Given the recent Elongated Muskrat bigotries (Lordy, his trans daughter breaking off contact and Grimes dumping him and dating a trans woman has really fucking broken him), I’ve started seriously exploring other social media options. Here are some my personal observations and thoughts (if you disagree, then YOU ARE WRONG! Or not):
- Regarding post.news (‘mikethemadbiol’ by the way…), there are two problems with it. First, the content seems kind of… boring. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not really pitched to what I want. Second, there really isn’t a good way to retweet (repost? retoot?). You can quotetwootpost, but you can’t just retwootpost (if you can, it’s not obvious).
- Regarding Mastodon (‘mikethemadbiologist’ at ‘mastodon.online’), it has the opposite technical problem: you have to manually quotetwootpost. I realize quotetwootposting can be used for a lot of dunking, but it can be a useful way to comment and interact.
- That said, Mastodon is starting to be a reasonably good RSS feed, especially for science stuff, which is one of the main attractions of Twitter. Late night scrolling through the Mastodon local feed is usually pretty interesting too (discussions of Vietnamese architecture! In Vietnamese! Which I don’t understand!)
- There also are WordPress plugins for automatically posting my blog posts to Mastodon, so that’s good too (haven’t bothered to look for post.news plugins yet).
- What might push me away from Twitter ‘for good’ (see next point) is Elongated Muskrat’s announcement that he’s going to release the interoffice emails regarding suppressing COVID misinformation. Eagerly awaiting Matty Dick Pics (aka ‘Matt Taibbi’) and Bari Weiss to show their asses completely and go full COVID denialist crank.
- Even if I ‘leave’ Twitter, I will keep the blog autoposting going–I’m perfectly happy to have Elongated Muskrat burn his Tesla stocks to maintain my account* (admittedly a teensy, tiny part of a single share…). I’ll also show up once in a while so the account doesn’t get deactivated.
- What the whole Twitter clusterfuck shows is that no one should have the kind of power and wealth Musk has. We shouldn’t have to worry about his fucking feelings (as I noted above, his daughter breaking off contact and Grimes dumping him probably red pilled him even more–he was always an asshole).
*I come by this honestly. My late mother, who worked for the phone company way back when it was Ma Bell and hated it (the amount of sexism was staggering), received, as part of her pay, a few Bell shares. After the phone company broke up, she would receive multiple dividend checks for ridiculously small amounts (e.g., 22 cents). She never sold the shares because she wanted them to waste their money sending her those checks. This is the way.
When I was under 21, my parents would often give me miscellaneous shares of stock, usually the result of some kind of stock split or merger. For years, I had three shares of Reichhold Chemicals and, for years, they dutifully sent me a quarterly dividend check of about fifty cents. I used to call it a nuisance check. It was worth money, but I only got that money, about the price of a newspaper back then, if I bothered to cash it or deposit it.
Good for you moving away from Twitter. I never got directly involved with the Twit-o-verse. I relied on good old fashioned bloggers like you to deal with the monstrosity. I’ve been following Mastodon for a while now. It used to have a bad reputation because it was popular with child molesters in Japan, but I gather it has outgrown that stage. It still has rough edges, scaling issues and, likely, security problems, but so many bloggers I follow have been talking about moving to Mastodon, that I figure it will have an entirely new, much larger community in coming months.
I get the impression that Twitter rose in popularity when Google terminated its Reader back in 2013. I no longer bother with RSS feed readers in any form since whenever I try to follow things in such an organized fashion I quickly fall thousands of posts behind and abandon the feed entirely. Still, I get the impression that a lot of bloggers follow all sorts of feeds so I don’t have to. Thanks for all your hard work dealing with the firehose for all these years, and here’s hoping that Twitter sinks into irrelevance.
I’m pretty sad about what’s going on with Twitter and all of the bio and epidemiology and virology people seeming to spread to different winds. They may be coming along too late, but there’s also spoutable (spoutible?) I think they’re calling themselves, who are run by the same people who have something about antibots?
Anyway, I’d almost forgotten about them but they seem to be trying to be most like Twitter except with good content moderation.
Apparently spoutible: https://twitter.com/cbouzy/status/1603802296651071503?t=GUNI05uaxNHoUDfL18nzXg&s=19
Ah, they’re run by the same people who made bot sentinel – https://preregister.spoutible.com/