Social media

I'm leaving Twitter ... here's why, and a variety of other places you can find me.

Adverts, misogyny and racism a'plenty ... and that's not misinformation

I've used social media - mainly Twitter - to advertise new posts and recruit new readers for a decade. I sometimes respond to tweets from others, rarely retweet them, and never use direct messaging.

🦋

Cut to the chase ... follow me on Bluesky. There are more bee-related posts on that platform, and it's not cluttered with lunatics, techbroligarchs or bots.

However, things are changing. The new server software for The Apiarist means that subscribers receive new posts as an emailed newsletter. A consequence of this is that traffic to the site from Twitter is much reduced. As are the number who 'follow' me, which has dropped hugely in the last few months.

But the other thing that's changing is social media. I recently described Twitter as a "bubbling cesspool of hate, conspiracy theories and misogyny" ... I still think that's a reasonably accurate description, but I should have added 'and adverts and racism'.

Enough! I'm not interested in staying in an abusive relationship.

The recent changes to the 'block' function (it no longer blocks posts from the selected user and is probably illegal), means I'm going to stop using Twitter. I blocked some of the worst offenders - including the owner - years ago and don't want to hear their idiotic views again.

Twitter has also started using its vast back catalogue of tweets to train large language AI models, so probably normalising what is already normal on Twitter, i.e. hate, misogyny, conspiracy theories and racism.

In place of Twitter - sorry X (which seems an entirely appropriate name for something that appears to be slowly dying) - I'm investigating Mastodon and BlueSky. The latter has been described as:

The platform is basically identical to [Twitter], except the folks who converse with me can spell, and I'm not being inundated with a bunch of right-wing, inbred, mouth-breathing idiots, posting misinformation.

These platforms - unlike Twitter and Facebook - are open, distributed, federated, and not influenced by the whims of egocentric billionaires - is there any other type? - or the need to primarily drive advertising revenue to pay off a $44bn overdraft.

Here are the current options ...

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See you on the other side 😉