Look For Me On Counter Social Now (w/Update)

With all the talk the last two weeks of Elon Musk's destruction of Twitter as a corporate entity - his mass firings, driving the employees to flee under demands of "hardcore" doubling down on work, pushing for fee-based services that would drive users away, and allowing for extremist BS to spread that would drive advertisers away - most everybody hadn't actually quit Twitter because we were enjoying the drama too much, and some of us were masochistic enough to stay to watch the pending technological collapse of the media app in real-time.

It would have to take an act of sadism and cluelessness for Musk to drive people away from Twitter even as he was driving the app over the cliffs, and Musk reached that today with the announcement that he's letting donald trump - who lied, bullied, lied more, mocked people, lied a lot more, and made outrageous demands through his Twitter feed on an hourly basis until he crossed too many lines and got banned - back on twitter without restraint.

With that, I made my announcement and made my peace. Goodbye, Twitter.

I will not support a Twitter where Elon Musk brings back a lying, racist monster like trump without consequences to let him poison this forum any further. I am gone. Goodbye Twitter, and good luck. look for me on @pwartenberg@counter.social#RIPTwitter #ElonMuskIsATroll

— Witty Librarian For Ukraine (@PaulWartenberg) November 20, 2022

I am done with Twitter now, and if it falls apart under the strain of too few workers keeping it together with duct tape and spit, then I will just have to read about it on NPR's website when it happens.

I will miss you all. Except for the ones I know on Discord and Facebook, mostly the Lost Golden Horde Battalion of the TNC.

You can find me now on the alternative social media app Counter.Social under @pwartenberg and I wish you good luck in your journeys ahead.

More to say about this hectic month later. A little too busy with NaNo and with working a vendor table at Lake County Comic Con this Sunday.

I will part with this, my most famous tweet of all time:

that's how it starts, with the oohing and the ahhing. then comes the screaming and the running... pic.twitter.com/iZDXx7T4EQ

— Witty Librarian For Ukraine (@PaulWartenberg) April 9, 2017

Update: I'm also looking into this HIVE app, but it's mobile-only.

Even Further Update (12/5/22): Well, damn. HIVE turned out to be a bit unhelpful. Counter Social works okay but I'm having a hard time finding people and following them. In the meanwhile, Musk may have invited trump to rejoin Twitter but it turns out trump signed an exclusive rights deal with his own (failing) social media app, meaning trump legally can't get on Twitter even if he wanted to. It all turned into Much Ado About Nothing, I suppose. Anyway, Musk is turning out to be a real idiot running the company into the ground, and violating a ton of international labor laws in the process. I will see you back on the Titanic on the Twitter feed, peeps.

Even Further Revision to the Update (12/11/22): Going back to Twitter is not a good idea. Elon Musk is intentionally promoting every bad-faith right-wing meme on the site, in the process of defaming former Twitter officials in order to justify letting extremists promoting violence and misinformation to return to the site. Other people I know are going back to quitting the site, refusing to let their traffic contribute to Musk's stat numbers. Musk is intentionally starting fights to get views. It's disgusting.