LAST WEEK, FOR the first time, the fast-deteriorating Twitter sent me a “warning” message! Pretty exciting. Evidently they thought my tweet (reproduced below) “might have sensitive content—like nudity, sexual content, gore, or hateful symbols.”
In fact, the offending tweet is lacking anything remotely so interesting; it’s an invitation to Mastodon, my new social media home (please follow me over there at @maria@thelife.boats). And if you want to give Mastodon a try, visit thelife.boats, the Mastodon server I use, which is run by the Brick House Cooperative. You can switch servers anytime!
When I first started on Mastodon, it felt a bit like a BBS from the 90s: random and goofy in a pleasurable, old-fashioned way. A nerd place. But then I came to understand that I’d been conditioned to accept a “curated” and “branded” experience of social media. The real thing is in fact random; the real thing is just people talking about any old thing that strikes their fancy.
There are a few other alternatives to Twitter out there. Mastodon is the leading one, and I am currently amazed at how fun it is, what with the low fascist quotient, no ads, and opportunities for insightful conversation. The second-place contender, Post, suffers from the same flaw that brought Twitter down: it’s billionaire-funded and billionaire-owned, and can torpedoed by actors hostile to the values I care about, such as transparency, egalitarianism, and democracy. More on that here.
Every click, every heart, every second you devote your attention to anything at all on Twitter, or Facebook, or any other profiteering megaplatform, contributes directly to the welfare of those no-goodniks.
And worse, it means having your mind and energy hijacked by bullshit unworthy of the attention of decent people. We don’t have to give one-tenth of a tinker’s curse about Elon Musk, or MAGAs, or “wokeness” or any of the nonsense those clowns want us to talk about, at the expense of stuff that matters.
I don’t know about you, but I’m about done writing for billionaires for free, and even more done with slowly building a social media network which I then have to dismantle, because a bunch of fascists come and wreck it.
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