The Bull City Foodraiser is still going!! I am matching!! Seriously, if you can give, even the smallest amount – it will help. If you’re lucky enough that you’ve never experienced food insecurity (I am one of those lucky ones) – please, help other families avoid it. I can only imagine how terrifying it must be to not know how you’re going to feed your kids. Many of these families are in reduced/free breakfast & lunch programs and when winter break rolls around – well, the kids don’t stop needing to eat just because the school is closed.

I hope you enjoyed that extra hour of sleep last night, lord knows I did. I went to a going away thing last night (and only because I truly adore the person leaving town) – it was in the loudest fucking venue I’ve ever been in, it was supposed to start at 8, we got there at 8:15, and the guest of honor was an hour late. I did get to see a few people I haven’t seen in forever, but still, so. fucking. loud. and. unenjoyable. Yes, I am officially OLD.

So, while Twitter may or may not be dying and completely non-functional soon, I’ve been looking around at the various and sundry social media sites. None are truly Twitter, tho.

Tumblr: Still delightfully weird and the land of gifs
Instagram: I miss when it was just all pictures, but it’s not terrible.
DreamWidth: Came out of the Russians buying LiveJournal, basically long form blogging with filtering on who can see your stuff.
Mastodon: Layout very similar to Twitter, but a lot of folks seem to be having problems with it – I didn’t have any issues – pick a server and go, but your mileage may vary. Mastodon.social seems to be having some understandable growing pains – bit slow, some image loading wonkiness, but overall, I do like it.
CounterSocial: Another that is similar to Twitter. Web version is VERY busy tho, and can be offputting. (You can unpin columns to calm things down, but when you first open that page, it’s kind of overwhelming.) Also dealing with DDOS issues. I do like the “Community Firehose” tab where you can just see everything.
Tribel: Big nope, it’s run by the Occupy Democrats folks, the TOS is garbage, and honestly, it just looks like Facebook and you register by name, not a handle.
Cohost: Looked promising, a bit of a cross between LiveJournal/DreamWidth and Tumblr. But the fantastic Rahaeli on Twitter did a HUGE breakdown on the TOS and the fact that it’s so poorly written that basically by using the site, you’re breaking the TOS.
Discord: I’m on a couple servers there, and I like it – but it’s not at all like Twitter, you can’t see everything in one feed. (Or if you can, I haven’t figured it out yet.)

I’m a pretty heavy Twitter user, and honestly – there is nothing really like it out there right now. And it’s sad to watch it fall apart in real time, all because of one egomaniac who doesn’t know what he’s doing and wants to be the “cool kid” with the right wingers. I hope he personally goes bankrupt from this and regrets the purchase every day for the rest of his life.

I’m also not mad at anyone who keeps or decides to get Twitter Blue. It’s got a few nice features, and for some folks, they need to have the algorithm on their side for work and identity protection and whatnot. I won’t be messing with it cause I have no need for it, but I’m not going to begrudge anyone who does need it.

If Twitter fully goes under, I genuinely don’t know where I’m gonna land. I’ll still be right here for sure – this little blog has saved my sanity over the course of the pandemic. But it’s very uni-directional, and Twitter was great for a lot of interactive communications.

Time will tell, I suppose.