If the blue bird falls off the perch

I will be more than disappointed. It will also mean finding another way to communicate with two groups of people - a group with which I still work and a group I have grown to know and like.

Yes, I am talking about Twitter. I know people tend to love Twitter, hate Twitter or tolerate Twitter. 

I was introduced to Twitter by my friend V... discovering it and mentioning it. I prowled over and looked at it...mmm...maybe or maybe not. I left it for a bit and then someone else mentioned it. We put our heads together and came up with a solution to a problem. We could use Twitter to communicate quickly and easily with everyone. That "DM" (direct message) function was just what we needed. 

We have used the DM function to ask for help, to give help, to make decisions, send out urgent information and more. It has saved time and money. I would go as far as to say it has also saved lives.  Twitter could be accessed in some completely unexpected places. I wonder if Elon Musk has any idea how often Twitter has been used by aid workers? We don't want Twitter to fail.

Then there are the other people/organisations/media outlets I "follow" on Twitter.  Some days I barely have time to look, on others I can put a paw around the door and look in for a few minutes on several occasions. If there is an incident I can be informed almost immediately. I can follow up opinion pieces or find my way to government documents.

It has therefore been alarming to see what Mr Musk has done to Twitter but it has been even more alarming to see what others have done to Twitter. Twitter was not perfect but it will be less perfect if people simply leave. If you didn't like what was happening there you could block people or mute people. You didn't need to listen in . You could starve the haters, the racists, the bigots and more - starve them of oxygen. 

Leaving Twitter was not the answer. I have set up a Mastodon account in case Twitter fails completely but Mastodon is not the answer any more than Reddit or Linked In or Facebook or Instagram or Pinterist is. I don't yet understand how Mastodon works. It certainly does not have the simplicity of Twitter and it won't have the accessibility.

If you have a Twitter account perhaps you might reconsider what will happen to other users. It might sound like a perverted sort of "fun" to see the world's richest man lose his title and billions with it...but Twitter should not be about him. Twitter should be about those of us who use it to help others - some of those aid workers risking their lives need your help.