Twitter: the great migration… maybe

Elon Musk has bought Twitter. Many of us have made sure we had an account on Mastodon or Discord. I even remembered I had an Instagram account and I started posting photos there again. But deep down, what I really want is to go back to writing on my website, as I used to do years ago on the now defunct «Polonia en español» or «Alemanista«.

I have been using Twitter for years. Twitter entertains me, and I have no intention of leaving. On Twitter I have connected with friends I already had, and I have made new friends whom I like and love. I chat with some of them more than I speak with some people I interact face-to-face on a daily basis.

Thanks to Twitter, I no longer go to newspapers’ front pages: I visit the stories through Twitter links posted by the very journalists who author the texts, or posted by the newspapers, but filtering what I want to read.

Frankly, I love Twitter. But it’s true that we’re doing Musk’s business simply by being there, by posting there, by seeing the advertising there. Twitter’s intention, as is Meta’s, is that we «live» on their network. That everything is published on their websites. But what happens when a user is suspended? Their publications cease to exist. Their hours spent writing thousands or tens of thousands of tweets have been in vain. And I don’t think it even needs to go away; how long does it take for a thread or a collection of links on Twitter to be forgotten? An hour? Two days? When have you ever googled something and a tweet with the result popped up, ever?

Not so long ago we were writing blogs and forums. Maybe it was the best time of the internet, when content was grouped by topic, moderated by those who knew, and easily accessible from any search engine. What happened? Why did we abandon it? It was good and we let it die. I think the answer is simple: Immediacy. Interactions. The number of followers was growing. The «microblog» network killed the blogs.

As I say, I’m not leaving Twitter. But I do hope to write more on the blog. Maybe short texts, maybe long texts. Some will be in Spanish and some in English.

And that’s it for today. Let’s watch Borgen.