Twitter Is Dying. Where to Go From Here?

Requiem for Twitter

Oh Twitter. I was an early-ish adopter of twitter. I joined back in April of 2009. This was right when it started getting mainstream traction and it quickly became my preferred form of social media.  

I loved twitter dearly and it was my main time waster for many years. If it wasn’t for that service, I would not have continued my comic book reading hobby. I don’t know too many people locally that read comics and I can talk about the latest story developments or the classic X-men comic I read. Twitter led me to finding many others like me.  

Not only that, I met my wife there. While we went to school together, it was through twitter my personality shined through and we are going strong. I made friends with people on that site that I still talk to do this day. These are people that I would have never met in person. My perspective of the world was broadened beyond the small foothills of the Appalachian Mountains I call home thanks to twitter. 

Twitter is not without fault. In the lead up to the 2016 US Presidential election, the site was unbearable to the point that I would eventually abandon my original account in favor of a clean start. Twitter is very much what you make of it. You have to carefully curate your experience, or it could be miserable. These last 5 years Twitter became something special for me as I formed close ties to these internet friends from around the world.  

Twitter Enters the Final Days

That is all changing. Thanks to the swindler named Elon Musk and his purchase of twitter, the site is increasingly becoming untenable and with reports coming out that the site hemorrhaging talent and staff, it is likely twitter will be closed by the end of the year. Heck if it can make it another week, I will be shocked.   

That leaves me and many other terminally online folk scrambling to find new internet corners to haunt. In the past this would be easy. Join a forum, create series of blogs, etc. The problem is that Twitter kind of destroyed the internet of the past. Twitter contributed to the death of the personal blog. Forums are extinct, thanks to the death of the websites via Facebook.  

Few social media platforms promote text first like Twitter. The Meta services of Facebook and Instagram are sleek, but the algorithms make interacting a mess plus the push is to video. Tiktok is not for me. That leaves the upstarts such as Mastodon, CoHost, and the surprising old hand—Tumblr.  

Social Media

I am still using twitter until the site Fail Whales one last time or until there’s no one left. That said I am not putting all my eggs in that basket.  

My leading social media platform is Mastodon. You can find me there here: https://mastodon.world/@extremelyuncanny  

It is most like Twitter or at least Old Twitter. I like it. There are some weird quirks but going forward this will likely be my main social media.  

After that I have Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram,  and CoHost . Each of these platforms have their upsides. I am not sure where to take some of them, because they require a lot more effort than a couple brief posts on Mastodon or Twitter.

Twitter is Dead. Long Live Blogs 

I am going to move to more small posting in between long form blog posts here at Extremely Uncanny. It isn’t going to go daily but I would like to go up to 2-4 times a week. I used to do commentary on comics over at Twitter, and that can easily move over here to the website. It will take me a couple more weeks to get things lined up but keep an eye out. I was kicking the idea around back at the beginning of the year as I was lamenting the death of comics blogging, but I guess that monkey paw’s finger curled up. 

That’s it for today. Changes are afoot here on the internet and its wild. Blogging is back on the menu!