Premourning Twitter…Prematurely?

Twitter is a push rather than pull medium, but it's one that I set up for myself and control... it's "curated," if you can stand that term. And that's the beauty of it, as far as I'm concerned. There's nothing else like it. It gives me everything I asked for, and until recently, hardly anything else (compared to Facebook, for instance). Its signal to noise ratio has been very good.

I was just thinking about all of the websites I would have to visit or email newsletters I would have to sign up for if Twitter goes away, in order to keep up with the same people. I don't do Instagram, I don't go on TikTok. As one of my local Twitter acquaintances said,

Seeing so many people sharing how they're feeling about Twitter changing, and trying to find a new place, makes me feel a lot less alone about how I feel about it. And also, oh god, trying to learn a _new_ thing is kind of overwhelming.
Amity Foster

Here is an incomplete list of the people I would miss the most:

Transportation/urbanism

• Brent Toderian
• Darrell Owens (idothethinking...already on his list)
• David Zipper (already on his list)
• Warren Wells
• Jeff Speck
• Angie Schmitt
• Ned Resnikoff
• Rik Adamski
• Dongho Chang
  

Climate

• Bill McKibben (just signed up for his list)
• Alex Steffen (just signed up for his list)
• Mary Annaïse Heglar
• Leah Stokes
• David Roberts
• Eric Holthaus
• Extinction Rebellion
• Genevieve Guenther
• Rob Hopkins
• Build Soil
• Mark Z. Jacobson
  

Black feminists/academics/activists (many of whom are already on there less because of harassment):

• Tressie McMillan Cottom
• Mikki Kendall (karnythia)
• Anthea Butler (ProfB)
• Melissa Harris Perry
• Ebony Thomas
• ebonyabsolutely
• Brittney Cooper (professorcrunk)
• Christina Greer
• Bree Newsome
• Dorothy Roberts
• Judith Browne Dianis
• Barbara Arnwine
  

Journalists / news sources:

• Anand Giridharadas
• Lyz Lenz (already on her list)
  
• Chris Hayes
• The ACLU
• Steve Greenhouse
• Michael Hobbes
  

Hard-to-categorize people:

• Leah McElrath
• Paul Thomas
• Sisyphus38
• Chris Steller
• Dean Baker
• Ada Palmer
• Hemant Mehta
• Tom Tomorrow (on Sparky's list, but it's not the same as his occasional observations)
• Jennifer Mendelsohn
• Cory Doctorow
• For Rosemary Sutcliff
• Stacey Mitchell
• David Perry (Lollardfish...on Patreon)
• Charles C. Mann
• Angus Johnston
• Sarah Taber (on Patreon)
• Jared Yates Sexton
  

And that's not mentioning the many Twitter users who I don't follow, but whose thoughts show up often when they're retweeted by people I do follow.

Or the dozens and dozens of Twin Cities people I've connected with, who have local conversations and who use it for direct messages and organizing.

Also, I already miss people who have dropped off over time. It's hard to remember absences, but one I note as a fairly recent absence is Liz Bruenig (weird as she can be sometimes, and how much I disagree with her on a couple of important issues).

Here are some more tweets about the Twitter situation. (Is that meta enough?)

Maybe “the public square” is just kinda hard to monetize.
Hank Green

if you hate watching a billionaire destroy the place you live online, wait till you hear what they’re up to with planet earth
@betterthemask

Men will literally spend $44 billion on an unprofitable social media site and then burn it to the ground instead of going to therapy.
Lila Byock

Oh yeah as an underemployed writer, I'm totally fine with losing a 90K-person platform built up over thirteen years, when I am otherwise not remotely famous, why do you ask?
Summer Brennan

Manchild Twitterlord is killing a thing he could have gained huge capital from if he were not so focused on his outsized insecurities and megalomania
Paul Thomas @plthomasEdD

Twitter built lives, raised revolutions, linked us through joy, sorrow, beauty and filth and created time and spaces never expected and it is all undone by a billionaire with too much money and not enough heart and sense to know why or what he bought in the first place
Asher Wolf

Imagine living in a Mars colony with this management style
Jon Christian

Imagine looking at the cat-herding company and thinking yes, I would like to own that and be the Chief Cat Herder, the cats will surely co-operate with ME
Tom Tomorrow

Twitter really is a modern day newspaper, the only place online I see things I didn’t seek out. And just like the newspaper, it has the local billionaire buying it for way more than it’s worth because he doesn’t like the editorial decisions.
@paleodaniel

As much as we talk shit about Twitter, it really is a space where people have been able to organize and build community and push the discourse around things like prison abolition and climate justice so... idk... maybe tanking it is the point?
Mary Annaïse Heglar