If you've used Twitter within the past week of the time of this writing (early July 2023), you may have noticed that things on the old microblogging site are pretty dire. This is nothing new since Musk's acquisition of the platform (let's not forget Blue, killing the API, and refusal to pay bills), but two things have exacerbated its race to the bottom:
- Musk had the ability to view tweets without being logged in to Twitter disabled, because like with the API thing, he doesn't understand Web 2.0 netiquette and anyone who makes use of Twitter without directly making him money is a freeloader. The theory is that the repeated failed requests from embedded tweets (which can be found in a lot of news articles and blog posts) created a sort of self-DDoS attack.
Ostensibly to mitigate the outages, they imposed a rate limit of 600 tweets viewed per day for non-Blue subscribers. Which is not a lot in the grand scheme of things, and not a lot of potential eyeballs on your work if you're an advertiser or independent artist. I've personally not hit the rate limit, either my viewing habits are atypical or I've been finding more constructive things to do with my time lately (doubt). - Tweetdeck is dead. Formerly an independent frontend site, Tweetdeck was acquired by Twitter in 2011. It allowed you to organize content into columns (such as your main feed, notifications, hashtags you want to follow, user lists, etc.). It made Twitter more manageable even before they decided to show you tweets based on what the algorithm thought you wanted to see, rather than a linear progression of the accounts you follow (they later broke this out into separate "For You" and "Following" sections on vanilla Twitter, although some users have reported that it likes to switch back to "For You" of its own volition). After the rate limit fiasco, just about every column besides Home failed to load in Tweetdeck. Then they started forcibly moving users over to Tweetdeck Preview, which will become a Blue-only feature in the near future.
In spite of all the other times a threatened mass exodus from Twitter loomed but failed to appreciably materialize (Mastodon folks speak of the November 2022 influx shortly after Musk acquired Twitter), there's a palpable feeling of "this shit just may not work in the near future." I can't speak for my peers who are leaving Twitter or using it in a reduced capacity, but for me this means that my main avenue for keeping up with friends and getting news that isn't NPR may not remain as such. The way I see my web habits changing is:
- Use Discord more. I've always had a love/hate relationship with the platform: from joining servers with too many channels and never interacting with them, to how it's becoming an information black hole supplanting webcrawlable wikis and traditional forums; hell, I have enough of a problem with Teams at work, I don't need that in my leisure time!
But my main problem is logging on, seeing a bunch of missed conversations, and just never feeling like I can contribute to anything. That's something I'm working on getting over, since if Twitter decides to turn off DMs for non-Blue users next, Discord may become the last way I have to contact anybody. But I probably won't be making the same types of shitposts without imagining the judgemental thoughts of "ew, you're annoying, go away." - Find other ways to follow artists. A lot of them also have Tumblrs, and much to my surprise I was still able to log into my old account. A lot of them only crosspost to Instagram, which I refuse to sign up for. Sometimes they may have a Pixiv, more likely if they're Japanese. So far Tumblr seems best for discoverability, but I won't be interacting with that site as I used to. I hate the reblog/comment paradigm and the dashboard enough as it is. I may post stream announcements there but we'll see.
- Make a blog. Actually post to it and don't abandon or forget about it. I had been meaning to create a Neocities site for some time, I guess the current Twitter implosion is as good an excuse as any. I mean, who's gonna read my Twitlongers now?
I'm starting off with Zonelets, a freely available HTML blog template with a little bit of JavaScript to generate a post list on the homepage and links to the next/previous post. You still have to manually update the posts array in the JS file, but it's more elegant than anything I would write myself and I feel like WordPress is overkill. I may migrate it to a static site generator eventually, but I tried to get one started in Hugo earlier and immediately had build problems with the theme I chose. Zonelets' workflow isn't super complicated and if you already know basic HTML then it shouldn't be too hard to grasp.
What can you expect to see here? Mostly talking about media I'm consuming: books, anime, games, comics and manga (I really got into Webtoon in the past month). Not full-on reviews, but just blurbs on things I want to talk about outside of the scope of a Discord chat. I may talk about streaming, even though I've done it maybe 4 times in the past year. I don't want this to be a LiveJournal, a place to rant when I'm feeling like shit. Although I may talk about mental health stuff here, I'll try to content warning stuff appropriately.
That's about it for a first post. If you got here by accident and somehow managed to read all this, thanks. I'll try to actually update this one.