Today, at some point after this post goes up, if I’ve timed this right, Twitter is going to close down the system that lets my blog freely create a tweet and post it, without me doing it personally. If you haven’t checked my twitter, which I haven’t been promoting since November 2022, the only thing posted there is links to my blog posts, and retrospring posts — which is also generated by that same system. This is an API – an Application Program Interface. APIs are complicated if you want to understand them but if you just want to be generally aware of what they are, APIs are ways that two programs can directly communicate with one another – the software running my blog and the software running twitter are both bumping into one another directly.
What this meant is that any time I made a post, I didn’t have to think about how to advertise and promote it, it just gets posted to twitter and tumblr (and it gets posted to tumblr in full, which is pretty sweet).
Tomorrow, at least assuming everything is going the way it’s going, that stops.
This means this is probably, to some extent, a sunset of my time on Twitter. I check it from time to time, to make sure that my DMs are available. I know I’m not extracted from the system wholesale. At work, I have a professional twitter account, because it’s an important skillset for students to build on (hypothetically). We might be seeing a reduction in relevance for twitter there, too, because, and this is pretty funny, the reason we taught them how to use twitter was because, a few years ago, ‘competent at twitter’ was a fundamentally important toolset for social media degrees. That might be fading out, but the good news is that the skills we taught are largely transferable.
I know I’m not getting rid of twitter, but my twitter account, talen_lee, and its related cousins, is going to go dark. Sadly, so to is my most successful twitter thing, Dwarven Porn, with its 16,000+ followers. I don’t know why it is so successful (really), and its follower base is not entirely porn robots, to my surprise. I was always okay with the idea of reducing twitter usage and just relying on automated services so that, for the people who really wanted it, they’d still have convenient updates to my blog, but not contributing new, unique stuff to twitter as part of the ‘content’ mill.
This was my compromise. I don’t like going without Twitter. Mastodon and Cohost aren’t giving me quite what I want as replacements; Cohost is great because of the people there, but it tends to be pretty technical, web-dork based, and it doesn’t have a lot of tools for getting people’s attention or contacting them safely. No DMs to slide into, as it were, and it’s not easy to initiate a conversation on a topic with someone else. Mastodon frustrates me a little bit because most of the time, any given day on Mastodon, a meta-topic winds up coming up.
What I want is for Mastodon to be a site where I see something being talked about, think about it, and share it. I want to feel like it’s a place where when I post work on a game, people will comment, people will talk about it with me. Right now, Mastodon feels a bit sensitive, a bit raw, like I can’t just post any old thing. Twitter, being so mainstream and having so general an attitude meant that I didn’t have to think much about what I was posting, but Mastodon has an aura of a culture of don’t.
None of which is to say Mastodon is bad, it just is a place where, for example, if I’m in a bad mood I’m not about to log on and post something like ‘man, fuck Wizards of the Coast,’ because hey, that might be upsetting to someone who’s sensitive and I gotta be careful.
When my blog software can share to Mastodon and Tumblr and… man, is Cohost on the horizon? I’m excited by that! But we don’t know, I don’t know how likely that is.
Twitter has been a part of my life for the past nine years. In June, it will be ten years full. I got on twitter originally to promote my friend’s work, and then my own work, and the original reason to not tweet was that twitter, in general, was inane and bad. There was always this vibe that twitter wasn’t a good platform and I shouldn’t be there because tweets were small and tedious. What I didn’t appreciate when I started and grew into was the way twitter worked as an excellent scratch pad, where the short form of tweets meant I had to try and express ideas in a constrained space, and where the time stamp on everything meant I could chart my own engagement with ideas over time.
Also, I owe Twitter a lot for being a better person. I basically asked a lady once on twitter, like in 2013 about a question I thought was at the time pretty complex, and she gave me a 101 introduction to some ideas, which I then spent some time delving into. There was a kind of painful unpacking to do there, which went through stages, but I undeniably did not get exposed to better language for without the interface of twitter. There’s no doubt in my mind that without the addition of a large cloud of trans women into my life, I wouldn’t have learned a host of things that were, to me, at the time, kind of academic.
It’s not like it’s done, done, done. For all I know, given the nature of how corporations are stumbling and confused these days, this may mean Twitter winds up changing back, a few weeks later. Who knows, maybe the whole program becomes open source.
At least for now, though, this needs some noting, some stamp in the timeline: This is probably going to be the last post of mine promoted on twitter, or tomorrow night’s one.