(2022-11-04) Taylor Muskusdomesticus

Dorian Taylor: Muskus/Domesticus 🐀 Prior to Twitter, I got my up-to-the-second situational information mainly from IRC, supplemented by a rotating cast of one-off, bespoke private message boards, and finally, RSS.

What Twitter did for me, in 2009 when I finally started paying attention to it, was change the scene from a sort of para-local one (to the extent that everybody, while geographically distributed, self-selected into the group by some sort of affinity) to a global one

So while I don’t believe a RETVRN to the days before Twitter is viable, I do foresee a cranking up of the volume on RSS in particular, as well as dusting off my website(s). What I will miss about Twitter is going from thread - which costs asymptotically nothing to get started - to more substantial undertakings like these newsletters, or full-on articles...

Twitter is (still) for me a major source of links to what’s going on in the world. I open probably a thousand links off Twitter a month. I am legitimately concerned, if Twitter becomes unusable, where I’m going to get my links from.

This, however, is something that I have been thinking about for years, so it’s time to put that plan into action. I am, after all, fundamentally a “data guy”, and there is plenty of data out there to be gathered.