End of the road

I've been on Twitter (I'll never call it X) for 16½ years. I'll be on it for only eight more days.

When Elon Musk bought it, after some of his usual juvenile drama, I started to think about why I was on the "bird site." There were two main reasons. One, there were so many genuinely funny people on there. They were always good for a laugh. And second, Twitter drives some traffic, as they say, to this blog. I send out a tweet linking to a blog post, and that's how some people find it.

But with the United States now turning into Russia, and Musk being one of the American oligarchs, I just can't participate in his crapshow any more. And so the search has been on for a while for something to replace Twitter. First I tried something caled Mastodon, but it was too clumsy, and not enough good writeres were on it. Then I was on a site called Post, but it went under.

Nonetheless I persisted. A while back I started a presence on Threads, which is a Facebook offshoot. And in the past couple of weeks, a seemingly even better platform has come into prominence: Bluesky.

Now, I have no delusions about the purity of either of these two latest places. Facebook is generally pretty evil, and who knows who the money is behind Bluesky, or what they want out of it. But there's a certain satisfaction in saying no to Electric Car Boy. I'll deal with anybody but him.

I'm far from alone. Millions of users have joined Bluesky since the election. Most of them are bailing out from Twitter. And that makes Bluesky a more interesting platform. With so many Twitter refugees there, Bluesky's got the content that Musk has so precipitously lost. It looks and feels like Twitter used to. 

For some people making the switch, the draw is that there's far less nasty right-wing content on Bluesky, but I've always blocked that stuff out anyway. To me, the advantage is that the good posters have moved over.

Between Threads and Bluesky, I'm going to join the ranks of former tweeters, come the first of the month. I will no longer post on Twitter, and probably more importantly, I'll be taking the Twitter app off my phone. Who knows what information that thing is mining?

If Twitter has been the way you have found the new posts on this blog, be aware that in nine days, there won't be any continuing link between the two. You can follow me on Threads (where I am bojackpdx54) or Bluesky (where I am @bojack54.bsky.social). And I'll continue to link to my blog posts on Facebook, although that particular robot gets grouchy about it sometimes.

It's sad to be leaving Twitter. But hey, a lot of things are sad.