Farewell to Twitter
I joined Twitter in the summer of 2008, during a temp job in Slough. The office had blocked Facebook and I needed a social media distraction to get me through the dull day. At this time, social media was still just a fun distraction, a way to chat to friends, post photos, etc. It hadn't yet become an essential part of business or something that you could study and do as a job. I had read about twitter in the Guardian (the Guardian was my other main work distraction) and thought I'd give it a try. It took a while to get the hang of it and find people to make it fun but within less than a year, I was logging on everyday and the time I spent there only increased. I loved it. I was enthusiastic about it. It was fun and interesting. It was so simple but so clever. You could connect with so many people and just talk to then about all kinds of things.
I'd had an online life for a while at that stage. I'd spent the last ten years forming friendships with online strangers, on mailing lists and blogs. I meet some of them in real life too. When Facebook came along it turned that process upside down. It brought real-life people online. People I meet at college, at parties, on nights out with friends then became online friends. Twitter managed to do both these things. It had all the interesting people who I never meet, as well as lots of real-life friends, and people who I would didn't know at all but who had interesting things to say. I followed a lot of writers, tv and theatre people, lots of creative people, lots of funny people. I learnt a lot from all those people in my phone.
Twitter was the first online platform that I used primarily on my phone. I loved how I could disappear into my phone and catch up with what everybody else was up to while I waited for the bus or stood in a queue. I'd get a glimpse into all these different lives and the world felt smaller and I felt more connected to it all. Twitter made me feel better informed. I got these regular snapshots from around the world. I learnt weird things, I got lots of recommendations for books and tv shows, and more recently newsletters and podcasts. It widened my cultural horizon.
I loved the twitter chatter for big tv events. I remember watching the final series of Love/Hate and everyone tweeting during the ad breaks. I'm going to have to find a real-life group to watch Eurovision with next year because I won't be able to watch it with twitter.
A big part of why I've decided twitter after all these years is because it feels a bit weird and gross to be there, that in some way I'm supporting or endorsing the poisonous troll by still spending time on the site. It's also got quieter and I think a lot of people are pausing before they tweet and then maybe not hitting send. I think it's been that way for a while. The thoughtful, informative people I follow are now worrying about the kinds of replies they'll get, or going the wrong kind of viral, or things not coming across the way they meant it. I worry about those things.
I tried Mastadon and it seems fine. The thing that put me off was that's it is too much like twitter. People try to tell you it's like the early days of twitter, but I don't think that's true. It may be a new platform but it already feels twitter shaped. That may change and it will become a brand new thing but right now, people are posting how they post on twitter and I realised I'm tired of that. I'm fed up of the performative tweets, the fast reactions and the terminally onlineness of it all. I want out but I'm still finding it really hard to leave. Even though twitter is a lot quieter recently, I'm still afraid I'll miss something. I will miss the connected feeling I got from it but I need to acknowledge that really that's already gone and has been for a while.
It was fun while it lasted.