Genre Grapevine Guide to Twitter’s Last Days
(Including Steps to Take and Alternative Platforms to Consider)
This column was originally published on my Patreon. I'll be updating the original Patreon post with information on alternates to Twitter as more details on these platforms become available.
Last week people began posting their goodbyes on Twitter. This followed reports that Twitter employees are predicting the platform will be dead within a week, while others reported Twitter office buildings are closed and employees are leaving in droves. Nitasha Tiku, the tech culture writer for The Washington Post, reports that “I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers.”
I’ve previously covered what Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter meant for the science fiction and fantasy genre, along with giving an updated report in my last regular Genre Grapevine column.
But let’s be honest — Twitter appears to be unraveling far faster than nearly anyone imagined was possible. Even if Twitter survives, it appears at a minimum that content moderation will be heavily impacted due to Musk terminating so many of the contractors who handled that. In addition, there are now serious concerns being raised about security of personal information and account access on Twitter.
And there’s also the disaster that was Musk’s changes to Twitter’s Blue Check verification system, which allowed people including large numbers of racists and extremists to easily get verified and to impersonate others. For example, one of the trolls who has criminally stalked and harassed Patrick S. Tomlinson was able to create a Blue Check account impersonating him. That fake account is still live.
And all that’s before we even discuss how Twitter going down would remove a major platform for authors, editors, fans and others around the world to connect over a shared love of science fiction and fantasy. Yes, there has always been a lot of negativity, harassment, and hurt on Twitter. But there was also so much good.
That goodness is what people fear losing.
For example, right now authors across the SF/F genre are posting award eligibility threads, highlighting the works that they hope people will consider for the various awards. Among the eligibility posts I saw just this morning included ones from Maurice Broaddus, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Adriana C. Grigore, Maria Haskins and Pedro Iniguez. As Zig Zag Claybourne said, “A sweet side benefit of all the award eligibility posts going around is having ready lists of cool stuff you might have missed, and the leisure to now seek them out.”
If Twitter goes down these posts will lack easy discoverability. That will hit new writers particularly hard.
And Twitter is also how many of the new SF/F magazines and publishers that are changing the genre have connected with readers and also supported their fundraising. I disagree with Neil Clarke’s recent thread arguing that Twitter’s possible end wouldn’t harm SF/F magazines, where he said “The short fiction boom was not caused by Twitter. If Twitter collapses, short fiction will not die.”
Yes, Clarke is correct when he said “Value your community. Fight to keep connected with it. … Don't give a single company the power to take you out.” But as the publisher of an elite magazine in the SF/F genre, Clarke is also far more insulated than many are from the possible death of Twitter.
For example Aleksandra Hill, the founder and editor of the Ignyte Award winning khōréō magazine, responded to Clarke’s thread by saying “The magazines that are worried are overwhelmingly those focused on marginalized communities. Their existence is a fight every day against the structures that do not respect their stories or perspectives.”
And as S. Qiouyi Lu said in a powerful thread, “I feel pissed off bc a lot of disabled people, myself included, really only have twitter as a means to be in public, and people completely forgetting about us has the same vibes as neglecting disabled people during a natural disaster, we are not included in evacuation efforts.”
Perhaps Ryan Broderick summed it up best: “Let's speak it plainly: We are watching a wealthy man haphazardly strip-mine an app built and popularized by people of color and activists and relied on in the Global South as the last public social app that can still deliver news and information in 2G.”
Preparing for Twitter’s Implosion
So what can you do to prepare for Twitter possibly shutting down or imploding? Here are some suggestions I’ve compiled based on discussions seen across the SF/F genre.
1) Don’t delete your Twitter account
If you delete your account someone else can easily scoop up your Twitter handle. That means other places that currently link to your Twitter account may instead point toward a troll or even worse. As Peter Bowden said, as an alternative to deletion “Tweet you're leaving with links to where to join you. Hold your username. If you want, mark the account as private.” You can also simply add “(hiatus)” to your username. A big benefit to this is if Musk and Twitter get their shit together you still have access to your account.
2) Consider removing personal and connected info from your Twitter settings
It’s possible Twitter will experience major security access issues in the coming days since so many of the people who knew how to program and secure the platform have left. To keep my cell number from being compromised, I replaced it in Twitter settings with a Google Voice phone number. Note that Twitter had some issues a few days ago with two-factor authentication, so don't remove a phone number completely. Also consider adding a 2FA app to your account.
In addition, if you have your Twitter account connected to other accounts (especially if it’s a financial app) you should consider going into settings under “connected accounts” and ending that.
3) Post a “where to find you” tweet
People across Twitter are posting tweets detailing where to find them. Here’s my “where to find me” tweet, which is typical of the format people are using. Pin the tweet to the top of your Twitter account so people can easily find it.
4) Download your Twitter archive
If you want a permanent archive of your tweets and messages, download your archive by going to your settings as Diabolical Plots did. Be aware the process takes more than 24 hours. I’ve also heard reports of it taking much longer in recent days, so do this sooner rather than later.
5) Screen the crap from your Twitter feed
As K. Tempest Bradford said, all these changes at Twitter means “waves of disgusting crap” are about to be unleashed on the platform. So if you’re planning to stay active on Twitter learn some simple ways to keep your feed relatively crap-free. Bradford has a must-read thread on doing this.
S. Qiouyi Lu has also released a Twitter Nest toolkit that allows people to tweet from WordPress, automatically back up new tweets, and import your tweet archive. The toolkit info is here along with a direct link here in case Twitter goes down. Lu noted that automatic archiving requires a developer account that takes a few days to a week to approve, so people should sign up ASAP if they have any plan to use that. And if you have to archive more than 3,200 tweets you’ll have to download your Twitter archive, which also takes at least 24 hours.
6) Be aware that Musk may enable Twitter’s worst
If you stay active on Twitter, know that despite Musk’s frequent praise of free speech, he does not tolerate criticism of himself. I started tracking recent instances of Twitter censoring or blocking criticism of Musk in this thread. This includes cases where Twitter blocked or shut down people such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kathy Griffin, and even the SF/F genre’s own Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, all of whom criticized Musk. Combine this tendency of Musk’s with Twitter possibly turning into a cesspool of haters and Musk fanbois and yeah, all I can say is be prepared.
7) Don’t put your eggs in one social media basket
Below I cover some of the popular social media alternatives to Twitter. But so far there’s no main alternative that appears likely to replace Twitter. So it’s wise to open and maintain accounts across multiple platforms until we see which way all this goes.
Twitter Alternatives
To be honest, there are no perfect replacements for Twitter. Amber Sparks started an interesting thread asking writers “how they will *widely* share new work if Twitter collapses?” While the thread is worth a read, there was no clear consensus on where to go.
Despite this, here are some of the current popular alternatives to Twitter.
Mastodon is a decentralized social media platform, which means that there’s not one server or community you can join but instead a large number. Mastodon has also emerged as perhaps the leading platform for members of the SF/F community looking for a Twitter alternative.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein has a good thread about understanding the pros and cons of Mastodon along with an in-depth essay about everything she knows regarding the social media platform. Both are must-reads before you join Mastodon.
You'll also see the word “fediverse” a lot on Mastodon. As Lisbeth Campbell said, “Mastodon is ‘federated’ servers, not one unique platform,” hence the use of fediverse to designate all the different servers focused on different communities. The different individual servers are also called instances.
The fediverse a lot of SF/F authors are joining is Wandering.Shop. That’s also where I set up my account. Because Wandering.Shop has become so popular, they are currently limiting invitations to join. But invites should open again soon. And you can always join a different server and follow and interact with people on different servers. The main Mastodon server page has a list of all these different fediverse and how to join them.
If you open a Mastodon account, be sure to use FediFinder to scan the people you follow on Twitter and locate those that are also on Mastodon. (Update: There's now a more advanced version of FediFinder available.) You can then export that list to CSV and import it into Mastodon, where the platform will automatically follow those people. FediFinder even shares the link on Mastodon where you need to go to upload the files.
I did this with the people I follow on Twitter and it worked really well. I also recommend using FediFinder because Mastodon does not make it overly easy to follow people on other fediverse servers. Basically, you have to cut and paste a link into the Mastodon search engine of your server, which then opens a new profile where you click a different blue follow button. FediFinder nicely sidesteps all this hassle.
Despite the excitement that people have about Mastodon, understand that the number of overall users pales in comparison to Twitter. Discoverability across different fediverses is also more difficult than on Twitter. Finally, people tend to have far fewer followers on Mastodon. For example, Neil Gaiman currently has 3 million followers on Twitter but only has 83,000 on Mastodon. John Scalzi has 200,000 Twitter followers but only 8,200 on Mastodon.
Tribel Social bills itself as an “innovative pro-democracy Twitter alternative that’s free of hatred and fake news.” According to Variety, “Tribel prides itself on news feed customization, if you’re looking to avoid a doom-scrolling spiral. Users are also able to select a target audience for posts to maximize engagement, find topic experts quickly and get the opportunity to become a ‘star contributor’ based on the quality of posts and number of likes. Plus, it claims to be ‘bigotry-free,’ according to the app’s Instagram.”
I can't speak personally about the platform but plan to try it in the coming days.
Again, I haven’t tried this platform yet but I’ve heard good things about it. According to Variety, Cohost is a “desktop-only website. With an interface that seems to be a cross between Tumblr and Twitter, the platform wants to serve users first and plans to do so by not having an algorithm or any ads.”
Hive is also gaining popularity with people, with Saladin Ahmed saying this app appears to have the most momentum with comic folks while Erin Entrada Kelly is saying it's popular with bookfolk. It's simple to create a Hive account and the platform has a nice interface, although it's irritating you can't log in through a browser. And the app has some bugs and crashes often (although I hope those issues can be fixed soon). And it appears multiple people on Hive can have the same handle. I created an account but am waiting to see if the platform can fix these issues before I start using Hive on a regular basis.
Other Platforms
There are other soon-to-launch social media platforms trying to offer alternatives to Twitter including:
Project Mushroom, which has a waiting list for access you can sign up for. Project Mushroom also just launched a Kickstarter.
Bluesky Social. Still in development but sign ups being accepted for the beta.
In addition, people in the SF/F genre are also exploring Discords, Instagram, Tumblr, TikTok, and personal newsletters as ways to interact with each other. I explored some of these options in my previous column about the troubles at Twitter.