Today I’m leaving Twitter, because I don’t like making unpaid contributions to a for-profit publisher whose
proprietor is an alt-right troll. But also because it’s probably going to break down.
Read on for details.

I was beginning to think the End-Of-Twitter narrative was overblown, but evidence is stacking up.
First, the increasingly-toxic politics; check out
Elon
Musk and the Narcissism/Radicalization Maelstrom by Josh Marshall, and
Elon Musk
Bans CrimethInc. from Twitter at the Urging of Far-Right Troll.

Then there’s the technology. Because of the way modern Web Services work, it’s unsurprising that it
ticks along even with much of the workforce gone.
I expect that happy state of affairs to end as soon as they start deploying new features or really any kind of update, because the
greatest threat to a service is the team that operates it. And the threat is sharpest when they
need to upgrade the service, to fix a bug or unleash a new feature. Especially when the sane people have all left, the ones who don’t
want to commit to a “hardcore” lifestyle to enrich Elon.

What I’m doing ·
I’m not closing or deleting my account, because Twitter might come back, who knows. But I’m going to stop posting pictures
and observations and amplifying worthy voices and all that stuff. Remember: Unpaid contributions, alt-right troll,
fuck that.

I’ve deleted the app from my phone.

For the moment, my short-form notes on the world are available at
@timbray@mastodon.cloud; Come on over! That address will probably change to end
with something other than “mastodon.cloud” but don’t worry, Mastodon lets me (and anyone) migrate between
hosts and bring along followers; isn’t that wonderful?

I have roughly one-tenth the follower count that I do on Twitter, and am following only one sixth as many, but it has already
become as amusing and instructive as my experience on Twitter.

I’ll still use Twitter to post pointers to ongoing pieces because that benefits me, not Elon.

Oh, the other thing I’m doing is working with the excellent people at
CoSocial.ca to build a coop-based Canadian Mastodon presence.
Check it out!

Are people really leaving Twitter? ·
Yes.

But it’s super-hard to measure. There’s
an API for exploring the Mastodon instance space and then the Mastodon API itself lets
you
query an instance for its activity. There’s a
feed full of graphs that apparently relies on this stuff. It’s been
showing several thousand Mastod