I’ve been writing off and on about X this year because I think many folks who read my blog haven’t noticed what is going on over there. If we care about the open web, we need to frequently reassess how silos are used by regular people.
John Gruber blogged over the weekend in more detail about this:
You may not like it that X has re-found its footing under Elon Musk’s ownership, but it has. I’m citing Apple executives here but they’re far from alone. There are hundreds of interesting people and accounts I follow that post on X very regularly and do not post anywhere else at all.
It’s true. I don’t post to X, but I skim through it because I’m obsessed with following AI news, and that’s where it happens.
When I stopped posting to Twitter in 2012, I did it mostly on principle to make a statement about closed, developer-hostile platforms. I also gave a few presentations at meetups and conferences during that period where I expanded on the problems of hate, harassment, and misinformation. In contrast, many people who later left Twitter for Mastodon did it because of Elon Musk’s takeover.
As I blogged briefly this year, it’s not enough to be against something:
Just telling folks what we’re against has not been enough to rebalance the web to open platforms.
We also need to be clear-eyed about the new problems of small fediverse communities that act as filter bubbles. From another blog post about opposition not being enough:
Let’s say you leave a large social network because you dislike the person in charge, then create a Mastodon community where everyone feels safe and is mostly aligned on ideology. The software is decentralized, but identity and culture remain centralized around a single domain.
Often this works out great. I’ve been writing for years about the benefits of small communities. But with impulsive leadership, it can also create filter bubbles and mob behavior. Then you’ve recreated the thing you were trying to escape.
In a blog post by Lex Friedman responding to John Gruber’s post, Lex outlines a dozen reasons not to support Elon Musk. Those receipts alone aren’t likely to convince people on X to abandon it, because the behavior is effectively priced in already, part of the chaos that Elon brings to everything. Lex closes with this:
I miss what Twitter was. I wish I were still enjoying the party. But I sleep way better at night knowing I’m taking the steps I can to not make that smug, rich, hateful asshole any richer.
If the concern is money flowing to Elon, what about cancelling your Claude subscription? Anthropic pays Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI $1.25 billion a month for hosting Claude. X may get a lot of attention, but financially it’s a smaller source of revenue compared to the larger SpaceXAI empire. Tracking where our money goes gets complicated quickly.
I founded Micro.blog to show what a platform could look like if it prioritized both open web principles and building a safe community. That is still the best way forward. Not what we’re against, but what we’re for. Encouraging open standards, content ownership with domains, and cross-posting via POSSE. Doubling down on curation. Trying to be thoughtful about new features, algorithms, and social interactions.
Maybe you’re feeling deflated right now that X’s decline has stalled. If you like to write or share photos, go all-in on your own blog. Move your fediverse profile from someone else’s server to your own domain name. If you’re a developer, build something new for Bluesky and the atmosphere. Bluesky has the most traction with regular users and is doing cool stuff with open protocols.
There’s a lot to do and there has never been a better time for building on the open web.
