Changing Times
By 
I am moving into Phase 2 of my three-phase strategy for dealing with the destruction of Twitter. Phase 1 was to set up accounts on alternative platforms.
- Mastodon. A quirky platform run by quirky people. I have seen too many reports of it being unfriendly to people of color and arbitrary bannings by those quirky people.
- Counter.social. Not a bad interface, but nobody’s going there.
- Post.news. In beta, but they are building it surprisingly gracefully as they add users. Up to something over 100,000 users as I write. It looks like the best choice to me.
Phase 2 is to spend some time figuring out what is the best way to interact on Post. Its setup is different from Twitter: longer posts allowed, and comments on the post, rather than the Twitter free-for-all of individual reply tweets. My first feeling was that these are improvements, but I have become less sure of that. The interface is better than Twitters, but I hope they will eventually have something like TweetDeck.
I was also unsure of the audience. The “Explore” feed looks to me like Facebook with 100,000 people I don’t know. From a group like that, I can expect a lot of mansplaining, which I hate. It’s one reason I’ve been limiting replies to my tweets to people I follow. Post has no such limitation. Few of my regular discussants were on Post until this weekend’s migration. It’s starting to feel more like my Twitter audience, and I can do a “thumbs down” on mansplainers in the comments for those brave or ignorant enough to try that.
The next thing to do is to get a feel for the dynamic at Post, which will involve writing stuff there. That means I will spend less time on Twitter, but I’m not ready to leave yet. Twitter still provides useful information. It has long been possible to manage one’s account to avoid the worst of Twitter, and that is holding up for me even under the onslaught of The New Owner. His $8 blue check, however, may change that.
Phase 3 will be walking away from Twitter.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner and Post.news