By Joe Rosensteel

December 22, 2022 3:18 PM PT

You don’t have to go home, but…

Someone bought the bar we were all hanging out in, and they started interrupting the music with edicts about bar rules, fired most of the staff, aren’t paying their bills, installed a velvet rope where VIPs can spit on the other bar patrons, had bouncers start to randomly remove people, and are bricking over the fire exits.

I’ll get my coat.

There are other bars, of course. There are communities on Discord or Slack, and microblogging services like Mastodon and micro.blog. People with big audiences might build their own Substack, or ask people to follow their Tumblr, or set up a blog via WordPress.

Or maybe just chill out and read a book? Imagine a main character who isn’t getting milkshake-ducked or bean-dad-ed into oblivion, for once.

Gather up your jackets, move it to the exits

One reason a lot of people have a hard time walking away from Twitter is because it’s where we’ve invested all our valuable time and resources crafting bespoke non sequiturs, and hewing reaction memes from the finest 12th generation copies of JPEGs.

Fortunately, the previous management at Twitter offered us all archives of our posts, and no one has removed, or broken it yet. Get that archive, if you haven’t already. That archive works locally, except all the URLs are t.co URLs, and those will stop working if you delete your Twitter account, but it has important things like media. It’s not easy to share anything from this archive, if you have something old you want to link to elsewhere.

One solution, from Darius Kazemi, is a lightweight static site generator that can be uploaded basically anywhere on the internet and work, his example is here. You don’t have to upload it at all, and it can just live on your hard drive. Like I just used it to find the time I uploaded an image of a shark from Jaws with the human-like teeth from the original Sonic: The Hedgehog trailer. Normal stuff I tweeted.

The whole thing runs in javascript in your browser and doesn’t upload your archive to any service, or require you to install node or python or anything. If you have a large archive, like I do, you’ll need to unzip it, move the media directory out, and re-zip it. Instructions are straight forward. The result works as expected, and you can modify the CSS however you see fit. Like I commented out the height restrictions in the CSS because that’s just how I wanted to see it.

This is also useful for preserving my very long Twitter thread of all the times the iOS Photos widget has put text over my boyfriend’s face. Now that important work can live forever anywhere I decide to host it.

I hope you have found a friend

A difficulty with moving to new services, that has basically stifled all newcomers in social media, is that there’s no easy way to coordinate where you’re moving to without losing people along the way. There’s too much friction and people give up, or even if they all move, they don’t see each other. There are solutions to that which require some data to be present in your Twitter profile to work out what other people also have that data and draw that connection elsewhere. You need to periodically check because someone might show up, but hopefully if they’re late to the party they’ll check and find you first.

One of the heavily recommended services for finding friends on Mastodon, movetodon.org by Tibor Martini, works pretty well for this. Of course, at any moment this app could break. (If, for example, Twitter crafted another sudden policy decision to kill links to other social media sites.)

Use this time to follow people to other sites they link to besides Mastodon instances. Mastodon isn’t a crowd pleaser—so don’t expect, or demand, that people try Mastodon just so you can mirror your relationship from Twitter to Mastodon.

Time for you to go out to the places you will be from

No matter where you go after Twitter, it’s important to not try and reproduce the same social patterns from Twitter. As tempting as it is to blame Elon Musk for everything, it’s not like Twitter was the optimum social experience beforehand. We’ve all been trained to take a photo, screenshot, or link and post it to dunk on. Certainly one of the difficult things to get used to with Mastodon is the design decision to not have quote tweets because of the bad behavior that they can, but don’t always, encourage.

If you’re logging into your Discords to throw in a link and ask “can you believe this?”, maybe you should also think about how you’ve got the space, and the social skills to talk about it with appropriate context and nuance. To treat the space you’re going into like it’s for conversation with people that also want to talk with you, and not just be outraged.

We should also all be conscious of moderation in all of these other social settings. Moderation was a nebulous thing that Twitter management hired contractors to do to other people, but in smaller social settings, it can be the thing your buddy has to say to you about your behavior. People of a certain age know something about that from Usenet, BBSes, and various web forums. We might all be so used to shouting in overcrowded spaces we’re not paying attention to how we talk in the smaller ones.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end

I met some great friends, acquaintances, and interesting people through Twitter. I’ll find more in other places too—we all will. No one owns that, even if they buy up and ruin the spot where it happened in the past.

[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]