And a tellingly unintelligent comparison; Twitter (for all it’s many flaws and issues) was much more like an unending (or intended to be) tapestry than it was like a person, and you can’t rape a tapestry even you can do your best to destroy it. To make such a comparison is at best an admittance of the writer’s desires.

Instead every user was a weaver, even if simply observing the action of warp and weft from the sidelines. That it outgrew the ability of the weavers running the loom to keep if from fraying apart was obvious to some, but easily ignored by most in how entrancing the nearly-magical way different threads knitted together to create not just portraits of the users, but landscapes of whole communities, triptychs of current events, and so on.

Then some troll who fancied himself a brilliant smith became not just entranced with tapestry as so many others had, but addicted to the power it made him, just as many others had. So he took his army of weak automatons, brain-washed cultists, treasure-hoarding dragons, and sung the battlehymns of the Troll-in-Chief (which sound a bit like Tucker Carlson’s worst gastric distress).

And having often tried to become weavers in the past despite being frustrated by their inability to grasp that the point was to weave instead of rend, that army declared triumph and began to ‘weave’ in earnest, never having learned from their previous failures at such a seemingly-simple task. And so those trolls sit in burned and torn strands, thinking themselves won.

While the weavers have certainly not been idle, instead increasing creating new tapestries after having learnt so much from this one. This may be a battle the weavers lost, but in our exodus a diasporic diversity of approaches has arisen while our former tormentors are trapped in their own pyrrhic ‘victory’ in an increasingly flame-ridden dumpster fire that was once intended to be something more.

In my years on Twitter, I learned so much; I also learned that the ‘value’ in social media is created by me, whether I’m creating content or consuming it. That means I have the power and not the trolls who are busy masturbating to the most useless scraps of what the weavers of words left behind and thinking it’s… something. Often a violent and disgusting power fantasy like turdop’s above, because at heart the trolls are all incels.

And from the scraps we brought with us elsewhere to establish new tapestries, we’re already making beauty and creating more than Twitter really allowed for. Personally I’ve decided that blogging suffers from the same issue of often being linked to some kind of feed like Facebook and Twitter (and Mastodon, I guess), as well as generally being too short-form; this is a personal preference since I prefer to reading to podcasts and videos, and I prefer books to magazines.

However as a writer (aka a weaver of words), I also know some of my intended audience only reads bite-size chapters of serialization typical in modern webnovels as much as other readers in my intended audience may prefer to hold a book made of dead trees in their hands like I do. Blogging might sometimes be able to meet the former need, but Twitter never could. And instead of blogs, there are dedicated webnovel apps where writers can publish. Instead of writing a novel’s worth of tweets just to try to engage people, I can spend my time writing actual novels and planning a serialized publishing strategy.

I was giving away free labor to Twitter and getting nothing in return, now I’ve finally found a way to take the typing practice I got there and put it to good use weaving my own tapestries. And the trolls won nothing by my leaving Twitter, because nothing they do is winning. It’s just losing increasingly loudly, while everyone else goes back to actually getting things done.