Categories
Endured

So…

I am, apparently, Twitter user #79,903. That’s almost 16 years on the hell site – out of what is nearing 30 years online – so it is easily the longest internet platform I’ve ever engaged with.

Like practically everyone, I don’t have much faith in what’s to come. I don’t expect it to fall apart overnight, but like most of the internet, nothing good can stay good forever. (And really, Twitter has been bad long before recent events. But it’s also had critical mass in a way few sites have.)

I don’t know quite what the future holds for Twitter. I will undoubtedly keep passively reading it and engaging when necessary. But my energy has already been going elsewhere for a while.

I’ll spare you a treatise examining years of my mixed feeling about social media and leave it at this:

A. The majority of my social energy these days in on Discord. You can find me at Remy#4558.

B. I am building a small, private Discord community of my own. I have no desire to cannibalize the other small communities I’m in. But if you want to join a small circle of folks that I’d vouch for, drop me a note wherever you normally contact me.

C. I’m also on Cohost. It’s got a very non-serious vibe that I’ve missed. The longer, navel-gazing stuff will probably still end up here.

D. I’m also, as of March 2023, on Mastodon. I’m as surprised as you probably are.

E. I’m also also, as of June 2023, on Bluesky.

E. I’m still on a bunch of other places. The ones I’m most active on: Instagram, Steam, Foursquare/Swarm, Letterboxd.

That’s all for now. Good luck and do your best.

Categories
Created Reflected

It’s Safe To Stop Ignoring Me On Twitter

After fielding multiple complaints from multiple friends – along the lines of “Will you ever shut up about soccer?” – I have opted to split my Twitter account into soccer and non-soccer variants.

So: if you’re looking for occasional tweets of wit and whimsy from me, you can follow/re-follow/stop muting @Remy. If you instead want frequent updates about the Red Bulls/MLS/the soccer world in general, you should follow @GothamistDan.

Can’t promise I’m going to do the same on this blog, of course, but I get the feeling not a lot of people are stopping by here anymore.

Categories
Found

Matt Haughey on Twittering During Tragedy

Frequently, when I start discussing Twitter with people who don’t use the service, I receive responses ranging from “I don’t know what I’d use it for” to “The world doesn’t need to know what I had for breakfast”.

Matt Haughey has just posted about twittering during tragedy, as he recently underwent treatment for a brain tumor. This closing paragraph stuck out to me:

>Twitter is a great tool for personal broadcast to a vast set of friends and family and it’s quickly turning into a new default communication medium for the online world. It can certainly be distracting in the face of day-to-day cubicle work, but in this specific case it […] was actually helpful at alerting friends to the accident and later informing them of the tragedy, and mirrors my own use of the service in a vaguely similar situation.