A simple but painful truth rarely acknowledged is that I do not have a voice. My Twitter following is small. Celtic Riverside has a very limited readership. Even in my personal and professional lives, much of what I say falls on deaf ears. It’s such a true statement that my youngest brother treats it as an in-joke with me. I will say something, he will repeat it moments later, and everyone responds to him.
Why, just the other night he joked, “We need to spend time around the family together more so they think I’m smart again. I haven’t been around to take the ideas no one heard you say in a while.”
I often feel invisible and don’t know much how to proceed. See, I also have social anxiety and the idea of chasing people down is unappealing. My philosophy was always to be kind and be authentic, and relationships will form from mutual respect.
Some do. In fact, many of the best people I know are Twitter friends. It brought me close to people I otherwise would not have met and built digital friendships that mean as much to me as any. What limited readership I have mostly comes from sharing these posts to Twitter.
Now, in a world that often leaves me reeling anyway, a billionaire megalomaniac threatens the stability of that entire platform. With the max exodus of engineers, fears abound that the service will slowly falter to the point of a fatal crash, at which point what happens?
I don’t post photos or videos much. Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube make zero sense. Mastodon and Counter Social don’t seem quite ready. I still protest Facebook because I trust Zuckerberg about as much as Musk. Discord and Reddit felt off for my needs, too. No, if Twitter dies then my social media presence dies with it.
The second greatest thing Twitter gave me was a place to share these thoughts. Without a mechanism to get eyes on these writings, I might as well write them privately. If Twitter crashes, my readership drops to almost no one, and why maintain a domain to post unread thoughts?
It would not surprise me that Elon doesn’t know/doesn’t care what the service provided to many users, but the journey has meant something to me. I hope to find effective ways to maintain those relationships if Twitter fails, but who knows?
What I do know is that should Twitter go offline permanently, it will take Celtic Riverside with it.
Celtic Riverside 