Day 347

So I’ve locked my twitter account, and will focus mainly on doing updates on Mastodon. Musk’s right-wing postings and lies about covid-19 scientists, and his short-notice dissolution of twitter’s Trust & Safety Council were the last straw for me. I can’t in good conscience be on that platform actively. I’ll not be deley=ting my tweets or my profile, though, because that would allow someone else to start using my handle once it’s been deleted for a month, and I don’t want that. There have been many similar actions to mine today, and many threads on Mastodon expressing sadness at the demise of what was once seen as a platform and voice for impartiality and honesty, a platform whose content was built by its users, before the algorithms and the fake facts took over. It is sad. I noticed today that I started on there 13 years ago. It’s a long time.

Having said that, having now been on Mastodon for just over a month, and just having posted my 1,000th toot or micro-blog, it is a good and interesting and mostly calm place (although I do read stories of deep recesses of it on which right-wing and worse servers reside). The more people I follow whom I didn’t know before, the more obvious it becomes to me that to be present on a platform not guided by algorithms and not cluttered by adverts is a joy and a blessing, and that there is so much about the world that I still don’t know. I didn’t learn on twitter, not particularly anyway, just reacted and protested (for the last 6 years in any case) and shouted in my quiet way. Mastodon is a steady rumble of voices, a sussuration of voices, like you might hear at a cricket test match, where no-one’s shouting and no-one’s agitating, but just exchanging views in reasonable and low voices.

Off to London early tomorrow, and not back till very late Thursday. I have just prepared my Friday show, so will hopefully be able to do it with my eyes half-closed, or half-open depending on which way you look at it.

Finally, thanks, especially to AR, for the very kind private messages which came to me after yesterday’s post. I do see this place as a place I can vent. No-one reads it anyway, right?