With every new way in which Twitter gets worse, there’s always some joy and anxiety over whether this will be the end of the platform. It dies a little bit every time but it never fully croaks.
Everyone ends up getting *something* that makes them want to leave, something that breaks through the layers of genuine enjoyment, capture, and maybe even addiction; and I might have gotten mine now.

I say this over and over, and so does everyone else who uses that godforsaken site, but Twitter is a bad platform. It has been so for years, and since Elon Musk’s takeover it has only gotten worse.

It was already a mess. It had a culture of instant micro-engagement that encouraged people to post the most inflammatory or divisive shit to incite the worst discourse and generate the most engagement.
Be it discourse, content farming, “one pizza topping has to go” post, etc, all of it was already a part of Twitter. Nowadays, in 𝕏 The Everything App, all of that has been supercharged and botted to hell, and in between all of it, you now see Elon Musk’s favourite nazi telling you why the West is falling.

However, there is still a genuine appeal to Twitter. I found a LOT of artists through it thanks to how tweets are usually shared, and through art trends that just flourish every other week. The kind of shitposting that comes from Twitter can also be really, really funny; to quote my partner: the toxicity can be intoxicating sometimes. Additionally, Twitter is one of the few remaining social media sites where NSFW accounts and art remain, where NSFW is a PART of the environment and not an entirely separate and segregated porn website.
(that is its own separate topic which I might write about in the future… then again, i might not)

There’s a few Twitter clones and alternatives around, some of which have existed since before the Elon takeover. They all come with their own perks, their disadvantages, and they’re all The Answer to “where do we go if not Twitter?” but none have managed to meaningfully stick around and work as genuine competition to Twitter. We could talk all day about each platform’s specific problems, but the truth is that nobody goes there because everyone’s on Twitter.

Any big social media site will be just a good place to keep up with friends and other people you’re interested in. You can message your friends, yes; and you can find them in other places as well, yes, but they’re *all* on Twitter, and interacting there feels like casually bumping into them. This situation is unlikely to change unless they move somewhere else, and they’re not moving somewhere else because they’re all already on Twitter, and that’s where they casually bump into each other.
Or at least that’s the case for most people.

One of the latest fucked developments has been the removal of Twitter from Brazil. In short, Musk had the option of complying with Brazilian law or not operating in Brazil at all. He chose the latter.

As a result, there are no more Brazilians on that site (bah, people in Brazil, since it’s banned within the territory of Brazil, not for everyone with Brazilian nationality). Those who had Twitter have now moved onto other social media sites, and their absence is not unnoticed.

I’m not in Brazil, I live in Argentina, where (at the time of writing) the president tweets SO much and has Elon Musk’s co𝕏 so far down his libertussy that it’s unlikely we will lose access to the platform in the near future, but I do know people from Brazil.
A good friend of mine is Brazilian and I used to bump into her on Twitter a lot. I can still reach her just fine, but there is one less place to bump into her, and knowing for certain that we will not have that kind of interaction on that site just makes me not want to use it.

The next time I think of tweeting “this movie is ghosted with the shell” or “la banda del club de corazones solitarios del sargento pepa”, my next thought will be “damn, she won’t see this” and while it usually doesn’t make me not want to post it, it does make me want to post it less, and that feeling is increasing with time.

Maybe that’s what will do it for everyone, maybe that’s what it takes. Not their favourite artist or a few mutuals leaving the site but those two or three people they really care about bumping into.

Or maybe not, but I know this is certainly motivating me to start switching to Tumblr and Bluesky bit by bit.