During the exodus, I lost about 150 Twitter followers (from 9700, where it has been for a decade, to 9550) and went up to about 800 followers on Mastodon. They're probably the people who actually saw anything I posted on Twitter; to the rest I'm a ghost. So they wouldn't notice that I'm gone. That's how the system is designed; you don't notice people have left because you weren't ever seeing them in the first place. "Social media feeds are designed to mislead us about the average opinions and behaviors of the people in our lives." Twitter looks full because the algorithm feeds us a steady diet of promoted tweets, and a few tweets from our friends. Dan Gillmor, meanwhile, says that journalists and others should leave Twitter immediately; the risks of staying are too great, risks that are "endemic to the mega-corporate, scalable-or-nothing, highly centralized version of the Internet that has emerged in recent years."
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