I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about why twitter became stressful and unpleasant for me to use, even before the Musk takeover. And here’s what I came up with.

I’ve been meaning to prune the lists of people I follow on twitter for… years. I’ve done it occasionally, but still felt like I wasn’t seeing the stuff I wanted to see. And the stuff that I was seeing only upset and stressed me out.* I also didn’t understand why my friends weren’t liking or interacting with my posts. But that wasn’t because I didn’t do a good enough job picking out people to follow and vice versa. It was a feature, not a bug.

By amplifying popular noise through the various “tweaks” to the timeline, twitter became a product that intentionally deprived us** of the opportunity to create community. It stopped being social media and became a broadcast platform, akin to network television***. Accounts with enormous follower counts/“engagement” dominated all of our timelines, squeezing out the real humans we actually wanted to keep up and connect with. I don’t have to tell you how many times I would realize I was missing out on a real life friend’s tweets, but was fully up to date on some bullshit from people I didn’t follow and didn’t want to follow.

And that’s the reason why Mastodon feels so good, especially for those of us who remember early twitter, early tumblr, RSS feeds. Because we get to shape the content we see, the community we experience. Because the content shows up on a chronological timeline and only from people we follow. The people who prefer twitter over mastodon seem to me the kinds of people who prefer to use its broadcast features and game its amplification algorithm to reach the broadest audience possible for fun and profit.

But I didn’t leave twitter despite all this. I didn’t even expect leaving twitter as late as yesterday. But the “2FA is bloatware” thing scared the living shit out of me. I have 2FA because I’ve had my account hacked and taken over. I have 2FA because I worked in cybersecurity for 4 years. I have zero interest hanging out in a space where it’s considered superfluous.

To prove my own very shitty point, I’m still on Instagram. I don’t like being on there: I hate Meta and Mark and everything they stand for. But my friends are still on there, and I want to see their puppies, babies, and beautiful selfies. So I hang around. But no one has ripped out standard security out of that product!

Anyway… I like it on Mastodon, I plan to stay, and I’m very deliberate about starting fresh and finding people to follow organically instead of running one of those “find everyone I followed on twitter” scripts.

*I used to say that twitter made me sad, TikTok made me happy, and Instagram made me buy stuff.

**And by us, I mean individual users with modest followings.

***I’ve been pondering what it would mean to regulate twitter like broadcast television, but I’m not informed enough to offer my opinions on that topic.