The Twitter "Stay or Go" Debate

I talked with LOLGOP before Elon Musk banned those journalists and made Mastodon even more appealing

L O L G O P @LOLGOP

Elon Musk wants neo-Nazis on Twitter and us off. That's the only thing that makes staying fun.

Earlier this week (on Tuesday December 13, to be precise), before the Nazi-welcoming “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk actually started banning journalists from Twitter, I checked in with the man behind one of the accounts I have most admired since I first began wasting time on Twitter in 2010: Jason Sattler aka @LOLGOP on Twitter and Mastodon.

Although I’ve interviewed him twice by email (here and here) for this newsletter, it was our first actual phone conversation.

We ended up talking for about 75 minutes and while I haven’t finished transcribing and digesting everything we said, I thought I would rush out some of the conversation in light of the latest Musk outrages on Twitter (i.e. banning journalists and seemingly killing Twitter Spaces after getting embarrassed by people smarter than him).

Although we were mainly discussing our @LOLGOP and @TheDailyEdge accounts, I’ll identify us as Jason and Richard in the exchange below.

The basic question I wanted to ask was:

We stayed on Twitter to fight Trump. Should we stay on Twitter to fight Musk?

Richard: Things are worse, faster than I feared they would be, so I thought we could have a conversation and try to figure out what to do.

Jason: Works for me.

Richard: OK, let’s start with what you think of Elon Musk’s Twitter so far.

Jason: The platform isn’t as bad as I feared it would be, but he’s worse. I think he’s a very unpleasant person. He’s like Trump in that way. He’s anti-democratic. And he’s anti-multiracial democracy. His “anti-wokeness” is my new bugaboo. My problem is he’s turned what was Black slang into a way to make fun of people wanting to address inequality and to target people who are accepting of LGBTQ rights. Being “anti-woke” is now a dog whistle about anti-Blackness and that’s what makes it so appealing across the bro-culture lines, despite the inability to define it. Ron DeSantis was asked in court to define “wokeness” and the answer was “opposing inequality.” Musk has taken on the “anti-wokeness” mentality the way that Trump took on the anti-immigrant mentality and I just fear that being normalized more than it’s already been normalized.

R: There’s a lot of racism, a lot of misogyny. I made some memes showing the parallels between Trump and Musk on Twitter and in life. They’re both bad people and dishonest people and they’ve both become fronts for things I’m not sure they fully understand. They’ve both become prisms for so much bad faith, so many dishonest actors in the world. Trump is a psychopath. When Covid hit, he didn’t care if ten people died or 10,000 people died or 10 million people died, as long as he got re-elected. As long as he got more attention. And Twitter is the same thing for Musk. The idea of the “good in the world” that Twitter can do is something that has no appeal to Elon Musk. And then you factor in how much bad it can do…

J: Right.

R: … And that has more appeal to him. His number one investor is Saudi Arabia, which jails American citizens for what they tweet. One guy who went back to Saudi Arabia recently has been put in prison for 16 years for tweets. So the guy now running Twitter is a billionaire in the Peter Thiel-Marc Andreesen mode who’s loved by crypto bros, backed by Saudi Arabia and supporting Putin. It’s not a good mix.

J: And a business that’s really dependent on Tesla’s relationship with Chairman Xi. It’s just an axis of intolerance and authoritarianism.

So… what should we do?

R: So the question is, can Twitter be saved—and what good can we do by staying or going? Are we there as resisters? Or does our continued participation serve as an endorsement for Elon Musk and all that he’s doing?

J: That is the huge question. And I think the answer is—still—you’ve got to do both. You’ve got to stay and kinda get a sense of how bad it is, what the reality of it is. Once he started tweeting “arrest Fauci,” it became “we are now officially enabling this guy and we are helping him communicate these things.” I think you are really onto something with the way he has become a prism for the way America’s passion for rich dudes launders these ideas. He was temperamentally—and mentally—reactionary and far-right before he became politically far-right. Just like Trump. They had these kind of instincts as people, but they didn’t quite understand how that translated into politics until they developed this hatred of the existing Democratic party. And that nurtured it. They were like, “this is why I’ve always hated the Democratic party, because I’m actually a Republican.” Musk has now become the standard bearer of the Republican party even more than Ron DeSantis. So they are all falling behind him. He is pursuing this Twitter Files thing. It’s the same exact agenda the House Republicans are going to do, largely, over the next two years. The fact that it’s such a flop, that nobody really gives a shit outside of Twitter, doesn’t speak well for the Republican party’s agenda here, but repetition does work and having this coordinated message does work…. So staying there, finding ways to oppose what’s happening—without amplifying it, the big rule always being screenshot your enemies. Try not to amplify him. He doesn’t need our help any more than he already has. But as a person—remember, we are all weirdos. Most Twitter users only tweet twice a month. People like us who tweet more than that are not normal people. But if we go and leave it, before we find the right alternatives, we’re robbing what we’ve kind of built for ourselves. So I would say we should give ourselves the time to start trying—we can send off some our energies into—some of the different platforms. I think Mastodon makes the most sense. It’s easy to cross-post and you don’t have to do much to kind of replicate your (Twitter) existence there. I think Post is interesting. It could have some of the problems that Twitter could potentially have. But it’s interesting to look at. Finding some (new) place for yourself—because I think everyone agrees it’s not Facebook—I think makes sense for everybody.

R: What bothers me most about Post is that Marc Andreesen’s VC firm is the number one backer. Andreesen’s the number one backer of Substack, too, which we’re both on, but which created the Matt Taibbi’s, the Glenn Greenwald’s, the Bari Weiss’s. And Elon Musk even flirted with the idea of buying Substack when someone suggested that to him on Twitter. The idea was that Elon Musk could buy Substack and then he would control “the narrative layer” of the internet.

J: I think maybe he’s just humoring himself after Tesla lost two-thirds of its value this year. I think a lot of this is just making him feel his power. When he talks about those things, he feels super-powerful. It could be real. Or it could be just Elon Musk likes talking about these things.

R: If I had more time and energy and tech-savvy I would have probably switched from Substack to Ghost already. People tell me it’s better. But I’m busy. And I have inertia. If just getting enough energy to get off Substack is too much for me, the thought of rebuilding my Twitter on Mastodon or somewhere else seems daunting. I’m thinking maybe Facebook isn’t so bad. What about that? Despite what you just said. You’re bigger than me on Facebook.

J: I think Facebook is mostly dead but I should use it more in hopes of interacting with normal people who aren't on Twitter. Instagram, too. But no one wants to see a picture of me. Not even me… I’d put The Daily Edge up on Mastodon and start posting there. With ten minutes you can start replicating your Twitter account on Mastodon. I think it’s worth it.

R: I looked at it. All the servers. You’re on mastodon.social. I wasn’t given the option of mastodon.social.

J: That’s distracting. But it doesn’t really matter. The server isn’t the issue as much as just building up your account—getting followers and finding people you love to follow.

What about actually using Mastodon?

J: These experiences are not as good as Twitter. That’s the thing that really sucks. Twitter is the best form of this kind of communication that there’s probably ever going to be. Elon Musk can ruin it. But replicating it is much harder than people are estimating at this point.

R: You made the switch early to Mastodon. But you’ve got about 5% of the followers over there that you’ve got on Twitter.

J: But the engagement is comparable. It’s very high for the number of followers. I actually get more responses for my big posts there than I do on Twitter.

R: I noticed that you were using content warnings when I checked out your Mastodon page the other day. There’s not much controversial stuff behind those warnings, but I found it kind of funny. Some of the servers on Mastodon say that anytime you don’t abide by all these rules—specifically about misinformation—we’re gonna kick you off. And I’m thinking, I might make a joke, or I might be sarcastic. What is misinformation? What is disinformation? You and I were on Twitter in the old days. In the old days, the jokes we made were jokes and people understood them.

J: Right.

R: Nowadays, it’s misinformation and disinformation, and we have to be careful about what we joke about.

J: That is one place where the server rules would matter more. I don’t know enough about the servers to know which ones will understand that jokes are jokes. But that’s something you can ask about on Mastodon. Or I could ask about. It’s like old days Twitter. If you ask some thing on Mastodon, you do get genuine responses.

In summary: @LOLGOP’s “stay and go” philosophy

While many people are quitting entirely, Jason (@LOLGOP) is advocating staying and going. For “weirdos” like me and him, who have invested a lot of time and energy and built decent followings, he suggests not abandoning Twitter immediately, but consciously building up your alternative presence on Post or Mastodon until you are forced to leave Twitter.

After Musk’s latest antics on Twitter last night, I’ll be trying to muster up the energy to figure out Mastodon. In the meantime, The Daily Edge is also on Facebook and Instagram. And LOLGOP is also on Mastodon, Facebook and Instagram.

Please add your thoughts in the comments. Thanks!

UPDATE: The Daily Edge is now on Mastodon too: https://universeodon.com/@TheDailyEdge. I’m also using the Metatext app too, which @LOLGOP recommended but I didn’t put in the interview because I didn’t understand what it was at the time.

UPDATE 2: I’m now on Post too: https://post.news/thedailyedge

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