What if There is No “Next Twitter”?
It feels like the past two months have been a waiting game, setting up our Mastodon and Post accounts while keeping an eye on Twitter for breaking news, a reason to leave, a prophet to lead us to a new promised land. Maybe Casey Newton and Popehat are the prophets for such an exodus.
But here’s the thing: There shouldn’t be a new place. It’s weird that there ever was one, when the place where we should be gathering is the internet itself, with all its weird, wonderful corners and frontiers and outer limits.
We take it for granted that The Discourse has a home where everyone is gathered together, but it hasn’t always been that way.
In the pre-Twitter years, I was a tech journalist covering web apps and startups. Which meant signing up for everything, because there wasn’t a coalesced platform for online conversation. Instead there were zillions of communities spread out across MySpace, LiveJournal, Digg, Slashdot, Fark, the galaxy of blogs that came together in our individual RSS readers, and the new generation of community sites like Reddit and YouTube. (And so many more. If I missed your favorite forum, I’m deeply sorry.)
When Twitter took SXSW by storm in 2007, it quickly became my main social network, and remained my go-to for the decade and a half since. It’s the app I open on my phone on the subway, what I read between meetings on a busy day, the last thing I read at night, the first when I wake up in the morning.
None of that behavior is healthy of course, but at least it’s been consistent. The rest of the social media world has evolved, as chat platforms became photo platforms became video platforms became experience platforms. But for me, the point of social media is to learn what my friends are reading and thinking about, and Twitter’s always been the best social media platform for that. There’s just no substitute for a perfectly crafted sentence with a link to read more.
At the same time, treating Twitter as the internet’s town square comes with a massive societal cost.
The Twitter experience used to be completely defined by who you choose to follow. But more and more, The Discourse has flattened out. In the last days of Twitter, we all follow certain people, whether we chose to follow them or not.
Because more than any media platform in history, Twitter is really, really good at elevating small people, small ideas, and small news stories, and giving them that prominent position. That can be amazing for underrepresented communities and marginalized voices. It also means grifters and idiots, who in saner times would be wallowing on some blog on the outskirts of the internet, instead become its central players.
To put a finer point on it: I do not want to know who Dinesh D’Souza is. There’s no reason for me to be familiar with his name. A media platform that serves his opinions on my TL is broken — the sharing mechanics are too frictionless, the incentives to share are perverse.
And that’s where an internet of infinite communities and forums might be better. If it makes discoverability harder, and sharing less frictionless, those might not be bad things. If it means we have to go find information rather than having it served up to us by everyone all the time, well, that’s probably better for everyone.
So if leaving Twitter feels like leaving your beloved home before your next home is built, I say pack a sleeping bag and a tent and be ready to rough it for a while. Maybe forever. Might be fun.
