Planning Our Escape from Twitter to... Where?

Well, after six months of insane mismanagement by Elon Musk, this past weekend of enforcing data limits on viewing is pretty much the death knell of Twitter. It's now a question how quickly this ship will sink into the Atlantic. Anne Laurie over at Balloon Juice has a number of details - especially how Musk is failing to pay his bills - which would be better to read at her article before returning back here, please and thanks. Here's a GIF of Titanic failure to pass the time until you return.

via GIPHY

Ever since Musk overpaid for Twitter - seriously, 44 BILLION?! - he has fired most of his workforce, tried to cheat employment safety guidelines, sought to make Twitter users PAY for something that had been free for them for more than a decade, allowed haters and racists back in order to spike reader interest, and eventually committed to this act of self-immolation as if to drive even addicted Tweeters - sighs and points to mirror - to flee for their lives.

I mean, I know I promised to walk away from Twitter, and I tried... for about a week, before I got pulled back by the fact most people I know were still using it, and because it was still a quick and powerful way to gain near-instant news. A lot of people pledged to get off the ship back then, and yet... We were too used (too addicted) to the app.

But we're looking at the likely abandonment of Twitter within this month as more people get frustrated with Musk's growing incompetence at managing things. It does not help Musk that more alternatives to his app are cropping up.

I had for example jumped onto CounterSocial last November. Only because a favorite for everyone else - Mastadon - was too frustrating for me to install and set up. It wasn't intuitive or helpful. Sadly not a lot of people I knew crossed onto CS, there was no audience to share, so I hadn't kept up with it.

Soon after, an alternative called Spoutible showed up, and I was able to register onto that relatively easy. It mimics a lot of features on Twitter and it should be the easiest app to shift to, except not everybody has, partly because of early controversy with Spoutible's owner being a jerk and mostly because (see below)...

Another app called BlueSky showed up a couple months ago, promising to be the best possible replacement, and it's using the Beta testing process to encourage users to invite their friends in order to make BlueSky more desirable (for those of us who never sat at the cool kids' table, this is high school all over again sigh) to join. As Twitter collapsed this weekend, BlueSky invites skyrocketed (pun intended).

And just this Monday, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook I mean Meta announced the speedup of a new app tied into the Facebook/Instagram services called Threads, which dropped this morning late Wednesday night and already got 30 million users to where Musk is threatening to sue Zuck out of spite. While shifting over to an app most people already have - Facebook has 2.99 billion users globally and Instagram which ties into Threads has 2.35 billion - would be a no-brainer, there are security and privacy concerns about the transition that makes me wary.

As you see, while Twitter is sinking, we humans are overwhelmed with choices we didn't have when Twitter started back in 2006. The instant sharing of tweets - faster than newswires and RSS feeds, easier to send to millions of readers than emails or texts - was a novel and unique software app for its day. But now that Musk is punching holes into his own luxury liner to make it sink faster, the survivors queuing for the lifeboats can't make a clean decision on which arriving cruise ship to join.

I mean, we could even go join up on Discord and tie-in to our multiplayer gaming habits, but that just breaks down to such specific cliques that general sharing could never be a reality. And hell, I am digressing here.

So, if you're keeping up at home:

Twitter: still there at https://twitter.com/PaulWartenberg playing the trumpet with the band until the ship sinks for good.

CounterSocial: Can be found at https://counter.social/@pwartenberg but I'm not sure how often I will show up, but send me a tell when you get there.

Spoutible: I'm at https://spoutible.com/PaulWartenberg and I am trying to make it a habit of cross-posting my blog flogs to increase traffic from there.

BlueSky: (I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not... /cries)

Threads: Nope, not unless they PAY me to do it.

And I'm curious, are there OTHER social apps out there playing for Twitter's market share...?

(Keeps playing Herb Alpert's "Rise" until the waters reach the deck)

"Gentlemen, it has been a priv---" (suddenly gets invite to BlueSky) "Every sucker for himself! I'm out of here!" (flees)

Update 7/21/23: Holy sh-t I DID get an invite to BlueSky. You can find me there as @paulwartenberg.bsky.social