Amidst everything else going on in the world, I’ve been watching Twitter continue to circle the drain. It’s nothing new, for the most part, but it’s still depressing to see it happening. More bills left unpaid, the slow degredation of basic features, the shifts in company policy that aren’t really shifts so much as the company’s owner desperately trying anything to keep people worshipping him, and then, mostly recently, the restriction of accounts to viewing a set number of tweets each day. The latest of these, the 600-tweets-viewable-per-day thing, caused a big stir and the biggest drop in Twitter activity I’ve seen. Now, thanks to the number of people using the site less (myself included), there’s fewer posts, less activity on those posts, and a growing desperation to find something new. A lot of people seem to be moving to bluesky, but the recent release of “Threads: an Instagram App” seems to have complicated matters. By which I mean that it seems to have claimed pretty much everyone looking to move with some notable exceptions, though I suppose we’ll see if they stay or move on the next time something new comes out.

I don’t know if I’ll use either one much. I don’t much care for Instagram and, despite some attempts earlier this year, never really got into it. I don’t really care for most Meta social media applications, given how much data they want (I never have and never will install one of their apps on my phone). From what people have been saying, Threads seems to be worse. I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t seen anything from any of my trusted sources about the claims people are making about what information the “Threads” app wants (other than a few saying things like “never use a meta app because the company is basically an intelligence gathering firm masquerading as a social media company”), but I’ll also admit that I haven’t really gone looking for information because I don’t really care for it. I don’t want another app from the company that owns Facebook and Instagram. All that means is I’d be using another service provided by the prime enshitifier of the the internet (Meta/Zuckerburg) and I really don’t want that. Plus, there’s apparently no way to control your feed and I’ve got enough of that frustration from how much shit gets thrown into my feeds on Facebook and Instagram that I absolutely do not care about. I don’t want shit reccomended to me. I want to see only the stuff I have chosen for myself and, so far, I only get that on Twitter anymore. And Cohost, techincally, but there’s a lot less activity on Cohost.

People are still suggesting that bluesky will be the best Twitter replacement, but their limit on users via their invite-only system means adoption is slow and probably going to lose users to stuff like Threads. Definitely in the immediate sense, given how many people immediately jumped to Threads, but probably also in the long-term sense as well. It’s not like people are going to wait around for a bluesky invite when they can easily sign up for something else and start using it today… Plus, people are making plenty of negative claims about bluesky as well, though they seem to be more limited in scope than the claims people made about all the other social media platforms that have sprung up in the last year. Bluesky itself seems to be interested in scaring some people away, what with its talk of federated social media and all that. I don’t really understand what they’re hoping to accomplish by federating things on bluesky, but I also don’t really know much about bluesky other than that it exists and most of the people I follow and frequently interact with on Twitter seem to have already gotten access to it, so that’s probably just a reflection of the very limited snippets of insight I’ve gotten into the platform.

All of this is exhausting. It’s not like I had a huge following on Twitter, but I had a group of friends I’d interact with and most of them are gone now. Most of them moved on to other things or abandoned social media entirely. A lot of the people I followed and interacted with, who weren’t really friends but were definitely associates, have gone as well. It is slowly becoming a graveyard/cesspit of right-wing filth that is less and less pleasant to participate in. Not to mention that, despite (or maybe because of) my attempts to constantly block any promoted tweets, I’ve stopped getting businesses and started getting increasingly horrible “verified” users who are paying to have their tweets promoted into other people’s feeds since they aren’t getting more engagement just from being “verified” like they thought they would. Turns out you need to not be a horrible person and actually be interesting or funny to get attention on social media and most people paying for blue checkmarks are neither.

I don’t really know what is going to happen with social media in the future. I feel like we’re approaching a turning point, but none of those have gone particularly well recently (most have been bad or just neutral). I don’t really want to turn into a digital hermit, but I might wind up becoming one just because it will be preferble to giving Meta more of my data to sell. I don’t think I’ll stop writing this blog even if I do vanish from the rest of the internet. It has been a long time since most of my views came from people clicking the links I post on other social media accounts, so it’s not like I’d be missing much if this place became my only digital footprint. All of this is a moot point at present. We’re a ways off from any major changes yet, so I’m going to stop borrowing trouble for today and go do something more relaxing than social media like scrubbing my toilet or sorting through my intrusive thoughts for the ones that might actually be useful and worth keeping around.