Usually I check Twitter in the morning before I go to work, and then in the evening. I didn’t check it this morning, but going on there tonight (9:30 PM, EST, US) my timeline read like the world was ending. Twitter’s gonna die or some such.
If that happens, there will be a lot of people who are sad, a lot of folks who are going to lose touch with people they’ve connected with on there (even if they’ve never met in real life), and a lot of creative people whose work won’t be as easily findable as pre-Twitter.
That is too bad. And I’m sure there will be some sort of new social media site (Mastodon? Instagram (not new)? Tumblr (definitely not new)?) that will eventually fill the void, and the scattered may eventually reconvene there.
I have to wonder, though, whether any of this is worth it. In spite of the millions of little connections, positive things, smiles delivered at a random joke or bizarre comment that were made possible by Twitter, what did we lose as a result? Maybe nothing, and when the superintelligent cockroaches write the history of humanity in a few dozen millennia they’ll actually lament the fact that dril stopped Tweeting (how in God’s name did that become a verb) in late 2022.
But maybe we did lose something, and maybe having Twitter go away (if it does) will give human beings an opportunity to remember what that was.
Regardless of what happens, I’ll be here. If you’re interested, check back every so often. Peace.