I joined Twitter back in 2010 and have loved it. Like so many of these things, I find you get from it what you put in, and over the years I put in lots of effort curating my timeline so that I followed a fantastic selection of people and groups that brought me knowledge and joy.

(Obviously it also helps that as a cis het white male non-celebrity, a lot of the very worst stuff passes me by)

I follow a bunch of folk like me - with professional/personal overlap etc. and that’s great But Twitter has given me access to so many wonderful people from so many different spheres, and my life has been all the richer for it And I worry how damage to Twitter will damage that.

(And obviously huge huge sympathies to people who are/have been much more directly affected by all the recent changes)

I can’t possibly do it all justice, but to just scratch the surface of some of that joy:

• The fascinating insights from Mary Aspinall-Miles, The Secret Barrister, CrimeGirl and the rest of #LegalTwitter
• The inspirational, empowering, sometimes heartbreaking, stories of Kimberly D. Manning, MD
• The sexy cathedrals of Jay Hulme, the absolute chaos and wisdom of madeline odent
• The brilliant storytelling of Shiv Ramdas - his uncle, the rice, and so much more
• The fantastic filth of Girl on the Net
• The utter hilarity of Threating Music Notation, Swear Trek and Effin’ Birds
• The totally cursed tech threads of foone and whitequark
• The many varied educational and entertaining threads of John Bull
• The spiritual and secular insights of Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg and RevDaniel
• …and much much more

There’s been so much already said about the unique value of Twitter:

the problem with twitter alternatives is they facilitate meaningful discussion when what i want is to feel like an ant surrounded by other terrible little ants

— i n n e s (@innesmck) November 4, 2022

the problem with twitter alternatives is they facilitate meaningful discussion when what i want is to feel like an ant surrounded by other terrible little ants

— i n n e s (@innesmck) November 4, 2022

but also that the medievalist will post interesting stuff about a completely different unmedieval topic and that discussion can happen too, because it's twitter and anything can be discussed

— Simon MacEwan (@theblastedheath) November 4, 2022

i have a discord, it is GOOD. but it's not the same thing as stumbling across a medievalist's twenty-tweet thread about penises on tapestries or whatever

— Cat Sebastian (@CatSWrites) November 4, 2022

Ultimately Whitney Merrill sums it up best:

I reallllly really don’t want Twitter to die. There are so many of you that I know, that I’m friends with, that I’ve connected to, because of Twitter. I continue to make friends and learn interesting things via Twitter. I really hope it doesn’t die.

— Whitney Merrill (@wbm312) November 5, 2022

I’m not “leaving Twitter”, but it seems foolish to not try to capture some of this over on the fediverse in case.

Find me at @doismellburning@chaos.social