Gregory's ServerBut, eventually, I came to love it, and it's lived rent-free in my head ever since. In so many ways, it defines me as much as I want it not to. It's a relationship that's unreciprocated – the job will never love you back. A friend used to say that I didn't owe it anything, but ...
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 That's another aspect to this that is so poignant for me, personally. I tried to make Twitter better. I tried to make Twitter the fediverse, back in 2008, and after I failed, I left and tried to make the fediverse a thing without Twitter. That was not an easy task. For a long time, I truly felt it was my fault, personally, that we failed. The enormity of Twitter became oppressive, because it was so obviously the wrong thing, corrupted from its potential by capital and a lack of imagination. Seeing Mastodon and the fediverse succeed today is deeply gratifying and hopeful for me. It's imperfect and early, but watching thousands of people birth communities that they can nurture and shape and watch grow and evolve, after so many years hoping and dreaming of this ... Well, it's not a feeling I can easily express. It feels like Spring. And the Winter, on Twitter – there's a feeling of loss, but also clarity. The trees laid bare, the bright snow on the ground. It's space for less, before something new. A former job was at another Great Empire of Culture, from a previous century. I realized there that technology has more in common with the past than we admit. It, too, is a fashion industry. Styles and fame come and go, inevitably. The constant is us: the communities we nurture, the culture we create. The space we cherish is just a vessel for those. It hasn't always been an easy ride, but I'm delighted that this place has been one of those cherished spaces, and proud of the role I played. ❤️🪺  @blaine I call your era "The o_O era." Thank you for your work — it defined my 20s, and helped me find my own kind in a new, unfamiliar, and otherwised cloistered city (Pittsburgh). Glad to see that the spirit of this early era lives on here, at Masto.  @blaine so many feels from this thread just as someone who was a _user_ for 15 years. Thank you for writing it 🙏 @blaine this is such a beautiful testament to what could have been — and what will be. I want to think society has learned a lesson from the corruption of capital and the harms of ad-driven design. Even if only a few of us learned, I’ll cherish that found community.  @blaine Will it help you get emotional distance from Twitter if I blame you for wrecking IRC? If not just ignore me. 😂 Either way thanks for fixing it!   @blaine I’m an amateur, so forgive me, pls. But since you’re asking: your expertise and your vision are not gone. What’s gone is the TT era. It’s time to move on. In other words: your creativity is not dependent on the existence of TT. Allow yourself to descend deeper, on that visceral ladder. @blaine this has been the most difficult thing for me. I’ve been on TW for 13+ yrs, nurturing a diverse community of exceedingly intelligent, funny, kind ppl, from whom I learned much. “Replacing” that is impossible. |
Twitter – the concept, not the collection of servers and contracts and code – is something so much bigger than a job. It's the most visceral representation of human communication and ideas that we've ever created. And how do you let *that* go? (no seriously, if you've got ideas!)