Taking a Twitter Break
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Taking a Twitter Break

Byrichard

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.

Mastodon, Social Media and Addiction
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Mastodon, Social Media and Addiction

Byrichard

I’d like to discuss Mastodon, Social Media and addiction. Specifically I would like to discuss how I do not want to invest my time in a social network where people are already discussing social media s if it is an addiction. We have seen that this has a negative impact on social networks. Look at Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and others for illustrations of this.


I do not want to be part of social networks and social media that are viewed as addictive, because it sends the wrong message to users, and potential users. It sends the message that rather than investing time in meeting new people and making new connections, you are giving in to a craving for an addiction. Back in the day I remember when I disliked likes, favourites and thumbs up for a simple reason. It replaced conversation with statistics. “Three people favourited this, five people starred that and 23 people gave this a thumbs up.” Instead of having an exchange of a few sentences we are interacting by likes, stars or thumbs up. This isn’t socialising.


Social networks, and by association social media should about following and joining converssations, about connecting with people, without the spectre of “addiction” floating over us.


By saying that social media is addictive it gives marketers the green light to abuse decency, to get engagement. It allows those who own or control social networks to decide how people interact. Finally it’s a value judgement that biases people against investing their time and emotional self on social networks because they do not want to be labelled as addicts.


If people on Mastodon have all the bad habits that discourage me from using Twitter then aside from leaving because of the leadership issue, what reason do I have to continue using social media? At the end of the day if I invest an hour a day writing blog posts then I might gain more.


Limited Bandwidth and Twitter
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Limited Bandwidth and Twitter

Byrichard

Let’s take a step back from today, and let’s remember the 2006 tech landscape. In 2006 we had Symbian phones, GPRS, text messages. We used the world wide web whilst sitting at computers usually via wifi. We would tweet until the moment we left home, and then we had to rely on SMS to keep in touch with people that we either wanted to meet or communicate with.


At the time phones were small, with just a few lines of text at a time, and little to no media content. We used Twitter and Jaiku because they allowed us, in a time of limited bandwidth, to have a conversation either, sitting at a computer, or by SMS.


Eventually bandwidth and data plans improved and increased, especially with the arrival of the iPhone, but blackberry users had lived in the future for years beforehand.


Twitter benefited from the iPhone, and it was favoured over Jaiku, so it won, but Jaiku offered everything that Twitter took years to offer, in turn.


That twitter has only a third of a million users tells you about the niche that it has, and the use cases that it fails to provide to its users. Medium was spun off from Twitter and others a blogging variant. Facebook, Reddit and two or three other solutions offer web forum style websites.


Twitter lost its niche back in 2007 when it went from being a network of friends of friends, who come across each other, and talk between each other to a hashtag driven, celebrity following mess. It’s when I read this vox article that I thought of the topic.


The web of today is mature. Everyone, or almost, has a smartphone and uses the web for information and staying in touch. Bandwidth is unlimited for many. What we need is not another twitter. What we need is a local, social web, where people that are in the same village, town or country, chat together. For too long the web has been about talking with people thousands of kilometres away. We need to progress towards a local social web.

MicroBlogging and I
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MicroBlogging and I

Byrichard

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.

Taking a Break From Twitter
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Taking a Break From Twitter

Byrichard

I have used Twitter almost every single day since I created my first account in 2006. During this time I have met a lot of people, gone to a lot of events, learned a lot and been part of communities. The decision to take a break is not an easy one to make, because it involves losing touch with a community. It involves leaving a social network at the moment when you’re following and conversing with more people.


Twitter icon transforming into the Mastodon M
Twitter icon transforming into the Mastodon M


I feel obligated to take a break for two main reasons. The first is that it makes rational sense to leave social networks when their ownership and morality swing to the Far Right. I don’t want to read news by Far Right newspapers, watch their news, listen to their shows, or be part of their social networks.


Theoretically I could simply shrink the number of people I follow and keep my tweets private, and I’d be happy with that. The real reason I want to take a twitter break is that I don’t want Musk to win. I don’t want him to be able to tweet “oh look, the servers are under pressure” and having leading poll questions that provide false justification for immoral points of view.


From a European perspective we cannot continue to use an app where disinformation is seen as free speech. We cannot be on a social network where the mainstream media, despite their Right Wing ownership in many cases, is denigrated and where he wants “citizen” journalism to thrive.


“So it’s perhaps no surprise that Musk, a billionaire businessman, went off on Apple this past week. He understands that the iPhone maker is an impediment to his financial goals.” source.


If I stop using Twitter, it is because those in charge at the moment go against sense of ethics and morality. I don’t want to be part of a network where people are brainwashed and misled. and where mob mentality is encouraged, rather than rational reason and thought.


Twitter should never have had an IPO. It should never have agreed to being sold, as it enriched greedy people, but with a cost to society at large. It should have become a non profit organisation, working as a medium by which for people to communicate with each other globally, where morality and ethics were prioritised, where rational, decent people made decisions.


We have Mastodon now, and with time Mastodon will be as vibrant as Twitter, but for now using Mastodon means being isolated from a community we enjoy, meeting in a place we no longer want to go to.


And finally, I don’t want Twitter to go away. I want user engagement to drop long enough for Musk to rethink his political lean long enough for twitter to become a place for good, once more.

Mastodon has Eight Million Accounts Today
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Mastodon has Eight Million Accounts Today

Byrichard

Mastodon has reached eight million accounts today. That’s close to the population of Switzerland and two million less than London. Mastodon is growing because it was ready to scale up at the right time. As Musk and Twitter shift towards the Right, and as Musk perpetuates conspiracy theories, on a daily basis, so he prepares the idea conditions for other social networks and opportunities to thrive.


As Twitter loses users, and engagement so other social networks are more likely to thrive. Every day I check on Twitter, and every day I am repulsed by what he is sharing. Every day I feel that I should abandon Twitter. I don’t, for now, for a simple reason. On twitter there are conversations to be had twenty four hours a day, whereas on Mastodon, you have to wait for people to show up. That wait is a good reason to do other things, like return to Twitter.


What I am waiting for, impatiently is for enough people to leave Twitter for Mastodon, for Mastodon to be entertaining at all times, without long moments of silence. I am not convinced that Mastodon will be the ideal Twitter replacement. For now it is a curiousity that has the ability to scale up as required, within the current requirements.


Mastodon is to “microblogging” what WordPress is to blogging. It’s a way to create an instance of a service which you can either use in solitude, and yet access what others are discussing, or a way of having a small personal community. We’re used to syndicated blogs. The fediverse is almost the same, but goes by the name “federated”. In both cases it’s spread across servers, more flexible, more adaptive to demand, and easier to sustain. Wordpress and other content management systems could be written to take advantage of this distributed networks of communities.


That’s it for today.

The Day of Snow Poles and Mastodon
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The Day of Snow Poles and Mastodon

Byrichard

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.

On Engagement and Leaving Social Media Platforms
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On Engagement and Leaving Social Media Platforms

Byrichard

I used to like Facebook and Instagram because they were extensions of my social life. I left both of them when I saw that only two or three people reacted to my posts. Although social media platforms had started as being solitary, they had become social with time, and then lonely again, as time went on.


I left Facebook because it made me feel lonelier to use it than stay way. The same is true of Instagram. When I felt that I was looking at ads and influencer accounts, without getting anything for myself I dumped both, and this occurred during, and because of the pandemic. When solitude is permanent, social media plays an important social role.


With Twitter it’s different. My engagement and social network are growing and if I kept tweeting my network would grow and I’d get something out of it. The drawback is that I have an intense dislike for the attitude of the person in charge, and the people he allows to influence himself. I want moral and ethical people to take a twitter break, not because I want Twitter to fail, but because I want Musk to get a clear message that social media platforms are what they are, because of their users, and that without respecting human rights platforms empty of users.


I don’t expect people to take a twitter break so I don’t think that what I want will have any effect. The second reason for the twitter break is to take some time and some space to work on other things, to blog more. I am tired of spending hours a week on social platforms. only for them to be sold off, and for others to profit from our attention, and our engagement.


Twitter should never have been sold to an individual, especially not such an individual. Social networks always collapse when they change hands. I always leave them when they change owners, because the website goes from being a place for innovative early adopters, to being a place for advertisers and disengagement.

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Twitter is Dead, Long Live Social Media

Byrichard

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.

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The Temptation to Give Up On Social Media

Byrichard

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.