You don’t have to go home, but…

Someone bought the bar we were all hanging out in, and they started interrupting the music with edicts about bar rules, fired most of the staff, aren’t paying their bills, installed a velvet rope where VIPs can spit on the other bar patrons, had bouncers start to randomly remove people, and are bricking over the fire exits.

I’ll get my coat.

There are other bars, of course. There are communities on Discord or Slack, and microblogging services like Mastodon and micro.blog. People with big audiences might build their own Substack, or ask people to follow their Tumblr, or set up a blog via WordPress.

Or maybe just chill out and read a book? Imagine a main character who isn’t getting milkshake-ducked or bean-dad-ed into oblivion, for once.

Gather up your jackets, move it to the exits

One reason a lot of people have a hard time walking away from Twitter is because it’s where we’ve invested all our valuable time and resources crafting bespoke non sequiturs, and hewing reaction memes from the finest 12th generation copies of JPEGs.…