With Tweetbot and Twitterrific gone, and both the website and official app insistant on algorithmic timeline as the default, it is time to say goodbye.

Well, almost. For the few accounts that haven’t yet migrated and still have interesting things to say, there is NetNewsWire.

Let this unsolicited 2014 cartoon of me sipping coffee in Havana sit here for posterity as I replace it with an actual photo for my micro.blog avatar. Slash account photo slash profile pic. I can’t keep up with the nomenclature. Other than the hunched back, the often unkempt sideburns, and the cup of coffee that is always close by, it never truly was a good likeness, even for 2014.

The new photo is a cutout of this particular moment in time, as I browsed through used books in front of an Athens, OH bookstore during one of our first post-pandemic trips. Yes, that feral child doing God knows what on the sidewalk is ours, and obscured by the sign just enough to be included without a privacy blur.

Athens itself ⊕ And yes, having a photo from an institution unironically named the Athens Lunatic Asylum serve as my Twitter profile backdrop was a joke that up until now only I uderstood, but we are both in on it now, aren’t we, dear reader? was a delightful surprise, from the walkable downtown to its partially-abandoded Lunatic Asylum. The latter was the source of my Twitter cover photo, also saved here for posterity pending the site’s likely demise.

For those of you completely off Twitter, it is now in the impossible-to-avoid-Elon-Musk phase, where even if you block his account there will be people re-tweeting, quote-tweeting, subtweeting… if for nothing else then to complain.

Sadly, it is still the go-to place for medical conference updates, and right now there is a big one.

Found on Twitter: this photograph of the late, great architect Zaha Hadid. She is notable for squeezing some beauty out of brutalism. The photo is notable for the Iskra ETA 85 telephone resting on the coffee table — part of most Yugoslav households last century, including my childhood home.

“I rob banks because that’s where the money is.”

This is what the bank robber Willie Sutton may or may not have once said in an interview. Regardless of source, it applies equally well to social networks and people.

I consider myself a fairly rational creature, and yet…

• Mastodon out of the box: An eye sore! Unusable! What is this, Discord? Because I hate Discord!
• Mastodon with Light theme and advanced web interface on: Where have you been all my life?

Found on Mastodon via @m_clem@econtwitter.net, a passage from The Enchiridion by Epictetus, translated by Elizabeth Carter in 1758.

What a lovely sentiment to have, and not only with regards to social media.

There is a good overview of the two ways Micro.blog can interact with Mastodon, from @pmcconnell. I much prefer the full integration (Option 2 in the text), but it looks like only Option 1 completely matches the formatting. Is that a bug or a technical limitation?

David Simon on Twitter:

The worst and most cancerous campaigns on the internet are not to be outreasoned or debated. Doing so grants credibility where none should exist. And Twitter has never truly come to terms with the asymmetrical dynamic.

Dangerous thing, asymmetry is.

When all is said and done, Twitter will have been a net negative for humanity regardless of leadership.

Because it combined flat social interactions with costless message amplification, it led to too many pile-ups of tens of thousands-to-one, too much reality distortion that pushed people into doomscrolling, too deep of an insight into often anonymous but always scarred psyches which we would subconsciously mirror.

Most people remember the precise moment when they realized how dangerous these dynamics are. My own came on the night of January 3, 2021, after the public flagellation of one John Roderick, known henceforth as “Bean Dad". Note that this is a link to an article in Forbes, of all places, which I found the most in line with my own thinking. This is how social media radicalizes you. I wasn’t exactly Robert Oppenheimer reciting from the Bhagavad Gita, but a sense of Twitter being a psycho-nuclear weapon formed, and why would I want to spend too much time around it?

And now a billionaire wants to mold Twitter into the human hive-mind, or the everything app, or a bank. To overuse an analogy: this is very much like Edward Teller — a real-life mad scientist and an overall horrible human being — proposing to use his brainchild, the hydrogen bomb, to terraform Alaska, extract oil from tar sands, and control hurricanes. There’s so much power there, don’t you just want to use it?

No. Just stop.

So it is with giddiness and delight that I follow the flourishing of micro.blog, and wt.social, and even the overcomplicated for its own good Mastodon, and most of all what Dave Winer is doing with FeedLand, because there is an alternative timeline out there where Google never shut down the Reader and RSS is the dominant language of social networks and whatever foibles of that other world may be — the 2012–2020 Romney administration, the complete and utter dominance of webOS, mere existence of the DC cinematic universe — at least we’d have known it got on-line social interactions right.