The Social Meltdown

I just joined Threads. If you’ve not been following the news, Threads is the new social media app from Meta, the company behind Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. It’s basically a carbon copy of all the worst bits of Twitter, right up to the capricious billionaire chief executive who’d probably kill their own users if they thought they could sell advertising space on the headstones.

Not dead, only Thread.Sleep()ing?

Threads will never replace Twitter, though, because what Twitter was, at its peak, was something remarkable. It was not a microblogging service, it was the microblogging service. If you wanted to post something publicly, you’d post it on Twitter, whether you were the President of the United States of America, or a parody account based on a sitcom about a burger van in Scotland.

Twitter had clout. It had influence. For better or worse, tweeting could actually change the world. The Arab Spring, Obama, Trump, Brexit… sure, it wasn’t the biggest, most popular, or most profitable social media platform. But ask yourself: have you ever seen a “serious” newspaper use LinkedIn or Facebook as a source when quoting somebody? Nope. Twitter drove the news.

I joined Twitter in 2008 (here’s my first tweet!), around the same time I started getting involved in tech community events. Twitter was perfect for the kind of loosely-coupled connections and friendships that arise from those events. Facebook was too personal, LinkedIn was too corporate, email too time-consuming. But tagging somebody on Twitter was a wonderfully unobtrusive way to say “hey, we’re talking about this thing you might find interesting.”

It wasn’t always like that. Before microblogging, there was blogging. Blogging was great. Google Reader was a great product, Blogger and WordPress were easy enough to get up and running, and writing a blog became a de facto rite of passage for anybody trying to establish a name for themselves in tech, journalism, art, music.

Social media killed that, and I believe that’s because it changed the dynamic of what people do when when have five minutes to kill at their desk between meetings — not to mention the paradigm shift from desktop to mobile that was taking place around the same time. I used to check my blog roll a few time a day. I’d post in the comments, reply to threads, write my own follow-up posts. Then social media came along, and blogs got relegated to something I’d check when I’d caught up on Facebook and Twitter… and before long, that became impossible. Too many people, too much content, and if you’ve read everything your friends posted, the algorithm can always find something else to show you.

I’m as guilty as anybody of falling for the convenience of social media. Over the years, I spent more and more time posting on Twitter and Facebook, and less and less writing on my own blog. The occasional tweet going viral was a thrill… the most vapid, inconsequential kind of thrill, a completely arbitrary and unverifiable number on a web page going up every time the my post racked up another page impression to sell to their advertisers — but hell, they had some incredibly smart people getting paid an obscene amount of money to make going viral on those platforms feel like an accomplishment, and it worked.

Then, in November last year, Elon Musk bought Twitter.

I don’t know anything about electric cars, so based on the media coverage of Tesla’s success, I assumed Musk must be some sort of genius.

I do actually know a thing or two about rockets, and when I saw SpaceX landing two reusable launch vehicles side-by-side like something out of a 50s science fiction movie, I continued to assume that Musk must be some sort of genius.

Then he bought a software company — and as it happens, I know quite a lot about software, and about what’s involved in running complex software platforms.

I no longer believe Elon Musk is a genius. Not even close. I think a ginger cat with one brain cell would have done a better job running Twitter than Elon Musk has, unless he’s actually trying to destroy the platform and bankrupt himself in the process.1

Twitter is dying. Sure, it’s still up, I’m still using it, and so are lots of other people. But it feels like nobody’s in it for the long haul any more. It’s like when you realise your favourite bar isn’t bothering to fix the broken washroom taps any more: we’re still visiting, but we’re waiting for the day we show up to find the doors locked and the repossession notice stuck in the window, and when the day comes, nobody will really be surprised.

The problem is: there’s no compelling replacement.

In the immediate aftermath of Musk’s acquisition, a lot of folks I know set up accounts on Mastodon. Quite a lot of us discovered we already had accounts on Mastodon, which we’d completely forgotten about… and quite a few of those, myself included, discovered that the Mastodon instance we’d signed up to wasn’t a Mastodon instance any more and was now hosting some, ah, specialist adult content.

At the time of writing, I have active accounts on Mastodon, BlueSky and Threads — not to mention Substack’s own Notes platform, which looks suspiciously like Twitter but with better typography and no users. Plus all the platforms I was already on: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Telegram, WhatsApp, 43 different Slack workspaces (don’t ask), Discord, Signal, Meetup…

In a way, it’s a blessing. The sheer overload of networks means that social media no longer feels remotely convenient — and as much as I wish a few of them would hurry up and actually shut down, I suspect that’s about as likely as Nadine Dorries actually resigning.

Fundamentally, though, the process of re-evaluating Twitter’s role in my online career has led me to realise that I use — used? — Twitter for four things.

First: I use it to tell stupid jokes. No big deal. Jokes move easily onto another platform.

Second: I use it to publicly engage with companies whose behaviour I think is worthy of comment. Sometimes because they do something I think is exceptionally cool; sometimes because they do something I think is exceptionally uncool. Companies who aren’t answering the phone or replying to email will often respond to a tweet — especially from somebody with thousands of followers. I suspect this is just gone (thanks Elon): I honestly can’t imagine an airline paying as much attention to Threads, Mastodon or BlueSky as they did to Twitter in its heyday, and as Twitter itself becomes increasingly irrelevant I’m sure customer service departments all over the world are breathing a huge sigh of relief.

Third: I use it to talk about tech. Fifteen years ago, when I didn’t know anybody to talk to when I needed help with .NET and Firebug and jQuery, posting on Twitter had an uncanny knack of connecting with the right people. For me, that’s not a factor any more; my network of helpful tech people has reached critical mass and is no longer beholden to a specific channel or platform.

Finally, I use Twitter to talk to people. Sometimes, this is personal: I talk to a lot of people via Twitter DMs, and in many cases, they’re people I have no other way to reach - no email, no phone number, no common Slacks or Discords. Over the next week or so, I’ll be pinging all of those people saying “hey, here’s how to reach me when this whole place finally burns down”.

Often, though, it’s more of a broadcast. It’s announcements about meetups I’m running, conferences, community events, workshops, Linebreakers concerts — and what I’d really like is to be able to use email for this.

Email is far from perfect, but what makes it unique is that it’s portable. When Twitter finally goes dark, I’ll lose the 15,000+ followers I’ve built up over the last fifteen years — they’ll just be gone. There’s no way for me to download a list and sync it to Threads or BlueSky. But if I have a list of email addresses, I can take that with me - and, if you’re running your own domain, so can you. I’ve moved dylanbeattie.net from my friends’ Qmail box, to my own mail server, to Fastmail; it’s not trivial, but it’s possible.

I’ve never run any kind of newsletter or mailing list before; to me, email has always felt more personal than just posting stuff online and hoping the right people will see it. But, y’know, with everything that’s happening to social media at the moment, it feels like it might be time to give it a shot.

You wanna be involved? Sign up, let’s see how this thing goes.

It’s just the same dumb stuff I was doing already, but in your inbox instead of on somebody else’s advertising platform.

And if not? I’m on Twitter, BlueSky, Threads, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub, TikTok — and let’s face it, whatever daft thing launches next week, I’ll probably be dylanbeattie on that as well.

1 We shall leave aside, for now, the question of how moribund the automotive and aerospace industries must have been for a hack like Musk to disrupt them as successfully as he did.