@alexwild #BodySnatchers

@alexwild Good question. Because they are still there, they were never worth following in the first place. I don't miss them.

@alexwild
IDK, but I wish they'd stop bringing that shit here. I'm so tired of seeing "RT" in my feed.

@alexwild Sunk cost fallacy?

@alexwild Because there's still no real way to support a patreon etc. over here, and people make their living off those, and some of the people who do that are interesting.

@alexwild because I am teaching a course for which I'd like to do some outreach to academics and it's more efficient over there, given the follower difference/reach. For some reason, they unbanned me and it was right when I needed to push out those queries.

@alexwild Have some great online friends there which whom I've been in touch with for years. Want to stay in that circle or friends as well..

@alexwild
1. Network effects. I can’t leave because several people that I find important and who I’m casual friends with are there and not here, and not anywhere else, either. As long as part of my social network is there, it holds me there. This is not surprising—Apple wields this with its Messages app.
2. Specific content: the coverage of cycling events is much worse here. I follow pro cyclists on Twitter. There is more cycling commentary on Twitter. This is also true of game dev. (And because I know a lot of people involved in both, see #1 again.)
3. News and government services: most news orgs are still there. The BC wildfire service is there and not here. I can get official government info about COVID there and not here.
4. Corporations. I can tweet at my internet provider and find the status of their network. I can complain to UPS or whoever about a missed delivery of their customer service fails me. Sometimes that works better.
5. All of the above. Twitter is a dumpster fire that’s crumbling, but in the meantime, it’s still a very powerful network.

I really enjoy Mastodon; I spend much more time here than Twitter now. But let’s not pretend that Twitter doesn’t have any value or utility. I hope a lot of those important services move over here, at least. But if they don’t, I’ll probably (unfortunately) keep on foot in that system forever.

@alexwild Inertia paired with laziness, plus a tablespoon of situation blindness.

@alexwild Because this site has basically no members from Mali, or Niger, or even Algeria or Tunisia; no content in Kabyle or Songhay or Fulfulde (I have to work hard to even find toots in Arabic); because it makes it unreasonably hard to find anyone; because posting a linguistics question here feels like shouting into the void, while posting one in Twitter reliably gets well-informed replies from a variety of perspectives... There's a lot more to social media than ownership and infrastructure.

@alexwild People are still in Texas too.