As Elon reinstates Nazi accounts and openly jokes with fascists over on Twitter, those of us in between this platform and that one are experiencing a maelstrom of distress, anger, fear, and lonesomeness for the dissolution of communities we are/were part of there.

I’ve seen several open calls on #Mastodon for people to abandon #Twitter outright or else be directly associated with that Nazism. This is ugly and it’s not okay. Please stop doing it/boosting posts that do.

A lot of people *have* made the decision to cleanly and completely cut ties with #Twitter and for those people, the calculus made sense. But many more of us have established channels of access to mutual aid, to/within marginalized groups, to information that has no analogue here. #DisabilityTwitter
#QueerTwitter
#BlackTwitter
among others, were and still are vital access points for many of us. Abandoning those communities feels wrong to me and to many others.
The guy in charge is a colossal piece of shit, stirring chaos and reviving hate because he can and because he revels in it. This is doing real harm to real people all over the globe. The #NewYorkTimes published statistics on the sickening rise of hate speech instances.
To those who are disgusted by this, maybe for some it makes sense to leave. For others, it makes sense to stay and fight back or to shore up the communities we are part of, to assess how to stay connected.

What we do not need in this moment is for people in the places we are trying to make our new home to call us Nazi sympathizers or fascists because we cannot yet find a way to rebuild those access networks or will not ever leave our people behind.

#Mastodon is a wonderful place, or collection of places. But it is not as accessible in many ways as the place we are coming from. It is difficult to find people here unless you already know where they are.

So much advocacy, activism, and education happens on #Twitter in ways that are easy to access because of its structure. That structure is also problematic because it was able to be purchased by one man and is being manipulated (has always been manipulated, to be fair) to churn resentment and hate and vitriol.

I hate watching what the place I loved is becoming. I hate what it is doing to people I care about. I don’t know how to make it better.

But please, please let those of us who are trying to find our communities here, to meet the new neighbors here while also maintaining vital access points for support, let us do that in safety and kindness. 💜

@UndeadRed85 I for one would never say that. I understand that there's lots and lots of ambiguity. Or, at the very least, there's definitely not a one for one match on Mastodon for all Twitter-based communities.

People who can sever their connection to Twitter completely for Mastodon shouldn't be seen as the ideal. Frankly, there is no ideal. Everybody's got different connections.

Mastodon is a place to grow and make a change. If it doesn't work for everyone, that's OK.