Back when I first began using Twitter in 2008-2009, Livejournal was still around, and it contained most of what I would consider the anime scene that wasn’t part of SomethingAwful, 4chan. or a few other places. But as Web 2.0 was in full swing and everyone wanted a piece of this new social media we all had to SMS our posts to, I stubbornly stuck with Livejournal and blogs for my anime reviews until January 2011, when I finally retired Livejournal and moved to Twitter and WordPress. The anitwitter scene was hot shit for a number of years, roughly 2010-2016 I’d say, before it largely fell off because blogs were less popular with zoomers, and Twitter was just kind of floundering as-is. There has been a slight rediscovery of blogging as of COVID-era 2020-2021, and I think that was just due to the fact a lot of journos got onto Medium and Substack, and some folks remembered writing is cool too!
Although ani…x or whatever anyone calls it now because I am mean and continuing to use the deadname Twitter, is still fairly active, the recent incidents involving X owner Elon Musk have called into question my usage of the platform. At first I was able to perhaps continue using Twitter while he recklessly crashed rockets into the ground or rapidly disassembled them in the sky. After all, the platform was still usable, though bot activity quadrupled since his acquisition, funny for a guy who claimed he wouldn’t spend more on it because of them. His inept, bumbling of taking it over was very apparent in features not working, things breaking, but the core was still there. But now? Now he is trying to push it into becoming the American WeChat, and using his newfound government-deputy powers, is trying to gut our government, our financial systems, anything and everything, and I have to assume this isn’t out of some goodwill to improve government. He either wants all of our personal information for AI or some other exploit, or to enrich himself. I ain’t about that, dawg.
So right now I am facing two choices, one is that I full-delete Twitter. The second is that I delete all my tweets and retain the account for replies and so the name isn’t taken, just in case maybe he sells it off in the future or it gets taken over by someone competent. I am leaning on the second option the most, because I am not quite ready to just torch it all yet. From there, I have not decided if I am going to go on Bluesky, or just operate out of the blog, old school for awhile. I don’t know if there is an anime scene on bsky, but since my blog is hardly trafficked anymore and few engage it, it’s not like I am heavily advertising and need a new platform.
I’ll probably decide at some point within the next week or two, and there will probably not be a warning, it will just happen. This isn’t an airport so I need not announce my departure. Y’all get it.
