For a while, my corner of the internet seemed to fit into one room.
The journalist, the minister, the engineer, the troll and the person posting their lunch could all turn up in the same conversation. It was frequently irritating and occasionally useful in ways nobody had planned.
We disagreed about almost everything. At least we knew where the argument was happening.
Then people started leaving.
They did not all choose the same destination.
Four rooms
Some official and institutional accounts found their way to Mastodon. I understand the appeal of a decentralised space. In the corners I encounter, though, it can feel like a public noticeboard in a very respectable building. Everything is neatly displayed. I’m less certain how many people have come inside.
Bluesky feels like a reunion for people who had had enough of X and its owner. There is an echo of the old Twitter, before so much of the conversation became a conversation about Twitter itself. That familiarity is appealing. I do sometimes wonder how much of a new place’s identity can come from the place everyone left.
Threads keeps introducing itself to me. We are still getting acquainted. It seems considerably more enthusiastic about the relationship than I am.
And some of us stayed on X.
Call it habit, attachment or Stockholm syndrome. I’ve tried all three descriptions on myself.
Why I stayed
X provides plenty of reasons to complain. It also still contains many of the people I actually want to read.
That is the unglamorous explanation. Familiar voices, useful observations, conversations I would otherwise miss.
The tech CEOs I follow still appear in my X feed. I seem to hear from some of them there more often than on LinkedIn these days. LinkedIn deserves its own article, and it will get one.
There is a geographical pattern in my circles, too. Many of the Americans I know from my content creator days stayed. Several of the Europeans I know left on principle.
My contact list hardly counts as a representative sample. Still, the difference is noticeable. The same platform can become a moral boundary for one person and remain an ordinary part of the day for another.
I understand the reasons people left. For me, enough of the conversation remained to keep opening the app.
The sanity check
Some days I scroll through X and wonder what on earth everyone is thinking.
Then I look through my own posts and remember that I also contribute to the atmosphere.
I’ve been fairly open about that. What I post is a mixture of observations, questions, jokes, unfinished thoughts and nonsense. Sense and nonsense, in proportions I prefer not to audit too closely.
That mixture is part of the appeal.
X still feels like a crowded square with an unpredictable sound system. Everyone is standing slightly too close together, and someone else controls the volume.
I bring a pinch of salt.
What the split costs
What concerns me about the fragmentation is the loss of a shared audience.
An institution can publish an announcement in one room while the people affected are talking in another. Critics can settle an argument among people who already agree, while the people they are criticising never encounter it.
Elsewhere, the conversation continues as though that exchange never happened.
Each room develops its own sense of what “everyone” is discussing. Gradually, even the shared references become less shared: which announcement people saw, which criticism received an answer, and what the argument was about in the first place.
There are good reasons to seek a calmer space. Leaving somewhere hostile or exhausting can make daily life better.
But a more comfortable room can also mean fewer unexpected encounters. Less friction, perhaps, but less contact with people who would challenge the assumptions everyone inside now shares.
Staying on X gives me no exemption from that. My feed has its own blind spots.
The wider problem is that we increasingly have separate conversations about what we imagine is the same conversation.
Learning to live in several rooms
I doubt the old square will neatly reassemble.
My guess is that we will get used to keeping several addresses: official information in one place, professional conversation in another, arguments somewhere else, and nonsense wherever we feel most at home.
That makes the passages between rooms matter.
A link carried across. Enough context to understand why people elsewhere are upset. The occasional willingness to read someone we did not move with.
Perhaps the useful question is how to keep those doors open.
For now, X is still the room I return to.
Pinch of salt included.