John Gruber has been going on about how X remains the platform where all the interesting action still happens. That the worst of the rank muskiness has receded. That playing host to Barack’s thoughtful, sharp and eloquent essay is reason enough to reconsider the platform.
I was convinced. So I spent Saturday afternoon culling down my Following list with the help of DS V4.1 Flash in the OpenChamber browser. I took down all the “find me on mastodon” links on my profile. I waited 24 hours to download a full archive of my past life there (pre-2022), and as I write, tweetXer is wrestling with the rate limit in a background tab to wipe down my feed for that fresh new account feeling.
First impressions: the ads are annoying. But then I remembered that in 2026 everyone’s penny pinching on compute, storage, bandwidth to fund their token obsessions.
Next, the For you is a standard-issue dopamine-adrenaline inducer feed. Thankfully Following tab does exactly what it says, no more, no less. Even better, when I return to Home after clicking around, it remembers my preference for Following instead of defaulting to For you. How very mature.
Anyway, I’m giving this a shot, and I come across (ironically from the For you feed) Lex Friedman’s take on John’s optimism about X.
It gave me pause and reminded me that it’s not Jan 2022 anymore when I tweeted:
nor Jul 2017:
nor Nov 2007 when it was all still statuses, 140 characters apiece:
No, it’s way more complicated now. But I’ll be good and careful. Promise.