It’s been a year since I wrote Beautiful Twitter Sunsets, and roughly a year since the ownership and management change over on Twitter-that-was, and after something like 13 years on that site (and who knows how many words written) I have deleted my account. My accounts, actually, I had more than one. The alts rarely updated but one was “Available Quests”, a handle that posted D&D, table-top appropriate quests like some kind of guild job board and the other was “Timeline Operations”, a customer service account for time travelers stuck in this awful splinter timeline. TimelineOps was always a fun character to step into and the jokes mostly wrote themselves as I interacted with people.

Anyway, both of those and the main account deleted.

Like everyone else, I am waiting to see what comes next. Mastodon is probably the technical (and tech) leader in this race but has a horrible brand, a fractured user base, and something of a reputation among the folks who haven’t used it yet. The ActivityPub protocol is the key jewel in Mastodon’s potential social media crown, but we’re still waiting for another major player to implement it [Tumblr, maybe?] or for someone to build a new app and website from scratch that will federate with Masto and the rest using ActivityPub, while also resonating enough with users that it gains traction.

The other ‘open’ option that is 1. not open, 2. wholly owned by a private company, and 3. actually gaining some mindshare out there is Bluesky. Bluesky, or bsky.app, is using the AT Protocol (yes, they capitalize it even though you’re supposed to say “at protocol”, not sound out “A. T.”) which is similar to ActivityPub in that it will allow different platforms to cross post and ‘federate’ and let you take your online social presence with you to whichever platform you’d prefer (that uses the AT Protocol). Except that the AT doesn’t connect to anything and no one else is using it. Bluesky is succeeding where a number of other platforms ain’t by basically looking like and acting almost exactly like twitter from, say, 2017 while also restricting access behind invite codes while they go through their “Beta”. The first batch of invites went out to journalists and a few other heavy hitters so they’ve managed to make a site that you’d want to read with accounts that you’d probably like to follow and then immediately closed the door to everyone, only opening it a crack.

It was just six weeks ago that Bluesky hit a million users, despite technically being around since 2019. It could probably grow to ten times that size in another six weeks if they opened the door to everyone, but the folks that run Bluesky are being very careful. Users are great but users are also the worst thing about a lot of social media.

If you go to the bottom of this web page you’ll find links to my accounts on both of these new platforms¹. I’m spending more time right now on Bluesky and will probably be active there for the foreseeable. Though the social media I probably have more fun using is Tumblr, which is kind of hilarious since I was on Tumblr even before making a twitter account in 2010. Everything old is new again.

Twitter-that-was: You were awful, and then somehow over the past year you got worse. You will not be missed; mourned a little, maybe, because you were a part of our lives for quite a long time, but not missed.

There’s not a replacement yet. Like everyone else, I’m still waiting to see where we all land.

¹ The Links section is baked into the CMS and almost trivial to update, when I remember to update, so if you are reading this in 2 or 3 years time and we’re all on some new second-life VR/AR social media platform called StupidGoggles or TormentNexus or whatever, my account for the latest-greatest social media platform should be down there too.

I’m not a poet – strike that, we can all be poets. But I am not a professional poet and my skills in writing verse are both under-exercised and a little rusty. But I wanted to take a little poetic license anyway and paint a mental picture for you, of a glorious fall afternoon full of color and crisp weather and quiet walks across fallen leaves in a park, or perhaps along a woodland trail.

And a glorious fall afternoon full of sunlight gives way to evening, and the slanting sunlight angling lower and lower in the sky, and a beautiful sharp, spiky sunset, until just a single glowing ember sends out a last light-house beam as it slips under that horizon. Good night and good luck.

…and that’s the feeling I’m getting being on a certain social network these days. The Titanic musicians playing our way out. We few, we lucky few, one last time unto that breach.

But the thing about sunsets: there is always a sunrise (historically and statistically speaking) so this isn’t the end, this is just a really bad day to be a Twitter employee and is one more reminder that we should probably know where the exits are, even if today is not that day. And it never hurts to have a back-up plan, maybe a space you already keep on a domain you already own.

A nice place to land when it all goes to heck. A good place to watch that final sunset.

Remember to breathe
heck take a big breath right now
(and straighten your shoulders and back a little your posture is probably terrible)

and if you need to, put down the phone or get up from your desk for a minute.
Maybe just go ahead and do that anyway, “need to” or not.

Now find a window to look out of. Or if there isn’t a handy window, find the furthest point you can and deliberately adjust your focus away from the phone or desk and instead look into the distance.

Take a break, finish the thought, let it go.

…

…If need be take another big breath.

okay

Now ‘center’ yourself.
That could mean: reminding yourself of where you are, where you stand, who you are, who you love, what the plan is for the rest of the day, or none of that and a little quiet meditation instead (for those that meditate).
But find a center

and try to be there for a long second,

and hold onto as much of that as you can when you go back to the screen.

##

Hey while we’re here: if you didn’t back up your data on 1 January (New Year’s Day is an excellent day for backing up important data) then take a minute to do that before you dive back into whatever terrible news is happening. You’ll feel better after.