Twitter is dead, and the rest of text-based social media ain’t great

Twitter is dead. Sure there is some good parts of it remaining in the new company X, as this argues. But I am not certain for how much longer. If Musk wants to use it as a vehicle to relive his start up days , I don’t have much hope for it.

I still go on X to see what some people are doing, people who seem to be posting exclusively there. I was hopeful to jump to Threads, but after a flurry of activity, engagement seems to be dropping off. I tried Bluesky, but it seems better for people who used to love to argue on Twitter. That was never my thing.

I’ve also tried Mastrodon and even some Discord servers, but the problem in all cases is I cannot reproduce the social network I built up over time on Twitter. That social network kept me coming back and wanting to read and wanting to add. I don’t have the desire to build that up again.

The closest I have to that type of social network is what I have on Instagram. But it’s highly visual and I long for the text based social communication I used to have on twitter.

I don’t know what can be done about it. Maybe nothing. Maybe it’s the dusk of social media as we knew it from the Web 2.0 days. That could be fine.

In the mean time, here’s some more interesting links on social media I’ve liked recently. None of them are positive, alas: