I left Twitter when Elon Musk bought it. I followed music people, Remainers, including you. The thing I missed most were your descriptions of parliament and its goings on They were fanstastic. Sort of 18th century. Please keep them and publish them. They are the things that helped keep us sane. Brexit has demolished life for music performers. You and your energy give us hope that it's not all dead. Thank you.
I'm a big fan of Bluesky (science Bluesky is really taking off at the moment). I've been on there for a year, but I am concerned about the long term viability/ownership of the platform. It's running with a crew of 20 on VC funding, and it seems a very juicy morsel for a buyout.
Everything you say about Twitter is right. I remember watching the news coming in on TV that Leave had “won” the ref, and I felt helpless & lost. In those days, before we realised the shenanigans that had lead to this awful, damaging decision, I was prepared to accept the outcome, as I have in every election, general, local or EU, but once all the dirty tricks, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the Tufton St connections, the unlawful use of people’s data & Russian engagement became clear, I felt I had to find an outlet for my rage, or drive my nearest & dearest absolutely mad!
I had a twitter account which I had had for years but hardly used, but when I started doing so, I began finding so many like-minded souls, so much information, and it helped me enormously to engage with lots of ordinary people like me, parents, grandparents, as well as young voters & I built up a respectable number of followers. I followed much more news as the BBC became increasingly r/w.
If I hadn’t been on Twitter, I wouldn’t have discovered your first book, Brexit, What the Hell Happens Now. It opened my eyes and gave me the arguments I needed to engage with the aggressive people who laughed at our “Remoaner Tears”.
It gave me, as you say, some agency.
We have seen & heard in the last eight years, things we could never, ever have imagined happening or being said here in the UK. We have watched our Parliament attacked & a far-right Tory & Farage onslaught of corruption and greed, & without voices like yours, swearing and all (you remind me of my sons who are around your age), I it would have been even harder to bear.
Blue Sky gives me hope.
Twitter under Musk is an outrageous affront to anyone who believes in democracy and Freedom.
I enjoy your writing partly because if one of your reasons for not doing well in news rooms: you engage with your subject. I read your work in the i too and had noticed you use a cooler tone there. I still enjoy those articles but when you write from your heart, you create a more powerful experience for the reader. Long may you continue.
(I do wish we could find a word with the same impact as cunt that isn't a part of a woman's body. It upsets me a bit that it is the worst thing someone can be called).
When the pub you and your mates liked hanging around in is bought and refurbished by some tasteless rich boy who seems not to understand that people want to talk to each other (12 massive TVs tuned to annoying stations at full volume plus muzak, no proper beer, just fizzy lager that tastes like piss, stupid stools which it's impossible to sit on after your third pint, hideously bright lighting, sullen, underpaid and inexperienced staff, etc, etc, then you rightly decamp somewhere else. I'm not entirely sure why keeping a foot in the door helps.
There's nothing wrong with trying to create something better. Or doing something that makes you feel better when the world is going to shit.
Twatter is unusable, if it is the world's town square it's permanently Saturday Night and full of drunks who want a fight whilst they are pissing themsleves. Never wrestle with a pig ...
For an actual quote, I think Buckminster Fuller put it well "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." Let's hope BlueSky is that new model.
I junked X/Twitter a while back. I missed a few things (people being funny mostly) but i couldn't be doing with Musk. Went on Threads, but that just got weird. Like being in an odd cult. Anyway, giving BlueSky a whirl. At least some of the good people are on there (a bit like here actually...)
I took Twitter off my phone years before it became X because it was sending me wrong. Getting into that Daily Mailer mindset of searching out people who annoy you and then searching out snarky voices to shame them on your behalf. I have ADHD so dopamine loops are a real menace.
Deleted my accounts when Musk stopped the Ukrainians using Starlink. Vladimir Putin resigned immediately.
I quit publicly posting to X last summer. So I’ve had over a year away. I go back for DMs and when I have to use it for work. Other than that, I ‘cheated’ during the GE, to read your feed, Ian, and Election Maps UK. Oh, and to do a search on my seat (after the Tory surprisingly lost) and gleefully read through the many happy posts.
I miss Twitter. But I don’t miss X. I miss my follows and followers. But many of them aren’t on X now anyway (my favourites ‘filter’ feed was almost dead when I sanity checked it over two random days). So I do almost mourn the loss. It’s like a bereavement. But it’s gone. It’s the past. Even if some people I care about are still living there.
I’ve tried everything else since. Cold turkey? Hell no. I work from home. I need these social connections. Without them, I’d go bonkers. Facebook? Fuck no. That’s a hellscape now, with an algorithm that makes even X’s look sane. Mastodon held a lot of promise, but a lot of folks rocked up and then pissed off after about eight seconds when they didn’t immediately get the dopamine hits they got from X. It felt sad… and also like a lesson. Engagement isn’t always about numbers, and sometimes it’s worth putting in the effort to make things grow. (The place is still superb for tech/geeks/academia.) Threads held some promise also, but it appears Meta just can’t get over being Meta. So you have Threads higher-ups constantly asking people what they want from Threads and then never giving it to them.
Which leaves Bluesky. I always quite liked it. It felt familiar. That doesn’t work for everyone. DAG memorably called it Twitter cosplay. But it was Twitter with lots of added features that make for a better experience. Yet when I joined, it was a reality check. I went from ~7k followers on Twitter and ~3k on Mastodon to nothing at all. But I found friends that had moved over and checked in daily. And it was… fun. Things have shifted a lot since. Several big waves of newcomers, and the latest is the biggest to date. My feed there is now feeling a lot like my Twitter one of old. Not everyone is there, but enough people are. Lots of new friends too. It feels good.
Although I will, for the record, note that there are not nearly enough photos of Thanos.
Thanks Ian. I've completely deleted my Twitter account now after downloading 13 years of centrist whingeing, bad puns and dad jokes to a file that I'll probably never look at again. If others want to keep a foot in Twitter that's totally understandable - it was never part of my livelihood, so I can't judge. The test for Bluesky will come when people on Bluesky stop talking about Twitter. Until then, so far so good...
I rarely use twitter. Never used it often. But there are still many people whom I respect on the platform. Also, it’s good to keep it to know what the enemy is thinking. In that, keep your friends close and your enemies closer, kind of way.
Already thanked you for this great article on BlueSky, now I’m thanking you for bringing my attention to Substack, I never knew.
My new account here came with 5 free subscriptions, so if you (or anyone reading) have any recommendations for like minded accounts, please do let me know. Thanks.
I left Twitter when Elon Musk bought it. I followed music people, Remainers, including you. The thing I missed most were your descriptions of parliament and its goings on They were fanstastic. Sort of 18th century. Please keep them and publish them. They are the things that helped keep us sane. Brexit has demolished life for music performers. You and your energy give us hope that it's not all dead. Thank you.
I'm a big fan of Bluesky (science Bluesky is really taking off at the moment). I've been on there for a year, but I am concerned about the long term viability/ownership of the platform. It's running with a crew of 20 on VC funding, and it seems a very juicy morsel for a buyout.
This article, though from about half a year ago, gave me some confidence about its future.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/25/24108872/bluesky-ceo-graber-federation-social-media-decoder-interview
Everything you say about Twitter is right. I remember watching the news coming in on TV that Leave had “won” the ref, and I felt helpless & lost. In those days, before we realised the shenanigans that had lead to this awful, damaging decision, I was prepared to accept the outcome, as I have in every election, general, local or EU, but once all the dirty tricks, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the Tufton St connections, the unlawful use of people’s data & Russian engagement became clear, I felt I had to find an outlet for my rage, or drive my nearest & dearest absolutely mad!
I had a twitter account which I had had for years but hardly used, but when I started doing so, I began finding so many like-minded souls, so much information, and it helped me enormously to engage with lots of ordinary people like me, parents, grandparents, as well as young voters & I built up a respectable number of followers. I followed much more news as the BBC became increasingly r/w.
If I hadn’t been on Twitter, I wouldn’t have discovered your first book, Brexit, What the Hell Happens Now. It opened my eyes and gave me the arguments I needed to engage with the aggressive people who laughed at our “Remoaner Tears”.
It gave me, as you say, some agency.
We have seen & heard in the last eight years, things we could never, ever have imagined happening or being said here in the UK. We have watched our Parliament attacked & a far-right Tory & Farage onslaught of corruption and greed, & without voices like yours, swearing and all (you remind me of my sons who are around your age), I it would have been even harder to bear.
Blue Sky gives me hope.
Twitter under Musk is an outrageous affront to anyone who believes in democracy and Freedom.
The sooner it dies, the better.
I enjoy your writing partly because if one of your reasons for not doing well in news rooms: you engage with your subject. I read your work in the i too and had noticed you use a cooler tone there. I still enjoy those articles but when you write from your heart, you create a more powerful experience for the reader. Long may you continue.
(I do wish we could find a word with the same impact as cunt that isn't a part of a woman's body. It upsets me a bit that it is the worst thing someone can be called).
When the pub you and your mates liked hanging around in is bought and refurbished by some tasteless rich boy who seems not to understand that people want to talk to each other (12 massive TVs tuned to annoying stations at full volume plus muzak, no proper beer, just fizzy lager that tastes like piss, stupid stools which it's impossible to sit on after your third pint, hideously bright lighting, sullen, underpaid and inexperienced staff, etc, etc, then you rightly decamp somewhere else. I'm not entirely sure why keeping a foot in the door helps.
There's nothing wrong with trying to create something better. Or doing something that makes you feel better when the world is going to shit.
Twatter is unusable, if it is the world's town square it's permanently Saturday Night and full of drunks who want a fight whilst they are pissing themsleves. Never wrestle with a pig ...
For an actual quote, I think Buckminster Fuller put it well "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." Let's hope BlueSky is that new model.
I junked X/Twitter a while back. I missed a few things (people being funny mostly) but i couldn't be doing with Musk. Went on Threads, but that just got weird. Like being in an odd cult. Anyway, giving BlueSky a whirl. At least some of the good people are on there (a bit like here actually...)
"it’s giving us a sense of agency" - very much this!
I deleted my X-Twitter account on November 6, 2024. It just felt like the one thing I could do that day.
Just followed you on BlueSky.
I took Twitter off my phone years before it became X because it was sending me wrong. Getting into that Daily Mailer mindset of searching out people who annoy you and then searching out snarky voices to shame them on your behalf. I have ADHD so dopamine loops are a real menace.
Deleted my accounts when Musk stopped the Ukrainians using Starlink. Vladimir Putin resigned immediately.
I quit publicly posting to X last summer. So I’ve had over a year away. I go back for DMs and when I have to use it for work. Other than that, I ‘cheated’ during the GE, to read your feed, Ian, and Election Maps UK. Oh, and to do a search on my seat (after the Tory surprisingly lost) and gleefully read through the many happy posts.
I miss Twitter. But I don’t miss X. I miss my follows and followers. But many of them aren’t on X now anyway (my favourites ‘filter’ feed was almost dead when I sanity checked it over two random days). So I do almost mourn the loss. It’s like a bereavement. But it’s gone. It’s the past. Even if some people I care about are still living there.
I’ve tried everything else since. Cold turkey? Hell no. I work from home. I need these social connections. Without them, I’d go bonkers. Facebook? Fuck no. That’s a hellscape now, with an algorithm that makes even X’s look sane. Mastodon held a lot of promise, but a lot of folks rocked up and then pissed off after about eight seconds when they didn’t immediately get the dopamine hits they got from X. It felt sad… and also like a lesson. Engagement isn’t always about numbers, and sometimes it’s worth putting in the effort to make things grow. (The place is still superb for tech/geeks/academia.) Threads held some promise also, but it appears Meta just can’t get over being Meta. So you have Threads higher-ups constantly asking people what they want from Threads and then never giving it to them.
Which leaves Bluesky. I always quite liked it. It felt familiar. That doesn’t work for everyone. DAG memorably called it Twitter cosplay. But it was Twitter with lots of added features that make for a better experience. Yet when I joined, it was a reality check. I went from ~7k followers on Twitter and ~3k on Mastodon to nothing at all. But I found friends that had moved over and checked in daily. And it was… fun. Things have shifted a lot since. Several big waves of newcomers, and the latest is the biggest to date. My feed there is now feeling a lot like my Twitter one of old. Not everyone is there, but enough people are. Lots of new friends too. It feels good.
Although I will, for the record, note that there are not nearly enough photos of Thanos.
Great article. Superb.
Superb, as always.
Thanks Ian. I've completely deleted my Twitter account now after downloading 13 years of centrist whingeing, bad puns and dad jokes to a file that I'll probably never look at again. If others want to keep a foot in Twitter that's totally understandable - it was never part of my livelihood, so I can't judge. The test for Bluesky will come when people on Bluesky stop talking about Twitter. Until then, so far so good...
I rarely use twitter. Never used it often. But there are still many people whom I respect on the platform. Also, it’s good to keep it to know what the enemy is thinking. In that, keep your friends close and your enemies closer, kind of way.
Already thanked you for this great article on BlueSky, now I’m thanking you for bringing my attention to Substack, I never knew.
My new account here came with 5 free subscriptions, so if you (or anyone reading) have any recommendations for like minded accounts, please do let me know. Thanks.
You've said a lot of how I feel. Leaving Twitter is like leaving the pub while your mates are still there.
But we're now being shouted down by aggressive algorithms and shoved out the way by big blue ticks and bloody TEMU ads.
On Bluesky real people are talking and sharing real observations on life. Vive la revolution bleu.