I share some of your concerns, but I don’t feel as … unsettled? A couple of hypotheticals I’ll throw into the pot to see what bubbles to the surface.
- What would happen (for you) if Twitter’s ‘fail whale’ reappeared tomorrow and suddenly Twitter was gone?
- What if you deactivated your original account and started afresh? Knowing what you know and bearing in mind what you wrote in this post, how would you do things differently, if at all? Is ‘making Twitter great again’ within your capacity?
- If Twitter is broken beyond repair and neither Mastodon nor micro.blog quite cut it, if you had the wherewithall, what would you design as a replacement? What would it need to have or be able to do?
So often the aim is to make things as easy and simple as possible, but I find there is something about the friction of carving out responses from my own site. I feel that it certainly makes me more mindful of my digital actions. As Clay Shirky suggests:
The thing I can least afford is to get things working so perfectly that I don’t notice what’s changing in the environment anymore.