Closing Time

We’re closing down. Not everything. But our Twitter presence will indeed be shutting down, effective … well, immediately. This post is going to be fairly brief right now, but I will be coming back later and writing down more thoughts on how we got to this point and why.

The short of it is that Twitter is no longer usable for our work. In the last week Elon, Twitter’s new and current owner, has been putting out new and capacious rules to assuage his bruised ego and tighten his grip on the platform. Last week he started with the banning of the ElonJet Twitter account, an account that used publicly available data to update the location of his personal jet. This was after previous claims that he would leave the account alone because he favored free speech.

Elon then went on to create a new anti-doxxing policy on the platform’s safety rules, something that I only heard about because of the firestorm on controversy. When looking at the rules, they seemed overly broad and were poised to damage any journalist who might report on breaking news, such as protests, political speeches or police activities. We made the public decision to not ‘break stories’ on Twitter in the meantime because of the concerns of this violating some rule. Leftist and LGBTQ+ creators are already at heightened risk of sanctions on sites like this, and that was not something I wanted to deal with.

Today, however, with no notice, Twitter expanded their rules, banning mentions of a number of other services, supposedly without paying for advertising.

However, our new host for the former RaindropWrksPDX Twitter seems to dispute that, with @[email protected] (I still have to learn how to embed Toots) stating “Nope We were ad-banned for prmoting [sic] newsie”. In addition to the services above listed as banned, the policy also bans use of popular link aggregate sites like Linktree, another service we’ve used heavily for years because of it being incredibly useful.

At the end of the day, Elon is scared, flailing, and I will do what I can to not let his fear destroy years of work on my end. Please see links at the top of the page for where to find me going forward.