J. Martin

December 18, 2022

It's Dead, Jim

After Reichsmarschall Elno’s carpet bombing run two days ago, banning journalists and critics left and right, nuking Twitter Journal and Spaces, banning outgoing links to Mastodon and other Fediverse instances not only in bios and tweets, but even DMs, I decided to put my primary handle too on ice and call it a day. (As mentioned in last week’s newsletter, I’d wrapped up and mothballed all my side accounts already.) Yesterday then, Saturday, was my first full day without Twitter in sixteen years. Sixteen years! It felt weird, I tell you. And then I had to invest two more hours to scrub Twitter from my blogs and social media presences and replace it with links to my Mastodon account. I’m pretty happy there, I gotta say. And although I have only a fraction of the followers I had on Twitter—whom I regularly purged from bots and spam accounts, mind—engagement on Mastodon is already as high as it was before Twitter introduced the algorithmic timeline (after which engagement fell off a cliff). Will I ever return to Twitter? Perhaps—when it no longer belongs to a Trumpist sociopath. I’m not using these terms lightly; what’s going on around Elno, not only on Twitter, baggers belief. As Ed Zitron put it, as quoted by Gruber: “Libertarian psychopaths with too much money are being given the spotlight and they are hitting themselves in the nuts with a kettlebell.” It’s a spectacle you don’t want to be too close to.

Last week, I wrote about Game Endings on my Voidpunk blog; uploaded an album to Flickr with 12 images in and around Namsan Tower, South Korea; posted my daily dose of faux vintage squaries on Pixelfed; and posted one image set each at my Instagram accounts betweendrafts and voidpunkverse. Less than usual, but hey! I was critically preoccupied.

Now comes the hard part—a Sunday Funnies section without Twitter! But Mastodon is already ramping up. Here’s a fluffy cat on a fluffy dog for starters, and some images of squirrels landing like superheroes after a jump or fall. Enjoy!

J.