trenchant.org

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The bizarre self-destruction of Twitter continues. While some may find the chaos entertaining I’m choosing instead to see it as an important reminder – in the end, despite any corporate power, the web offers opportunities to control your content and destiny, if you choose that path.

There isn’t really anything more boring than talking about Twitter, but to set the context –

“Look. The site is gonna stay up but the spell is broken.” – Paul Ford

“It’s so powerfully obvious to me, it might as well be written in ten-foot letters of flame: the platforms of the last decade are done. – Robin Sloan”

Whether those sentiments are universally true or not, it’s already clear that for me, personally, the previous age of social networking as a useful way of maintaining and building relationships has ended.

(It ended a while ago, but I kept using Twitter, even after abandoning the rest.)

But, and this is what’s so hard to believe – but it’s true – it doesn’t matter. It’s fine.

Our social ties aren’t on Twitter, or any other social network or web site. Relationships are reflected in the bits, the bits aren’t the relationships.

The bits in a corporate database aren’t your friends.

The real treasure was the friends we made along the way and those can’t ever be owned, because they exist in the minds and actions of humans, not bits on machines. The bits were never worth anything.

Some fear that you can’t bring your “audience” with you. But that’s not even the right framing. Nobody owns an audience. If the ties between people matter, those ties find a way to survive.

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People that I made connections with in the early days of blogging more than 20 years ago – some of them disappeared for a while from my perspective. Sometimes years.

Sometimes they reappeared Sometimes with different names later. Sometimes, their real name, which I had never known. I can still read some of their blogs.

Sadly many of them I only see on Twitter in the modern era. But the ties are there.

These things will work themselves out.

It will be fine.

Hopefully whatever they eventually create again supports RSS or SMTP or USPS.

Own Your Own Destiny

It’s never been a better time to own your own domain name.

You don’t have to write your own software. You don’t have to administrate some ancient esoteric server. You can choose a million different ways to express yourself online, with different companies or open source software or whatever else.

But if you control the address, you can ultimately change it all.

(I run my own web server full of weird custom and open source stuff but have long since given up running my own email. I can adjust any of those decisions when I want. This is why I’m so wary of signing up to a random Mastodon server.)

Make your web site beautiful or brutal or weird. The terrible boredom and homogenity that has built up in centralized web presences over the past 20 years needs breaking. Send me your link.

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There’s a tradeoff between convenience and the dopamine addictions of fast, attributed responses, and the control and craft of other slower mechanisms.

We all get to make these tradeoffs for ourselves.

We get the Internet we deserve. At the end of 2022 it’s more obvious to see the immense costs that have accrued in the current paradigm.