There's still no social media alternative

Someone asked me recently whether I want to revisit this post from last November: There is no social media alternative.

So, you want to pack your bags and leave Twitter? Be my guest. I will meet you in the airport boarding area, where the destinations are all … obscure.

Seriously, Twitter has managed over the years to become an indispensable part of the global information ecosystem even as it failed to become a profitable business. Every major worldwide news outlet has a presence on Twitter and uses it to drive traffic to their sites. Government agencies large and small use Twitter to make announcements. Ordinary people—citizen journalists, if you will—can share news and suddenly find themselves in an international spotlight. People entertain themselves by talking with other people who share their interests.

Also, @darth is there.

Even if someone builds an absolutely perfect functional replacement for Twitter’s feature set, they can’t replicate the user base and its content. Just ask Devin Nunes.

If you leave Twitter, where will you go? You’ve probably already been advised to sign up for Mastodon. My friends, I have been to Mastodon and I regret to report that it is not the answer you seek.

Yeah, that’s still true.

The list of Twitter alternatives just keeps getting longer. The latest obsession among the internet’s Cool Kidz Club is Bluesky, which appears to be trying to use the Twitter 2007 playbook to build buzz (I have not yet been invited and I haven’t bothered to chase down an invite because about the last thing I need right now is another short-form social media service). Dril and AOC are there, which will definitely keep the lights on for a while.

T2 is another Twitter clone, developed by some ex-Twitter folks. It appears to have no mindshare at all.

There’s also Substack Notes, which is a logical extension of the Substack platform but is currently just a big mess in every respect in practice. (I’m still trying to organize my thoughts around Substack Notes, but more on that later.)

But none of them offer even a fraction of the value that Twitter delivered in its prime. And nothing on the horizon appears to have even the slightest chance of becoming The Next Twitter.

I used to hear from people who were enthused about Post.news, but they seem to have moved on. It feels a bit like a mashup of Medium and Flipboard, which is not at all a bad thing, but it’s not The Next Thing.

I’m an enthusiastic Mastodon user, but I understand that many people just find it impenetrably nerdy, which means it is fated to be the Linux of social media. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Meanwhile, Elon Musk appears to be rebuilding Twitter with the help of 100 monkeys with 100 jackhammers. Visiting Twitter these days is almost painful. It reminds me of the feeling I get when I visit a once-vibrant shopping mall which has devolved into a dead zone where the goal is to get in and get out without too much psychic damage.

Some of my favorite Twitter folks have abandoned the site completely. Ken White (aka @Popehat), for example, is now Donehat. All tweets deleted. He did a wonderful essay (right here on Substack) detailing his reasons for leaving: Goodbye, Twitter.

I’ve done something similar. I deleted most of my 200,000+ tweets and now visit Twitter only to check in with specific people who have chosen to stay. Like Marcy Wheeler (@emptywheel), who tried out Mastodon and decided to stick with Twitter because that’s where the audience is. Can’t argue with that. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo (@joshtpm) has done the same.

Twitter has always been a special sort of mess, but its sheer size and diversity made it worth dealing with the chaos. I cannot imagine living in a world without Weird Twitter and Black Twitter, for example.

And yet, both of those viewports into other cultures are gone in Elon Musk’s Twitter. The world’s Stupidest Rich Man has turned his flagship social media network into a toxic, viscerally repellent experience in mere months. Maybe that was the whole point.

Anyway, I’ll see you around, but not on Twitter.