I have been on Twitter for sixteen years—I joined one year (almost to the day) after Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet, when Twitter was the darling at SXSW, and a few months before there was an iPhone to make it so Twitter was constantly available as a distraction anywhere you happened to be.
In the early days, Twitter’s prompt for input was a question: “What are you doing?” Like an idiot, I often answered that honestly, so my early posts are banal snips of my life—”Just done mowing the lawn” or “Going for pho at Green Bamboo” with the very rare insight into what Twitter would become for a lot of folks, like “Last night’s rehearsal included my rousing rendition of ‘Baby Got Back’ to the tune of ‘Greensleeves.’”
Everyone knows what happened between 2007 and now, and how Twitter has been at various times both a comfort and a scourge, to the point where it’s an actively unpleasant place to be these days.
So, what is one to do? Where do you go to fulfill what is clearly a modern need to shout into the void and have the void answer back with some sort of emoji?
At one point yesterday, I had eleven different apps on my phone that are intended to function at least in part as a replacement for Twitter, including the Meta-owned Threads, which officially launched yesterday.
I’ve had a tough time with Meta (formerly Facebook) sites over the years. I joined Facebook originally because of pressure from my then-wife, and watched it become more useful, then far less useful and more toxic over the years. I disabled my Facebook account in November 2019 as a mental health thing, knowing that the lead up to the 2020 election would make online interactions there harmful both for me and for the people I was interacting with—and I really never felt the need to go back. Not after the election, and not even when I ran for Congress myself in 2022.1
Similarly, I joined Instagram because of encouragement from friends, only to have Facebook buy it and put it through what Cory Doctorrow refers to as enshittification, to the point that it’s mostly an app that I open to be fed advertisements these days.
When I opened Threads for the first time yesterday, I was disappointed (but not at all surprised) to discover that the service had launched fully-enshittified. The app experience of standing in the middle of modern day Times Square looking at nothing but billboards for Brands and a crowd of strangers yelling for my attention.
The second time I opened Threads, I got a plea from the well-funded right wing hate group Moms for Liberty asking me to narc on my kid’s school if they had the temerity to suggest black people historically (and currently) have it bad in America or that LGBTQ+ folks have a right to exist free from violence and oppression.
The third time I opened Threads it was to disable my account. Then I deleted the app.
So what does the future hold? Honestly, I don’t know. I’ve left Twitter: the pinned tweet from my non-running-for-Congress account is my last tweet of a poop emoji, since that seems to be the essential spirit of Twitter these days. I have a Mastodon account but that user experience is nigh-on unusable, and various groups of folks on Slack and Discord that have a higher signal-to-noise ratio than your average social media site.
I’m lucky in that my social media handle has to-date not been claimed by anyone other than me, and has been my “brand” (ugh) for 20+ years now. Anywhere in the online space that I can be found, I can be found under that name2.
Oh yeah. The answer is (currently) Bluesky, which seems pretty Low-Key and Brand-Free for the moment. I have no idea what will happen when they decide they need to make money, though—I’m sure it will be unpleasant. The question is will it be so unpleasant that folks leave?
Yes, people yelled at me for not having a constant presence on Facebook during my campaign. To the point where people who constantly told me what I was doing wrong volunteered to run my Facebook page for me.
I just googled “fancycwabs” for the first time in a long time and hoo boy, there are lot of websites using my flickr photos that I wasn’t aware of.
If I ever join Threads I will only join to create a group called Moms for Liberty from Moms for Liberty.