not value the US values of “free speech”, I value the European ones, that include accountability. Remember the first line of the New York times’ article is “The world’s richest mansucceeded in a bid to acquire the influential social networking service, which he has said he wants to take private.”
Anyone valuing democracy should be worried by that sentence. Within the article they say that Twitter has 220 million daily users. He would take the conversation of 220 million people, and control the network they use, privately. This should not be possible.
Mr. Musk has made some of his intentions clear in regulatory filings, tweets and public appearances: The company must scrap nearly all of its moderation policies, which ban content like violent threats, harassment and spam. It must provide more transparency about the algorithm it uses to boost tweets in users’ newsfeeds. And it must become a private company.
I will finally leave you with the quote above. Do you want to be on a social network without moderation? I do not. That’s why I don’t use other platforms. I am ready to leave twitter, when the time comes. I have been ready to do so for years.
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