I feel very strongly about calling Elon Musk's social media platform "X" because I want to remind people that Twitter is gone -- it's dead. And we know who killed it. We need to acknowledge the power that one edgelord billionaire has over our public sphere, and remind ourselves that we cannot reclaim that space. We can't make it "ours" again by calling it Twitter. I'd rather build up new spaces online than chase after the memory of one that is lost.
@annaleen I can understand the meaning of losing Twitter for many people, who made their living by connecting there.
However, Twitter was as public as X is today, meaning it wasn't. It never was yours nor "ours". If it was actually public, it could not have been sold to Musk in the first place. The means of its past owners just aligned more with yours, by incident.
Bingo.
And it's important to keep this firmly in mind so we can learn the lesson and avoid repeating it in the future.
I mean, #twitter was fairly awful. It had a terrible interface, it was constrained, it promoted slogans and echo chambers over conversation... I think a lot of people remember it with sentimentality.
But to the point here, Twitter was never the public square, and folks who misunderstood ended up caught off guard when the private service provider acted like a private service provider.
Recognizing that reality helps avoid repeating the cycle.
If one wants a public square, then they need to push for a service that's actually public.
And better than Twitter, while we're at it.
