I can tell already that Elon Musk owning Twitter and trying to use it to make money is going to be a real thing that people will talk about online for weeks and weeks. Who is leaving? Who might get unbanned? Which companies will keep ads on the platform, and which ones are done? What new iteration of the platform can be monetized? When will Musk sell Twitter and take a loss?

I’d say that most users on the platform will continue to use it the same way they have been forever. I have curated my follow list, stopped retweets from appearing in my timeline, and continued using Tweetdeck instead of going to the official Twitter page to interact with it for more than a couple of years. I probably spend too much time on it, and there’s that feeling of not even needing to be here anymore, but I doubt I change my habit.

As for the alternatives… they are all crap. I mean all of them except Micro.blog (I rather enjoyed Maton Reece’s appeal for Micro.blog usage) and, you know, personal blogging. Mastodon and the rest I can’t be bothered to look up will not make a dent during this. They are a waste of time.

I fully expect within six months to a year, Twitter will be ruined. It will be a hellscape of impersonations and the worst aspects of the far-right with a dash of fascism, bigotry, and political fetishism. It will be an afterthought like Tumblr, which used to be mentioned in the same breath as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Unless Musk sells it to a company that knows how to handle it, like Automattic, for instance.

I pretty much have TweetDeck running in a tab every day. Not having it up is going to be really, really difficult for me. It’s kind of funny, as I recognize that I’m constantly online through Twitter and also that it probably isn’t very good for me.

It will be interesting to see how long I stay on if all the people I follow quit.