Returning to X?

Almost two years have passed since I left X following Elon Musk’s Nazi salute incident. Doing so was far less painful than I thought it’d be, and over time, I feel that my decision has been fully vindicated. I wasn’t the only one who left X in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition. At the time, there seemed to be a mass exodus to alternative platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and for a brief moment in time, it seemed like X was on the ropes. Recent months, however, have seen a marked reversal.

High profile developers, journalists, and pundits like Marco Arment, Casey Newton, and John Gruber have all made their way back to Musk’s platform, mainly because that’s where a lot of the conversation relevant to their areas of interest and coverage (e.g., AI, technology) is occurring. But Gruber went one step further, claiming that X is different place now:

The culture on X today is remarkably friendly and inclusive. It is a cheerful place. That cheerfulness is another differentiator. If you believe the world is falling apart and doomed only to get worse, that our obvious and real problems cannot be surmounted, X is not the platform for you. If you think the world is full of fun and amazing people and things, that humanity’s defining feature is our collective ability to solve any problem, that the only time better to be alive than today is tomorrow, it might be.

[…]

Without any fanfare — perhaps to avoid his ire — X has de-Musked its algorithm. I stopped visiting at all when the algorithm there was putting Musk’s own tweets into my timeline, every time I checked, despite the fact that I never followed him. But they don’t do that anymore. I don’t see much politics of any kind in my timeline, and what I do see is from accounts I chose to follow. I see tech (including a lot of interesting breaking news), sports (including a lot of interesting videos and stats), and stupid stuff that’s actually funny. My only problem with X now is that I do have to pay attention to avoid wasting time when I visit.

Not surprisingly, Gruber et al.‘s decision has sparked no small amount of pushback and criticism — something that Gruber, at least, has responded to with his trademark snark, even going so far as to claim that Bluesky and other X alternatives are “dominated by a fringe of unhinged kooks who want to be angry and want everyone else to be angry.”

It’s a bit tedious, to be honest, and oh so predictable. (Social media outrage cycles FTW!) I don’t necessarily begrudge folks returning to X, especially if, as in the case of Platformer’s Newton, it’s necessary for their job. If you’re covering AI, and most of the AI conversations are happening on X, then you gotta do what you gotta do. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Do X and Elon Musk deserve our attention?

My thanks to Robert Rackley, who directed me to Jonas Downey’s recent post about resisting platforms like X. Downey is much more critical of Gruber et al. than I am, but I wholeheartedly agree with his overall point: since social media platforms rely on our attention for their survival and success, we ought to think carefully about where we give our attention. As he puts it, “I am here to argue that your social media participation has impact, and chickening out on this issue is just cowardice wrapped up in excuses.”

He continues:

Think of every person on a social network as a little generator sending out bursts of electricity. Without all those generators, the network would be totally dark. The only real value is the people contributing and engaging! Social platforms have no intrinsic reason to exist without the rivers of content flowing through them.

You can see where I’m going with this. When influential people lend their hard-earned credibility to the junk-riddled toy of the world’s richest man, they are further empowering him with the one priceless thing his trillions in wealth can’t buy directly: more attention. Not that he needs it.

This aligns closely with my own personal view. I don’t want to give Elon Musk my time, energy, attention, and content because he doesn’t deserve those things. His values are antithetical to my own. Much like Trump, he revels in cruelty and arrogance, and no amount of flying cars can hide that. As Downey notes, we all have to make ethical compromises to get by in our capitalistic system, but further enriching Elon Musk even just a little bit — given my paltry X following, I’m under no illusions that it would be anything other than “a little bit” — is a pretty easy compromise to avoid.

And it’s even easier to avoid when you consider the current state of online publishing.

Building Our Own Platforms

The genius of social media platforms like X and Facebook is two-fold. First, they make it incredibly easy to publish online. You don’t need to know HTML or build your own website. You just sign up with your email address, and voila! You can start posting your thoughts online in a matter of minutes. Second, they make it easy to connect with your friends, family, and peers who are also on the platform, allowing you to share with them and see what they share.

However, all of that happens in walled gardens that X and Facebook control, and over time, it’s obvious that they’ve controlled them for their own profit and power. Which explains why you see more ads and recommendations on Facebook than real posts from the people you actually know and love.

There’s no doubt that social media platforms still make it easy to post online; they’ve spent untold millions trying to make that process as friction-less as possible. But as I’ve previously noted on several occasions, it’s easier than ever to create your own platform for sharing and publishing your content, if that’s something you truly care about. Thanks to services like Pagecord, Pika, Micro.blog, and yes, Substack, you don’t need to be a developer or programmer to create your own site for your own content, free from the confines of social media platforms and their algorithms.

Even as social media platforms have grown bigger and more powerful, I daresay they’ve become less necessary. If you’re concerned about the unchecked wealth and influence of people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, then perhaps the easiest path of resistance is to go independent, stake your own claim on the web, and build your own platform — a platform that’s under your control and doesn’t necessitate compromising your values.