Twitter is beginning to circle the drain. I saw someone’s estimate that it will be toast by year’s end. This is bad for many reasons but the biggest one is that progressives have been able to effectively use Twitter to mobilize against really bad shit since 2015. Once Twitter is gone, we’ve lost an important, easily accessible social platform to find each other and share important shit.
Mastodon is just one social media site offering itself up as a lifeboat but it’s a decentralized union of servers and it’s ease of use is on the higher end of not really intuitive at all. It’s laggy. It’s picky in terms of what desktop browsers it will interface with. And the app is really not great. But I am there for the moment.
Sadly, I think the era of social media is drawing to a close. At least this iteration of it anyway. I think this is a bad thing but it isolates us from the larger world. It isolates us even within the worlds we inhabit because it’s not like media is being terrible helpful in terms of providing us with information we need rather than information some billionaire would prefer we have.
Is it possible to have a dark age in a highly civilized world? I think we are about to find out.