Of course the discourse today is going to be on whether it is good or smart or advisable or even possible to fully break from the orbit of Twitter. The argument is gonna go that despite being owned by an absolute shitheel and full of the worst possible people and online habits, it is also one of the only places one can build a viable community and thus people should dig their heels in and refuse to cede ground. I empathize with that argument but ultimately reject it.
Twitter is a single website/app that pretends and projects itself out to look like it’s the whole entire internet. It’s got the algorithmic power to not merely influence but outright control the flow and tenor of conversation. It creates an endless row of shop windows for us to peer through, but no doors to the outside: we have to be constantly reminded of particular artists and writers and other creative folks lest the algorithm – and as a result, we ourselves – forgets them.
Twitter is not a chat room, it’s not a forum, it’s not an RSS feed; it merely looks like those older internet artifacts by design. It is instead an ever-inflamed memory hole. Whenever I hear people make the argument that “Twitter is the only place you can build a community,” I can’t help but think about “pivot to video,” Facebook’s algorithm scam that sent several large media and entertainment companies crumbling. Like, have you seen your own analytics? At best less than a handful of your thousands of followers even remember that you exist enough to interact with your posts. That’s not a community! It’s social snake oil. All social media is like this to greater and lesser degrees.
You can’t cede ground that was never yours to begin with. If you want to build a community online or off you have to be intentional about it. Twitter made it look easy: just post it and “they” will come. There was a stream of dopamine inherent in that action. But it’s not easy! And communities aren’t formed by mere accretion!
Everything feels like it’s following the example of Twitter, even a place like this that doesn’t show you your follower count or how many likes and rechosts a post gets. What I wish we could do instead was develop other ways of relating to each other that don’t rely on this attitude or this example of “community”-building. Twitter didn’t succeed at making communities; it only succeeded at making us feel like it did.