Last night, I engaged in a choatic bacchanal during what some alleged might be the final hours of Twitter’s life. Of course, the site is still up this morning and I don’t think most people truly believed the website was going to abruptly vanish at some point. It was (and still is) pretty clear that Twitter is going to diminish and fade into obscurity or diminish and transform into something else, just like every other social media site that has fallen by the wayside over the years. After all, it’s not like MySpace is entirely unavailable, it’s just irrelevant. Things on the internet tend to not vanish completely so much as fade from public reckoning or change so completely that they’re actively abandoned. Thus far, neither has entirely happened yet, but last night marked the end of an era as, if the reports prove true in coming days, most of Twitter’s employees have left the company.

I plan to ride the sinking ship that is Twitter into the depths. It was the first place I called “home” on the internet and that’s not a word I use lightly. I grew up in a place I was expected to call home that never felt like it, moved to college where I built my first home on the shifting sands of twice-yearly dormitory moves, and then bumped around uncomfortable apartments until I found a place that felt like home for a few years. Now I’m back to making do and trying to build a home in a place that sometimes feels hostile to comfort and familiarity so I refuse to give up the one place that has carried me through the last decade as a place I’ve felt comfortable and, sometimes, seen.

I’ve made a lot of friends there, over the years. Lost a lot, too. The same is true of joining communities, given that I’ve bounced in and out of both Writing Twitter and TTRPG Twitter, and even now I’ve still got friends I only communicate with via Twitter. Sure, we’re all looking elsewhere for that same connection and I’m starting to look for community in a wider array of places, but I’m not going to abandon the friends and commmunity I’ve got on Twitter until they’re inaccessible. Or, I guess, I’ve had time to build those things elsewhere. Gone are the days of having all my eggs in a single basket. I may never get quite so many eggs in my other baskets as I had in my Twitter basket, but that seems to be the nature of things these days as previously unassailable pillars of community connection fracture and leave people stumbling to and fro between much smaller communities through the wreckage of what once was. It happened in meat space thanks to the pandemic and now it’s happening in cyberspace as we are increasingly infected with a much deadlier disease than Covid-19 ever was: billionaires.

I wish I’d appreciated Twitter more when it wasn’t burning down. Sure, some of my current feelings are definitely the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia combining with the early, wistful stages of slowly mourning Twitter, but I was always so shy. I was worried about what people would think of what I said. I deleted most of the tweets I wrote becauase I figured I wasn’t really adding anything to the conversation or that maybe the idea I had was too complex to express through a tweet. Turns out what I was doing was preventing myself from adding the one thing no one else could add: me. I kept myself out of so many conversations and silenced myself for years, only pushing myself out of that rut when I realized that this might be my last chance to participate at all. I wish I’d figured this out earlier, that it is okay to just exist in spaces and that sometimes it’s a good thing to only add my voice to a conversation even if I don’t have a new, unspoken idea to add as well.

So now I continue building up my cohost account (https://cohost.org/LiteraryWizard) and decide that maybe I should have listened to my friends in high school who told me to set up a Tumblr. The stuff I do is mostly text-based, so that probably would have been a better platform for me than Facebook (which was the platform I chose when my friend started pressuring me to go online more than my AIM and Runescape accounts allowed). I can still make one, though I don’t know that I’ll do much with it. I feel like I need more time to mourn Twitter before I’m ready to move on. After all, grief is difficult and losing a home, even a digital one, is a big thing to lose even if you can still live there as the roof collapses and the comfort it once provided is eroded by the worsening weather.

I’m trying to stay positive and embrace the sense of freedom I have knowing that everyone I interact with feels the same over on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Literary_Wizard). It’s the attitude that led to last night’s chaos that started with joining Hank Green in getting “#butts” trending because chaos is fun, joy needs to be saught to be obtained, and we wanted to see how many “#butts” tweets per second we could get to (peaked at 8). After all, what’s a party without a bonfire? If this is a place of community, connection, and shared strangeness, then it is fitting that we spend the last days of its life as a viable social media platform dancing around in the ruins.