Keep reading these articles wistfully eulogizing what we've collectively lost on Twitter and I think we're all forgetting that even before Musk
It was a toxic fucking abuse-hole that you could only really survive if you were super lucky
My Twitter account was closed because a bunch of trolls reported me for self-describing as "queer" (it's a slur, you see) and then some well-meaning but actually homophobic academics told me that this wouldn't have happened if I "kept it professional"
I won't get into how when a straight bro puts "Husband, father, Christian" into his bio, that's not "unprofessional" btw
That's a rant for another day
But I want to point out that academics gleefully embedded Twitter into every aspect of our professional lives, making it all but mandatory to use it
No matter who it excluded
So you'll excuse me if I do not shed a tear
And if I prioritize making sure that you don't stomp on the people who left Twitter years ago due to abuse that you didn't care about
Over making sure that academics are able to reproduce what they had on academic Twitter on Fedi
Anyway, I wrote this in 2018
https://blog.bgcarlisle.com/2018/06/11/risks-and-harms-of-tech-in-academia/
Still rings true
Love to read about big institutions finally deleting their X accounts now in the year twenty-and-oh-twenty-five
(What took you so long)
But also
No, the golden age of pre-Musk Twitter was a toxic shit-hole run by Jack "oops I RT'd another white supremacist" Dorsey and it excluded a lot of people and you ignored that and it sucks to hear you be like "remember when the only person who was excluded was The Research Fairy? great times!"
Unnamed TNG skant beefcake