This Bird Has Flown: Leaving Twitter

This move is long overdue. I will permanently close the Blog’s Twitter account at the end of the week.  I really enjoyed my time curating the Blog’s profile on Twitter. I learned a ton from that site and made/solidified some relationships. However, these days, the Blog gets very little engagement through Twitter. It’s a crowded marketplace, and the tone of the Blog is not ideally suited for that space.

If you would like to continue following the Blog on social media, we will maintain our Mastodon and Bluesky accounts. I recommend both sites. They operate a lot like Twitter, but somehow the vibe is very different. 

Bluesky is more like Twitter. It was founded by two Twitter executives. I don’t really know or care what caused two of the people behind Twitter to create a rival site that is a lot like Twitter. All I an say is that Bluesky is growing very rapidly now, as there has been a recent exodus from Twitter. The number of users was 200,000 in July 2023, 5.9 million in July,2024, and I recently saw that it surpassed 14 million this month.  You used to need an invitation to join Bluesky. That is no longer true. One of the problems I experienced with Twitter , especially this year,was that most of the Blog’s followers seemed to be bot accounts. That seems to be very rare on Bluesky. Lately, Bluesky has been featuring a lot of “starter packs” which helps new users find people with common interests and also helps existing accounts get a lot of new followers who share common interests. The Blog’s followers have nearly doubled just in the past week, and engagement is way up (although the numbers are still very small).

Mastodon seems to attract more tech people and visual artists. Photos are much clearer and crisper on Mastodon. It’s a very pretty site. There’s a lot of happiness and support on the site — at least on the part of it that I inhabit. The downside (for me) is that it attracts a lot of techies who, for reasons that escape me, have no interests in contracts law. Also, their posts are completely incomprehensible to me. 

I recommend both of these sites, and I hope that those of you who follow the Blog on Twitter will continue to do so on one or both of these sites.