When Elon took over Twitter and it became clear he valued chaos over community, I abandoned my account. It was a hard choice because I’d come to rely on that steady stream of news, information and collaboration. Fortunately, my people moved to Mastodon, so I recovered (and Ivory made it practically seamless).

I’m not gonna lie: I hoped quite sincerely that Twitter/X would cease to exist. Or at the least, devolve into a marginal community similar to Truth Social, where just the wingnuts could own the libs inside their little bubble. And while there was a marked exodus, it suddenly ended. According to Statista, the monthly active users are down, but not that much. Clearly, momentum plays a role; you use a thing long enough, and it becomes a habit that’s tough to break! But I’m disappointed in the people that remain there. The man running that show is… very bad.

But people are one thing. Organizations are another. While Twitter was a useful public service back in the day, it’s now very much not. For example, posts on X are not truly public and accessible anymore. Post a thread, and a link to the first post will only show that one, unless you’re logged in.

So this post on Mastodon highlights the problem. When governments continue to use X to make public announcements, they are no longer reaching the public. And yet most government agencies continue to use the service as if it were broadcast radio or television. It just isn’t that anymore. It’s one dude’s Nazi-filled hangout room.

In a perfect world, governments would have their own Mastodon instances, and authenticated announcements, from, say the Canadian government, would come from an authoritative @mastodon.gc.ca server. This stuff is too important to trust to the commercial privacy-raiding industrial complex.

But even in this imperfect world, governments and organizations need to GTFO of X.

And everyone else should too. 👋