Leaving Twitter as a collective action problem

Can we be more organised about it?

For obvious reasons I feel freshly determined to leave Twitter. And for equally obvious reasons — aka network effects — leaving Twitter is hard.

Like many others, I learned this for myself when I last tried to quit. I spent a few weeks over on Mastodon and then I missed my Twitter friends and I came crawling back.

So how do you quit a thing like Twitter?

One thing that gives me hope is that we know precisely why it’s hard. Those network effects mean you can’t leave unless a viable mass of your followers and followees leave Twitter too, in a coordinated way. So since we understand what’s keeping us in, could we design an escape?

Each platform’s variant of the network effect is subtly different. And with Twitter, I wonder if the weakness, and therefore our best line of escape, lies in the sense that we each have our own little Twitter bubble.

If we think about quitting Twitter as a more intentional strategy, supported by a service pattern, designed to overcome the forces keeping us in, maybe the approach is to see if we can form viable breakaway groups.

Personally, for example, I think I’d need about 100–200 people to form a breakaway Twitter group that felt viable, maybe even preferable, as a way of spending my time for at least a few months. The key test of course would be whether such a group can also feel viable for each of those people in turn. And whether other groups join us later.

So what could a Twitter escape plan look like? How exactly would we organise it and what tools would we improvise to boost our chances? And when we sit back to evaluate the plan, how promising does it feel?

Step one, as in any prison break, would be to find our co-conspirators. What we’d need in our first few months on the run is a group of people who find each other sufficiently interesting to not go crawling back.

This act of identifying our breakaway party feels doable in that it’s a solvable analytical question. We’d need to identify the sub-group of people in our Twitter universe that is big enough but also self-contained enough to form a viable mass. Maybe we’d do this explicitly, guided by Twitter’s rich and readily available data, or maybe we’d let the groups self-identify, allowing people to choose an escape group to join.

Since the key test would be mutual interestingness, I imagine we’d organise the groups under topics or vibes. And we’d probably start by picking topics that contain a high prevalence of Musk-era-Twitter-haters, maximising the chance of reaching a viable size. Groups like ‘leftie tech Twitter’ or ‘tech for good Twitter’ might be good places to start.

We’d need an easy way for people to declare their interest in participating in the escape attempt. And since Musk isn’t yet the Messiah, just a very naughty boy, he can’t stop us organising all of this in the open, using a little tool called Twitter.

Once we have our viable group, step two is clear too: we’d need to solve the collective action problem of coordinating these people to escape at roughly the same time and to regroup on the outside at the same place.

Again this doesn’t feel impossible. Digital technologies have given us a whole host of tools to solve collective action problems as seen in platforms like Groupon, Pledgebank, or Kickstarter. The basic model is for people to commit in advance to doing something if other people do it too, and the action is triggered only when the scale of the group is viable. So part of our escape equipment would be to build a tool using this model.

Finally, we’d need to enact the escape. This needs to be a moment, or close to one, because with social networks a critical mass plays out across time as well as space. On Day 1 after the breakout, we’d need enough people in the escape group to gather at the meeting place — whichever new platform we’d chosen — and engage with each other.

What does this all look like in practice? What I have in mind is a mix of a service pattern or a series of structured steps, made widely available online, backed by some tools to make it easy, all sitting under a brand to give it coherence and traction. That way you’d be able to say ‘Hi everyone, ‘I’m organising a Breakout/eXit/Lifeboat’, please click here to participate, and people would know what you meant and how to join in.

What about scaling? Like people stuck hiding in a safehouse for ages, our breakout bubbles would get boring after a while, and there’s a risk that people would start drifting back. So we’d need to incorporate a viral dynamic — a way for breakout groups to reach back over the wall into Twitter from the outside and help other groups to escape too. And again, for all of Musk’s power, he can’t stop this either, so we could use Twitter itself to make these kinds of connections.

Here’s where network effects could start to work in our favour. Because if we had some initial success — if we could find the points of maximum weakness in the network; the escape groups that feel most hopeful — the later ones would get easier. In fact we’d probably choose our early escape groups partly because they would make the later groups easier. They’d act a bit like an advance party leaving on behalf of a wider group, reporting back later to give others confidence in the viability of escape.

With that in mind, it might be wise to set a medium-term goal upfront and be open about this — maybe we’re seeing if we can break out a whole subsection of the Twitter ecosystem, one that would be viable not just over months but over years. Examples might be “UK public digital Twitter” or “Environment Twitter”. We’d start by breaking out an advance party within the group before going back for the others. And again the beauty is that we could do all of this in the open, learning along the way.

Lastly, the million dollar question: where would we go? This is of course part of the problem. Facebook, Threads, LinkedIn all have their flaws. So far, Mastodon has been the haven of choice for many Twitter escapees, myself included. The real risk with Mastodon is that we could break it by importing Twitter behaviours. If there’s one thing I learned in my time on Mastodon it’s that it is not a Twitter alternative — it’s better than that. The space is more considered, more inclusive, and less compulsive.

All of which makes me wonder: maybe for precisely these reasons Mastodon is the destination to aim for. What’s the point in fleeing one prison for another? Surely now that we’ve learned our lesson, serving time in Twitter jail, we’d go somewhere nicer. Plus Mastodon’s decentralised structure means we’d be forever beyond the reach of prison governors.

So maybe a final part of the quit-Twitter service pattern would be a tool or a process to help escape groups to negotiate joining a Mastodon server, similar to how a consulate might negotiate for refugees to flee one nation to join another during a war. Or maybe we’d provide support to make it easier for an escape group to form a new Mastodon server.

I’m not saying any of this would be easy. I’m just saying we haven’t really given it our best shot yet, and it wouldn’t cost us much to try. The core team — the people creating the quit-Twitter service pattern/tool/method — would need a basic mix of skills — service/UX design, content writing, and some developer capacity. And all their work could be open and iterative; we could even run repeated escape attempts and improve them each time.

The thing with Musk is that the prison he’s running has walls that are just lines of prisoners, keeping other prisoners in. So the way to escape isn’t tunnels and explosives, it’s communication and organisation. All aiming for that critical moment — when we just walk away together.

To stay in touch with my writing you can follow me on Medium or support my writing on Substack. Or for the big picture take on how we adapt our governing institutions for a digital age, there’s my book, End State.

If you’re interested in these themes, here are some relevant pieces I’ve written before. On path dependency and why it heightens the stakes in our negotiation with technology; on the nature of technology; on the Fable of the Bees, if the bees were on Facebook; and an essay entitled The Invidious Hand, asking ‘what happens to capitalism when we discover a digital dimension?’