This Hellsite was Home.

November 11, 2022

The apparent impending death of Twitter has me bummed.

From a business perspective, Twitter was important to Replicache because it was our main marketing vehicle. A viral thread converted to far more new users than any other single thing we have access to. If Twitter disappears tomorrow it's a problem for us, so please go follow aboodman on Mastodon now just in case!

From a personal perspective, Twitter had become the place that tech (at least my part of tech) took place at. It was home. Although the SV diaspora had long since scattered to the far corners of the earth, we kept in contact here, every day, on the interwebs. Our virtual minikitchen, where we shared news, gossip, snark, wins, and losses.

But of course, it wasn't the web. We knew that, because we had real websites once. Shit, we helped build the web. It's how we found each other.

Most of us had long since let those sites go to seed. Until a few hours ago, aaronboodman.com was dust. Some DNS misconfig something something. Anyway it's back now, but so old. It happened to all of us. It was just easier to snark a few short words than put a coherent thought together.

A long time ago I worked on Camlistore née Perkeep. It was built fearing this exact event. For whatever reason, Flickr was the motivating case we always talked about. Which — funny thing — Flickr of course soldiers on, unkillable. I never imagined it would be Twitter to wink out of existence. It seemed far too important.

But I think the lesson here is that things which are physically capable of happening will happen. Twitter was not built in such a way, technically or legally, to resist this outcome. So it happened.

It wasn't a good place to make our home. We knew, but we did it anyway.

Going forward, this will become a proper blog again. I'll try to invest more effort here and less elsewhere. I will try and make this a home again.

Of course, I'll still have to syndicate to both Twitter and Mastodon so you hear about updates 🙄. And because a blog is not the same as a conversation, I imagine replies will still happen out there. So please go follow aboodman on Mastodon now.

Apologies for the advertisement. A man's gotta eat.