Having deleted my Facebook account nearly a decade ago, and last having logged in to Instagram back in 2012, I had no expectations of Threads. With quick onboarding and a pleasant enough first impression, those expectations were exceeded.

I won’t be coming back, but if they enable ActivityPub and make the “official” accounts — medical societies and NBA teams for me, please — accessible from micro.blog, it will be a win for everyone.

Well, almost everyone.

I have always admired prolific writers like Matthew Yglesias and Scott Alexander — both now on Substack, and not by accident — for their ability to produce tens of thousands of words daily, ⊕ My admiration being tampered somewhat by ChatGPT and other LLMs, which are about as intellectually and factually rigorous as Alexander, and slightly less so than Yglesias; some sacrifices do have to be made in the name of productivity. on top of the random bite-sized thoughts posted on social media. There are only so many words I can read and write in a day, and for the better part of the last year, my language IO has been preoccupied by helping clean, analyze, interpret, and write up the results of a single clinical trial, which are now finally out in The Lancet Neurology. ⊕ Yes, my highest impact factor paper to date is in a neurology journal. Go figure.

The paper is about our clinical trial which used the body’s own immune system to treat autoimmune disease — and a particular one at that, myasthenia gravis — via technology that up until now has only been used against cancer (CAR T cells). It has made a decent impact since it came out less than two days ago. It got a write-up in The Economist, for one. Endpoints News as well. Evaluate Vantage got the best quote — it is at the very end of the article. And there is a whole bunch of press releases: from National Institutes of Health, University of North Carolina, Oregon Health and Sciences University, and of course Cartesian Therapeutics.

What went on yesterday reminded me that Twitter is not going anywhere any time soon: all of the above releases were to be found only there, not on a Mastodon instance, the journal’s own media metrics do not — and can not, at least not easily — trawl the Fediverse for hits, and I can’t just type in “Descartes–08”, “myasthenia gravis CAR-T”, or “Cartesian” into a Mastodon search box and get anything of relevance. ⊕ One could, of course, argue that you wouldn’t get anything of relevance on Twitter either, most of the discussion consisting of people who have barely read the tweet, let alone the article. And one would be correct. And while most of the non-Web3/crypto tech world has moved out, it looks like people in most other fields, from medicine to biotechnology to the NBA commentariat, are maintaining substantial Twitter presence.

This will, of course, have no impact on my commitment to staying out of the conversation to the extent possible while maintaining a semi-regular schedule of 500-character posts, which may now, IO bandwidth having opened up, become a tiny bit longer. Thank you for reading!

At $5 per month for a cozy social network and a static blog hosting service, micro.blog was already quite the bargain. This summer, $4 will get you four full months — an absolute steal.

With $10/month you also get podcast hosting, bookmark archives, and a newsletter, if you are so inclined. So you have to ask what exactly $8 per month give you at that other service. The freedom to see fewer adds, I suppose.

On the topic of firsts, here is my first Tweet, linking to a rather funny New Yorker article.

It garnered exactly one “like”, from — and this is where my trip to the archives took a dark turn — someone who is no longer with us. So it goes…

My decoupling from Twitter continues, with all of the 9K+ tweets now available on micro.blog. What use they could possibly have, I will leave as an exercise to the reader.

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.