The End of Twitter

is like the end of Donald Trump, much expected and frequently predicted, but never happens. Today Elon Musk is messing with direct messages, which may remove one of the last utilities Twitter has for me. The other is a plethora of accounts I follow on things like Russia’s war against Ukraine that have not moved to Mastodon or Bluesky. He seems also to have boobytrapped words like Bluesky, which get you locked out. I have stayed logged in to Twitter for many years now, and it is not clear to me that I any longer have a record of my password, so being locked out may be the end for me.

I’m engaging more on Bluesky, which gives me more engagement back, even though its numbers are fewer. I think there are about 600,000 users. Mastodon remains clunky and nerdy, but a possibility if all else fails.

Bluesky is functionally the most likely successor to Twitter, and it has a good community of posters and commenters. But they started out thinking they were going to federate and leave things like moderation to the users. The users have rejected that because they want an easy Twitter substitute. The developer team hasn’t said much about federation for a while and are probably struggling with hard decisions.

Update: Threads is garbage, and most people have left it already. No desktop interface, and all about the ads.

Also: I wish I had Shakezula’s wit to describe the self-righteous among us who remain valiantly ignorant of the uses of Twitter.