The Search for a Twitter Replacement
Plus a few recommendations and some recent things I’ve written
The search for a Twitter replacement has led me to two conclusions. One, there won’t be a 1:1 replacement. Notes is cool, but it’s locked to a certain ecosystem of writers. This builds in benefits and limits. Cohost is halfway between Twitter and Tumblr but doesn’t have a phone app so I always forget it exists. Mastodon is complicated and decentralized – some people are into it; I have an account I don’t use. Bluesky is made by Jack Dorsey and will probably encourage the generation of an ecosystem by trickling-out invites to popular Twitter people, but it’s also got weird stuff going on with its terms and conditions, and is also nominally decentralized. I just uninstalled something from my phone earlier called “ibble.” No idea what it was; pretty sure I never set up an account. I like Counter Social’s logo but I’m not sure I ever set up one of those either. If Bluesky does indeed stay around, y’all absolutely must change the name of individual microblog posts from “skeets” to something else.
This in turn leads to the second conclusion – the replacement is a combination of services as we transition to a new world in the digital space. There’s a lot more to be said about that, good and bad; my key recommendations for news on the digital space are Garbage Day and Max Read. I have other newsletter recommendations, but I’ll stop for now to say that Substack has been a big part of replacing Twitter for me as far as just the basics of reading and writing thoughts on movies, games new and classic, TV, sports, news, writing and publishing, even if I’m not real tuned-in to Notes. Discord is the other big one – replacing the search for community in a prospective online public square with existing online communities; the evolved, perhaps more flexible, form of the forum board. At some point soon I’ll do podcast recommendations – many of those shows also cultivate Discord communities; places for the fans to get together and talk about their shared interests. And then, as a direct consequence of Discord (shout out to No Escape, one of my favorite game blogs putting me on to a bunch of other cool games blogs) I’ve got Feedly – that’s right, in the year of Muad’Dib 2023, I’ve started using an RSS reader to group website links.
I don’t want to go long on this; I’ve got some other things on the docket (most anticipated movies and games for the rest of the year, something to do with podcasts, an incomplete news aggregate/commentary piece I started months ago) but ostensibly this newsletter exists as a vehicle for me to share my critical writing. So, here are some recent things I’ve written:
You can find some film impressions by me on Letterboxd (I follow back because I love reading what other people write about what they watch; I don’t use GoodReads, but I like this) and my most recent work is at Paste and Vague Visages:
Nostalgia and Corporate Identity in Air at Paste Magazine
Beau is Afraid Review at Vague Visages
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 at Vague Visages
One last thing, in case I never find the words to run long on this in a coherent fashion: the writers deserve everything they’re asking for in the strike. Labor is entitled to all the wealth it creates, for one thing. But even beyond that, they’re asking for very moderate concessions as the corporations that own film and television rake in obscene profits that they don’t want to share with the people that make it possible.
Peace and solidarity, good people. Be in touch.