I’ve probably been on Twitter longer than you. In fact being early on Twitter was such a part of my online personality for a while that at some point I had a little tool to tell you that I’ve been on Twitter longer than you.

And now all of this. What a bummer.

So what’s next? I had this blog before I had a Twitter account and I’ll probably keep it around until I can’t pay for the domain anymore.
But the thing is: I don’t even have all that much to say, really. I like to hear what people have to say, I might add a quip or an opinion once in a while and basically just be a part of some kind of social gathering. Back in the day Leisa Reichelt used the term Ambient Intimacy to describe what I liked about the Social Web. (back when it was Web 2.0 and before it became Social Media)
Now let’s be clear: this has been gone for a while.. Long enough that blog posts complaining about it are gone as well and need to be linked to on archive.org. But still, it is nice to have a semi-public virtual space to hang out, talk to your friends, maybe meet new people. With my low follower number and therefore low visibility I was in the rather privileged position that Twitter was able to fill that role for me pretty well – I’m not sure it is still able to do so.

It’s no secret that I really like the idea of the IndieWeb and the old way of everyone having their own little blog somewhere. But I guess that is not the preferred solution for many people, so right now the second best option seems to be what many people in my bubble look at: Mastodon. (And yes, I’m aware that those two things can be one thing.)
And let’s be honest: that is pretty fun, too. I like the slightly messy way in which things are happening in this decentralised federated network of small-ish servers. Right now it does mostly work for a very specific kind of nerd, but who knows.
It is very interesting to see how especially younger people struggle with the idea of federated social media. I’ve even seen very technical people having a hard time wrapping their head around the fact that there is not one Mastodon service that handles everything. I guess that’s how it is when you’ve grown up in an era in which all the big services have always been around.

Anyway, I don’t really have a point here. Say hi to me over on Mastodon if that’s where you are: @dominik@mastodon.xyz. Or you know, don’t, if don’t want to.