Broken chains

“I don’t miss Twitter but I do miss many of the people who are still on there” wrote Christina Pagel on Bluesky this morning. Christina is exactly one of the people that I am very happy that Twitter brought into my wider quasi-professional network. Someone sharp, thoughtful, helpful, and also someone I have never met – but I am very happy to have encountered online.

And that post was especially poignant today, for I am doing some cleaning up of my online presence (prior to launching something new in January – more about that soon). That cleanup has involved running a link checker across all of the posts on this blog, and as this blog has been going more than 20 years and 2000 posts that’s a lot of links, and quite a lot of broken links I have sought to repair.

More than 400 broken direct links I have just reviewed were to Twitter – to posts and to accounts. Thankfully the Internet Archive had most of it, so links from this blog point there now, but looking down the list was tinged with sadness. The people I used to have some connection with online, and the demise of Twitter led to the demise of that connection as well. Where are these people now I wonder, the ones I have not managed to re-discovered elsewhere? Some of these tweets exchanged with these people were semi significant – we dug up political scandals, diagnosed every twist and turn of Brexit in real time, helped each other both professionally and personally.

Don’t get me wrong: I have moved on, I have learned, I know there is no return to that. There are new connections on Mastodon and Bluesky. I’m using messenger groups more than I used to. And in retrospect building crucial digital infrastructure in a private walled garden was a bad call.

But conversely – as Christina alludes to in her post – the use of the rotten X is persistent. People stay. They are using the internet without the agency to do something different. And institutions from academic institutes to railway companies stick around on X even while it becomes more hazardous to their reputations and less useful for users.

So what do we do about this?

If you can, preserve these digital connections – I have no idea what on this blog will be useful when, but I will keep it all in its entirety just in case something here is useful to someone sometime. And if something online that matters to you isn’t there already put it in the Internet Archive. And on social networks treasure those connections that do matter, and try to help others make the move away from X and Meta owned platforms. Thin gruel perhaps, but that’s all we really have within our control.