It’s been nearly a year since Elon Musk bought and started ruining Twitter. Since then, I’ve been on Mastodon and Bluesky, and I’ve started watching a bunch of RSS feeds I relied on in the days before Twitter.

But it’s not the same as it had been. I’m not sure if that’s because people are dispersed across different platforms, or because people are tired of social media, or if people are just tired.

I remember being at PyCons in previous years where the Twitter commentary was energetic and prolific. At times, you could solve the problems of choosing a talk by being in one room, but watching the Twitter commentary about others at the same time. Hynek Schlawack talked about being drawn to conferences based on the excited tweets from attendees.

I was excited to give a keynote at PyCon this year, and I looked forward to checking afterwards to see what people took from it, what they quoted, what jokes landed well, and so on. When I looked, there was almost nothing.

I understand the problems with moving from one social medium to another. Some people just won’t bother. Mastodon is too nerdy. Bluesky is still invite-only. Threads is tainted with the Facebook brand.

Interestingly, 18 months before the Twitter mess, an eerily similar thing happened to the Freenode IRC network: Goodbye Freenode. A crazy “free speech” moron with too much money decided to buy the whole thing to “fix” it, and ended up driving everyone away. Although a clear alternative was quickly available (Libera IRC), a large number of people just didn’t make the switch.

Now it looks like the same thing is happening with the Twitter world. There are too many alternatives for where to go, and it’s confusing to choose. When you try a new place, it feels like a ghost town. It’s lonely being an early adopter on a new social platform.

My wife had the same experience: she tried to find communities on Mastodon or Bluesky that could replicate the experience she’s had on Twitter: they aren’t there. Yet? Hard to say.

I would like for something to take Twitter’s place, but I’m not sure anything will.