There have been some rumblings about Twitter as of late. From sacking half the staff based on lines of code written, making the remaining lot work 84-hour shifts, to enabling anyone to become verified for $8/month whilst promising free speech and posting right-wing conspiracy theories, Elon Musk has made the biggest splash in his first week at Twitter that possibly any company has ever seen.
And now they’re looking to get some of the fired staff back and banning “Elon Musk” accounts for impersonation? Unbelievable — I thought comedy was now legal on Twitter!
While no major company truly has everyone’s best interests at heart, it should suffice to say that this is not something I wish to be a part of.
Twitter as a concept, I like. In the past when the character limit was 140 characters, I simply found it too restrictive, but after they upped it to 280 characters and made it easy to chain multiple tweets together into a thread, it’s been alright. Even for long-form content, this works alright, forcing the author to break their prose into separate paragraphs, while allowing the readers to link to or share specific parts.
For my purposes of mostly self-promoting itch.io uploads, this was perfect. After all, there’s simply not a great deal that has to be said about each link. But now that I’m deleting my Twitter account, what else is there? The obvious answer is Mastodon, but decentralised isn’t exactly what I’m looking for. There’s also cohost — this one doesn’t look ready quite yet.
I will admit, this isn’t entirety just about Elon Musk. Even before his arrival, the website has been going downhill. You can no longer view more than a couple tweets from a profile without logging in, and they seemed more interested in failed experiments like fleets than more important things like allowing tweets to be edited or allowing recommendation notifications to be disabled entirely.
As such, I’ve come to the conclusion that hosting my own blog is the answer. While I know from experience that maintaining such a thing is a pain and doesn’t come with the same benefits as posting on an established website, it means I’m not at the mercy of anyone else. If the hosting company sucks, it’s not too hard to migrate to another one.