Why the Hell Am I Settling On X

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Why the Hell Am I Settling On X

11/19/2025

Yes, it's literally taken the past 3 or 5 years now for me to finally settle on the one social media platform, or what I refer to as an impulse publishing platform, to work in tandem with this WWW repository.

It's X.

Why X? Because it is simply the best singular impulse publishing platform that meets these personal requirements:

It is singular.

It can host the usual text quips, pictures, video, and livestreaming and can do it from a mobile device or the desktop. I had previously settled on Meta's platform which technically accommodates all of this too but redundantly across three platforms (Facebook itself, Threads, and Instagram). There was way too much anxiety picking which one to use during any given impulse publish, and leaving any out left me feeling "incomplete" - even with its generous cross posting options. Those options actually made things even more uncomfortable because I always found myself checking to make sure that content published evenly and properly across the multiple outputs. Way too much to manage.

I can buy it.

I want an impulse publishing host, not a system whereby my content is considered an advertising exchange agreement. Or in short, something where I am not "the product" - as the saying goes. I like handing over a relative small sum of money to have my service and business, and publishing, taken at least somewhat seriously, and for whatever nuttiness the current owner of it introduces into the system, X positions itself, increasingly, as this type of service. I don't look at my impulse publishing platform as a "community" - it's not a giant message forum where I have to consider the other users of it and their ideologies. To me it's less all that and more a microblogging platform only.

X Stayed the Place

Despite objections over Elon Musk's crazy politics and his political associations that have enraged half of Twitter's userbase, there never really was a "terminating exodus" from it. X is still the place where prominent people, brands, and media houses all still maintain their primary presence. I am not important under any of those categories, but, I'm one to always add "yet" to that. In any case, even in my irrelevance, I still want to be where the heavy hitters play, and X is still that place, amazingly, despite everything.

I suspect the reason that people stuck with it is because it is in fact just a great microblogging product. That greatness was built under its former framework, yes, but once people bought into it cementing critical mass, the idiosyncrasies of its new owner were not as bothersome to people as first advertised online and in the MSM media. See my point below on my own ambivalence on Elon.

Those are my primary reasons of the hour.

Holding My Nose

Not that I am wholly satisfied.

For example, the private ownership model has proven somewhat problematic in that the current "owner' has decided that X should be exactly the service framework that I describe above, transitioning it away from a general unified public platform in favor of a subscriber one. And that transition has led to some brokenness here and there.

For example, one of my X accounts, when one is not logged into X already, tells visitors to its profile that there are "no posts" when in fact there are several hundred. It's a blatant bug or worse a blatant "owner whim" to frustrate the account. And X has no path to resolution for that, even as a paying subscriber.

It's less about those problems that I have a concern though than it is the root cause which is that there an owner, period. Just one guy right now decides things for better or worse. Say what you will of corporate overlords, the previous Twitter iteration of the platform was at least subject to a governance.

I've also made a big deal about the "open web" which is one reason I picked Meta before this change. Posting to Threads meant posting to the fediverse which meant open exposure, which to me is crucial. However, I see that component of my publishing resolved because I maintain an independent WWW page - the very place you're at right now. Ideally any content I care about is synchronized here, meaning I don't have to care whether my impulse publishing/microblogging platform is so open after all. The twist of this point is that I see the fact that X is paywalled as creating "open scarcity" which in turn motivates me to produce WWW content. We'll see if that's more just wishful thinking than effective writer's strategy or not in time.

Anyway, there it is. Today's decision and my rationale for it. I am not leaving any of my other platforms as they all stand as great secondary community engagement devices (literally a fancy way of saying they are old-fashioned market, message and group forums -- in today's web form) but if one were interested in actually following me, it is this web page and my X account to do it with.

Glad to have this finally settled.

By Dave for Personal Blog.