What do we do with the Twitter-shaped hole in the internet?

Meh, the hole is tiny. Most people are still going to X/Twitter. Journalists are addicted to it still. Sports and media personalities aren't moving.

Only a tiny fringe amount of tech needs and political activists care.

There is a twitter shaped hole in the internet because the people who are unhappy with it only develop solutions to problems they think other people have instead of making something someone else wants.

The people trying to replicate twitter with a new version are indexed on "fixing" the slightly annoying things users put up with - without making something so good that users put up with the annoying things.

What made old twitter viable was it was a literal carnival where the plebes could parade around like famous people and famous people could pretend to be plebes. It failed when the government infiltrated it and conspired to ban comedians because their policies were vulnerable to the mockery they had earned. What anti-Elon people want today is a way to ingratiate themselves to power and its shifting narratives without shame, sort of like if LinkedIn had users, or an Onlyfans subscription you could say is for the articles. You can't say it, you just have to build it, but these "something must be done" posts are tedious.

The author offers strong arguements for the value of twitter, does a survey of inadequate competition, and leaves off with vauge specs of a better platform. Not discussed are ways twitter might recapture the minority who no longer use it.

I'm starting to think Elon is actually going to increase Twitter's value. It sure seems sticky. Even this minority of highly political people who hate Elon enough to quit twitter don't seem happy with the other offerings. Perhaps a rebranding and distancing himself from the platform will regain this lost market share. I never really cared about twitter before this whole saga started! Now it's really interesting.

As someone who use Twitter sparingly and turned off all suggestions (there are list of words you can mute for that), it still works just fine.

I think people who are social (media) butterflies and/or are opinion leaders on social issues are affected the most by the degradation of content moderation as the more you engage the public the more the public engages you, including all the unsavory elements.

If you, like me, just use Twitter as some sort of glorified/souped-up RSS feed, then nothing’s really changed. I think this is the healthiest way to engage with Twitter anyways.

I still use twitter for news and occasional lulz. Seems about the same as it always was, I don't see what the fuss is about tbh.

Twitter is and was an awful, depressing place. The sooner it dies the better. Sadly it remains about as strong as ever.

But if it were to die (one can always hope) I suggest to fill the hole with things that bring joy. Like cake and butterflies.

I literally don't see any difference compared to years ago. I follow 32 accounts, I only see them, no suggestions etc. That's all. None of them moved away to other platforms either.

I'm still using Twitter, and am still finding new sites, with content produced by interesting people. It doesn't seem as bad as people are making out, at least for my uses.

Personally, Twitter felt like the most interconnected place on the planet. It was an incredible conduit for ideas to flow across, at absurdly high radix. It's moderation team did an incredible job doing just enough taming, and the team did an impressive job resisting manipulation by various governments.

Almost every one of these excellences seems at risk now. And the situation feels like it's confirming a certain fatalism, that good services don't last; on a long enough timeline all services lose their luster, fall from their high perch.

The outlining of three paths seems ok-ish. Mastodon is presented as the one & only semi-decentralized approach. But I think it's too early, too premature to call. We're not very far into exploring how we might interconnect with each other, not far into working out protocols that might serve.

Personally, I don't feel like change has to come soon suddenly or with huge adoption. This is a huge hole, and creating more resilient protocols that can adapt and thus survive & flourish long term is something that is going to require years of experimentation & trying, isn't one big pioneering experiment but many different pioneers making many settlements, and those individual attempts sharing & swapping ideas about whats working amd what's not.

I do see huge hope in ActivityPub as a possible long term candidate. Making more services and clients seems like a long next work. Alas I think there's some difficulty right now, culturally; the bluesky community has a bit of a grudge against Mastadon, says it hasn't been a pleasant place, and I think that's true. And Mastadon has been the stable reference implementation, with not enough competition & other folks trying their own hand in the sector. We're not learning nearly asuchas we should be. More efforts are required.

As a general rule, dying social networks do not get replaced by something that’s exactly the same; most Livejournal users didn’t adopt Dreamwidth, say, they went to Tumblr or Twitter or elsewhere. _Maybe_ Twitter will be different, but I don’t think it’s obvious that the practical replacement will be one of the Twitter-like things.

Put a red tape over it with nuclear fallout warning

"We" don't have to do anything.

People are inventing new things all the time in every possible sphere of life. If something proves to be more popular than what's already out there, it will become successful

That's the whole point of evolution/capitalism - you don't need to have a big plan or pick the winners up front

Leave Twitter standing as a failed experiment and a reminder that nothing is above 'enshitification.'

Fill the hole with X.

(Insert value for X.)

Give it the bird.

Twitter was not a hole, it was a tumor.

Let it stay empty.