About Life After Twitter

One of the most pleasant parts of my holiday break was something I didn’t even notice until I opened up Apple News and looked at articles from The Verge. Of course, among the many posts was one about Twitter. I realized at that moment that I had thought about Twitter since before Christmas. How nice that was!

For a few weeks before the holiday break I was test-driving Mastodon. So far, I think it’s fine. It will take some time before I locate and follow the various feeds which I enjoyed on Twitter. But I am also finding some new ones. Mastodon will allow me to accomplish some of what I want – staying current with front-end development – but it will not do everything. The again, neither did Twitter.

If I am going to use social media to learn about and share the work, I will need to do so using several channels. Mastodon will be one. I will continue to be active on Slack as I was in 2022. I am trying Discord. I will read from and post to the Pantheon Community discussion group. There may be some good content on LinkedIn; it will also be a place to share my own work. And then there’s my blog.

With some unknown number of people abandoning Twitter, I have seen commentary that 2023 will be the year people get back to producing personal blogs. As someone who tries (and fails) every year to develop a habit for regularly writing journal entries and blog posts, I have my doubts about whether or not such a trend will begin. However, the tools available for easily creating and maintaining a blog have improved significantly since I first started posting to Twitter, so maybe there’s a chance this will happen. Maybe 2023 will be the year I finally succeed in maintaining a regular cadence of posts. My last blog post was 11 months ago – it will be easy to do better than that. However, I should try to set some realistic expectations.