Zarf Updates

Back in April, oh my gods, April was a million years ago, I wrote: Yes, I will quit Twitter if Elon Musk buys it.

My thinking hasn't changed, and he just signed. So there it is.

(I originally suggested that I would quit the day the stock was de-listed. Looks like that's tomorrow morning.)

"If Nethack has taught us anything, it's that if you don't eat food, you die."

-- @zarfeblong, Nov 29 2010

I am just going out. I may be some time.

-- @zarfeblong, Oct 27 2022

I have exported my Twitter account data and signed out of all my Twitter clients. You can continue to follow me here at this blog -- it's got an RSS feed and everything! -- or at @zarfeblong@mastodon.gamedev.place on Mastodon.

(Cross-server following on Mastodon isn't entirely obvious. Copy the link above and paste it into the search bar of your Mastodon page. Not the browser URL bar. It should bring me up and show a + button you can click.)

Further questions:

Why?

See my April post. I foresee a lot of ways Twitter can get worse under Elon. I refuse the psychological torture of hanging on every galaxy-brain-tweet trying to divine whether it's bad news. I will be better off for a clean break.

Are you deleting your Twitter account?

No. I'm parking it. I'm logged out. There's a tarp thrown over my Twitter client. Notifications and DMs will not reach me.

But I'm not letting anybody else snarf @zarfeblong. My tweet history remains visible.

If Twitter threatens to delete my account for inactivity, I could log in to preserve it. I won't be checking mentions or DMs, though.

Any chance of coming back?

I have no idea what the future holds. Maybe Elon will turn Twitter into a wonderful well-moderated fairyland. Maybe he'll sell it back off next Tuesday. If it seems like a good idea to come back, I'll come back.

But I am not optimistic about this. No promises.

(If Twitter gets sold off again, I figure it would be to someone even less encouraging than Musk. If it re-IPOs, it would be at a shadow of its former valuation, which was already on the edge of a plummet when Musk stepped in. I don't see a good outcome here.)

Is Mastodon your Twitter replacement?

No! I don't expect Mastodon to turn into an expansive bustling crowd of friendly discussion the way Twitter-circa-2010 did. Mastodon is a bunch of silos and there's friction in between them. This is on purpose.

I'm mildly optimistic that I'll be able to keep up with some friends via Mastodon. If not, oh well.

What about other platforms?

This blog will continue.

I'm on a few Discords regularly. Slack continues to be solid for small social groups. (It doesn't want to be -- Slack wants to be a pure business solution -- but you can still use it that way.)

As for true public social networks, dunno. Haven't seen anything enticing yet. (Cohost does not appeal for reasons that I won't get into here.)

If you want to reach me...

Email is still best: erkyrath at eblong dot com. Gah, do we even bother spambot-fiddling our email addresses any more? What a very 1990s look. So it goes.

See you around.

Update, Nov 2024

As of Nov 7th 2024, I have deactivated my Twitter account. My tweet history is no longer visible. According to Twitter's docs, my account will be permanently deleted in 30 days. (I have no idea if that's true, but it's what they say.)

Why the change of mind? Well, I am no longer comfortable having a history of being enthusiastically progressive on a server owned by someone hostile to the very idea. Yes, the rest of my Internet history is easily findable -- I haven't deleted any content from this blog. But I have to assume that Twitter will be a first-rank target for bad guys searching for good guys. I'd rather scrub it.

I have nerfed all the Twitter links to my account from my blog pages. (Note that the tweet links at the top of this post now go to a nonexistent server.) Links to other people's tweets remain in place; they may or may not work at some time in the future.

If you see @zarfeblong on Twitter in the future, it's a fake.