Seizing on the Twitter Apocalypse and Building a New House

We didn’t start the fire (didn't we though?), it was always burning since the world was turning.

10,000 years ago mammoths, mastodons, sloth, and bison roamed the land. Yesterday, I signed up for a Mastodon account.

Yesterday I joined Mastodon, the buzzy and crowdfunded social media service du jour. I initially resisted the gravitational pull of the herd fleeing the well-documented Twitter apocalypse—the  complete and final destruction of the so-called digital town square and the grief that comes along with it. But I get it. It’s hard to give up your identity and start again.  

In April it will be 15 years since I created my Twitter account. I was a 33-year-old recent j-school graduate trying to make my way in “new media” while navigating another economic downturn. I’d created my neighborhood blog, The Streets Where We Live (the Streets are dead, long live the Streets), to write about underreported news and happenings above 155th Street in Manhattan, and found community amongst other uptown digital neophytes. We used hashtags to find one another, followed each other’s blogs (remember, Twitter was once known as a “microblog platform”), and even became lifelong friends IRL (Pearsall, I see you.). I found and broke stories on Twitter, and credit the platform with DNAinfo finding me and asking me to join their startup effort. From there, life took on a velocity for which I am so grateful. Many of us soon dispersed —some left NYC, others began families and didn’t have time to tweet, and others moved to Facebook where they spent more time with smaller communities of friends and family. Such is life. We know what eventually happened over on Facebook, but this newsletter is not about that.

I stayed on the platform, teaching journalists worldwide (thanks WSJ) how to find their own Twitter audiences as a tool for reporting, community building and distribution. Most of them only used it to tweet their articles, but some understood the beauty of the platform and connected with new communities.

My feed became increasingly populated by media pros and I developed a love-hate relationship with the platform. I loved having access to global information and the thoughts of many brilliant minds. I celebrated the democratization of voices from The Arab Spring to the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movement. But I missed my hyperlocal community and increasingly found myself irritated by the rampant ego displays where self-anointed experts on myriad unstudied topics wore the crown of a blue checkmark. Now the talking heads I avoided on network news were on full display on my platform. (N.B. my hubris.) In the ramp up to the 2016 election, I dialed back my Twitter consumption for my mental health and by the time I left journalism in 2019, I deleted the app from my phone, only using it on my laptop for work and positing sporadic low engagement links about my writing or a quip I thought was too good to only have relegated to my living room. (Did I mention ego?) By the time this year’s apocalypse came into clear view, I’d already mourned the loss of the platform and its former place in my life. 

Posting my Twitter check for posterity, on a platform that could also disappear.

The word apocalypse can also mean an event that reveals a “prophetic revelation.” That revelation was revealed years before the pandemic, but became better understood under the threat of lockdown. Social media can threaten mental health, increase loneliness, diminish self-esteem through a constant game of comparing your insides to someone’s outsides, and spread the mis- and disinformation that threatens to brainwash many into joining political cults that threaten democracy and civil discourse. Take your pick. And yet, it’s the way many have stayed connected, especially in these grief-filled years, and the idea of walking away is frightening even if we know the house is on fire. Few of us know how to safely flee if not put out the blaze itself. Some grieve the loss and others are already trying to rebuild. 

My application to one journalism group on Mastodon was rejected when I tried to create a profile this weekend. I first bristled at the idea that someone would tell me I am no longer a journalist—ahem, my Twitter check still notes me as “verified because it’s notable in government, news, entertainment, or another designated category.” But I was soon struck by the blank slate offered by this new identity (you can follow me here). I looked at a spreadsheet of journalists someone sent me so that I could follow my community on the platform and felt an urge to hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE.     

I used to have business cards that read “Periodista,” journalist in Spanish. While in Paris last month I bought a ceramic plaque that reads “journaliste.” For so long, my identity was so wrapped up in what that Twitter check bestowed that I have failed to ask myself what community I desire to live within. It’s taken an apocalypse to slow down and catch up to who I am today and ask who I want to join. 

On Sunday morning, as I read through hashtag flurries and intro toots (cringe.) that sounded a lot like 2008 Twitter, I began searching for poets, gardeners, writers and humanists on Mastodon. I don’t want to rebuild that same house, it is no longer big enough for who I am today. 

In the wake of an apocalypse is the potential to build fresh. There is no need to choose what to toss, all has been summarily discarded. It is now up to us to add the essentials of this moment. And although it may feel like everything has been broken, we’re still here and we get to choose what to rebuild. That is all that matters. As Maya Angelou wrote, “You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it’s all right.” Or, as we say in my 12 step group, “wherever you go, there you are,” so let’s build the house we need right now.  

Let’s just make sure to build it nice and sturdy—no straw house or a digital bird’s nest that can be blown away by one Big Bad Wolf. I’d make that deal.