Twitter, the largest bar in the world, has not closed.
The new owner has fired maintenance, security and cleaning.
Regulars are already waiting for the moment when sparks start flying from overhead lamps, people start slipping in their own sweat, and the thugs kicked out hours earlier by the doormen start beating up customers again.
This hasn't happened yet.
Some say it will never happen.
If Twitter doesn't shut down now, it will never shut down.
We will die here.
No exit.
— mother of suckers (@jonviene) November 19, 2022
But the parishioners are concerned and have begun to look for alternatives.
In recent days, a small Indian messaging app called Koo (which, in English, is another onomatopoeia for the sound of a bird, like a tweet) has received literally millions of visits from curious Brazilians, willing to download the app despite the fact that ( or, rather, precisely because) the name of the program in its English pronunciation is a vulgar play on words in Portuguese.
The company did not miss a beat and on Monday launched its version in Portuguese.
Others make a waiting list for applications that promise to be what Twitter is and better: new bars, with bright eyes of illusion, that see with glee the decline of the competitor that until now made its arrival impractical.
And there are those who have seen the sign from heaven to abandon social networks once and for all and dedicate themselves to yoga, growing spinach or reading books, which is always great exercise.
But for those who, according to their calculations, have written the equivalent of
Quixote
and a half just in tweets, doing anything else is not a viable option.
Note: at some point in the crazy day yesterday, I exceeded 50,000 tweets on this social network.
If we calculate a relatively conservative figure of 100 characters per tweet, that's five million characters.
'Don Quixote' has just over two million.
This is my work.
– Thiago Ferrer Morini (@tferrerm) July 6, 2022
That is why there is Mastodon, which is seen as a messy and incomprehensible thing only for experts, as my colleague Jaime Rubio already explained here.
But it's not that hard to understand.
For those who, like yours truly, have spent years in the associative life of their university, Mastodon is the closest thing to the hallway of the college offices.
An infinite corridor, with many doors.
Some, wide open, with smiling people at the door, pleased that things have finally picked up;
others, closed tightly and singing, heartbroken that the masses have found their corner in the world.
The first thing to understand about Mastodon is—what has generated the biggest debates since I've been in it—that it's not an open space.
There are instances (the equivalent of offices) that want to hear as many voices as possible;
Others just want to hear the voices that matter to them talking about the issues that matter to them.
And that's not bad: there are people who are not looking for a conversation, but a refuge.
They're the ones that got hold of Mastodon in the first place;
for them, this moment is the moment that a fourth-century Hispano-Roman lived, looking up at the hill and seeing all those people on horseback.
But, above all, you have to understand that you are not a client.
Those who make the system work do so, for the most part, for the love of art.
When there is a problem, it is not an algorithm that is behind it, it is not a company;
is a person.
People who were not willing to drop a euro to Elon Musk are delighted to put money to set up a server or add a little more power to their instance.
Anyone who has been in an association of any kind knows that they are places where eternal friendships can develop (fortunately, that was my case) and invincible hatred.
It is an environment where people love each other, hate each other, leave, return;
where power struggles usually break out, even if symbolic, and in some cases tyrants are erected and dissidences are created that you laugh at
The Life of Brian
.
It can scare the layman.
I would not be anywhere else.
