Goodbye Twitter

Hi all,

six months are quite some time and a lot of stuff happened to me in the last two years.

Just as a small recap I

• finished my bachelor's degree
• was a major organizer for a huge german unicycling competition
• suffered two losses of important persons to me
• was part of the jury at the WRO world final in germany
• started working as a full time DevOps Engineer with a global team in the automotive sector
• had the opportunity to join the native web in a livestream to talk about web performance
• became a member of the 11ty GitHub organization
• got back into learning and using Rust

and during all of this I somehow managed to keep my GitHub graph (which doesn't include my dayjob activities) too look like this:

Writing this down make me realize again how much actually happened to me in the last two years and this doesn't even include things like me trying to relocate, starting a blog series about WebGPU that is on hold or the fact that I still play with my home cluster and home automation.

Causa Twitter

Ever since Elon Musk announced that he wants to buy Twitter, I was sceptical. Many people told me, that Twitter was a cestpool of hate and disinformation but I had built a kind of filter bubble that only included web technology and surrounding tech. There were people whose opinion I generally shared and those, who had diverging intuitions, but overall it felt very constructive and informative to me. My feed was not covered by hate, but by supportive arguments and discussions or news about what the major browsers and standard orgs were planning. Even when my feed got kind of toxic, I always took something constructive from it.

I liked my feed and the Twitter I was interacting with and I am very much aware that filter bubbles can become dangerous, but if you are aware of them and you are actively trying to prevent the dangers that come with them, I think they can be okay.

Nonetheless my scepticism towards Musk's Twitter purchase where substantiated. Quite soon after the purchase I switched over to Mastodon which I hosted myself and I also linked to it from this website. I still believe that Mastodon and the Fediverse is a great platform, but one of the great things is, that it's distributed. Because of this, I didn't want to join one of the major servers, but host my own. Hosting a Mastodon server even somewhat correctly isn't easy though (especially if you've never touched a Ruby app before). In the end it went unmaintained and after resetting my cluster I never got around to setting it up again (I once spend half a day on setup, just to not get it working).

For a long time there were links on here to my Twitter account (which I don't really use anymore) and my Mastodon (which was offline). At the same time alternatives like Bluesky weren't interesting enough to me to take some time looking into them, since most of the individuals I'd like to follow weren't on there and it also felt like just a Twitter 2.0 and I was just bitten by that idea.

So while I had no alternative to Twitter in place for me, Twitter became more and more the platform I heard about and feared. My feed was/is filled with hate, fear mongering, racism and irrational behavior. This is, because the company behind Twitter started pushing their payed subscribers into every user's timeline and especially Musk and at the same time kind of shadow banned "regular" users more and more. Weird stuff they did with verification and moderation lead to more and more people I know to jump ship and completely abandon Twitter and time and time again I felt like deleting my account. In the end I left my account standing, but just not used the platform anymore.

It especially hurt me to see Twitter die, because to me Twitter was always the go-to example of how to do a PWA right. I never used the native app and it always felt just like it and I used the Twitter PWA to show others what the web is capable of. During the last years the PWA was made worse and worse and now it asks you on every launch to buy premium and install the app all while no longer being in fullscreen mode.

So where to next?

For me (and you might've guessed this already) it's Bluesky. I created an account and will probably use that as my Twitter replacement.

I will not close down my Twitter account and my DMs will stay open (as long as Musk allows), but I will probably not read there actively. Maybe one day I'll find the time to reactivate Mastodon or join a server that is to my liking.

As of now, I'll probably take a reading position on social media, since I think that's good for my mental health and will focus my free time on the open source work I've been doing and getting my personal life back in line.