Taking Yet Another Twitter Break

With the current situation at Twitter I have chosen to take a twitter break. Twitter hasn’t been fun during the last three years, which is part of the reason I went anonymous, private, and then public but anonymous again. It used to be about having conversations with people that I would eventually want to meet in person.

Now that Twitter has shifted political slant and verified account have lost their status there is little to keep me on Twitter. I see it slipping in the wrong direction and I do not want to be part of the network at the moment. I might return in a few weeks or months. For now I think that the best is just to stay away.

I have two mastodon accounts now, on different instances and I am willing to give those networks a chance. I’m on those instances but there is a difference. I am not inclined to invest weeks, months or years on trying to find a community, only for it to be destroyed, once again. Either the owners just grow bored, or the social network is bought, or the users grow bored and leave. After flitting from website from 1996 to today I have lost the drive to invest any time on networks that can be bought by billionaires, with no checks or balances. Why do we provide value to websites that are just sold by greedy people to other greedy people?

I did consider returning to Facebook and Instagram but I don’t think I am inclined to return to these networks. If pandemic policies change and we get to COVID zero then I will have a strong motivation to return to Facebook, for the groups. For now I might take a short break.

I think blogging and web development have a better return on investment than social networks. I will focus on these.