Update—the TL;dr version I posted to Twitter this morning: The elephant has many more posts about serious “must read” articles and far too few pictures of cute dogs and baby otters, so we obviously need both. It’s more like church, where this place is like a county fair midway.

As all the world knows, Elon Musk has taken over Twitter and is doing his level best to do what Scipio Africanus allegedly did to Carthage in 146 B.C.E.: lay waste to the place and sow salt on the grounds so nothing would grow there again. Elon might have his way, after exiting about 80 % of Twitter employees, but for now it limps along despite his attempts to destroy it.

A lot of influential Twitter people said they’d leave if Musk took over, with some confessing their secrets and favorite tweets, but I’m taking more of the view of Michael Bolton in Office Space, who’s exasperated when everyone asks him about having the same name:

Samir: Hmm… well, why don’t you just go by Mike instead of Michael?

Michael Bolton: No way! Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.

So, since I’m not going to leave right now, some thoughts:

Have I noticed changes? Yes and no.

Yes, I get a lot more promoted links for causes and political views that nothing on my timeline has invited Twitter’s algorithm to promote. Delete, block, and move on.

No, because so far my tiny corner of Twitter–mostly academics in the humanities–and my even tinier place in it is too insignificant to rate any kind of attention.

The real point is that I’ve learned so much from Twitter that I’m loath to give it up–information that I didn’t know I needed, from other disciplines that usually we don’t get to interact with in such an informal way. We can follow research libraries–who knew that #ArchivesSparkle and #ArchivesHashtagParty was a thing? And let’s not forget WeRateDogs and other fun accounts.

Now for the elephant: Mastodon, which Wikipedia defines as a “free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services. It has microblogging features similar to the Twitter service.” It seems to be a series of connected servers where you can sign up for an account if they’re not full yet. I’m at https://hcommons.social/web/@Dmcampbellwsu but can see the posts from other servers by switching from the local to the global tab.

Is there a difference? So far, yes–I’m following people as I find them, but it’s not always easy. The posts I’m seeing tend to be more–serious?–but maybe that’s just because everyone is getting used to it. This place so far has a different voice, but I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with it.