We could go on about how Musk will be an immediate business school case study for taking the value of a unique, universally-known and globally-appreciated brand and absolutely trashing it in exchange for a symbol best known for porn and/or the button you press on your computer whenever you want to leave something, but… well, actually, I kind of want to talk about the latter! With the switchover in name, I think this is a fine time to start disentangling myself from Musk’s Folly, whatever it is called, and manage my presence there differently than I have over these last 15 years when it was known as Twitter.
Yep.
I’ve uninstalled X Corp.’s (still curiously called “Twitter”) app from my phone and laptop. I’m not totally leaving Twitter/X, but I plan to be deliberately much less active. For posting purposes, for now at least I’m active—and I believe increasingly active—on both Mastodon and Threads. (I keep the list of my social media and platform links on my homepage: dunlevy.org/john/).
For news consumption, I’m hopeful about Mastodon and Threads, though neither is really there yet. I have seen some great commentary especially on both, but nothing on the scale of what was available on Twitter. On the other hand, “real-time” Twitter could get to be a bit much—unhealthy even.