When Twitter first launched, the prompt it presented to users was “What are you doing?”
So my First Tweet…
… was in response to that question.
Frankly I’m embarrassed I’ve remained on X. I’m more frustrated that I felt like I needed to be on it. But I think I had some good reasons. They are:
Dan Froomkin ex-Washington Post columnist; Kathleen Belew an expert on the white power movement; educator Alfie Kohn; Steven Lemongello & Scott Maxwell who are columnists for the Orlando Sentinel; political blogger Steve Benen; Michael McDonald a UF Pollster; and who could forget Liam Nissan™. I stayed for his humor as well as the humor of New York Times Pitchbot, and Rep. Jack Kimble who represents California’s 54th U.S. Congressional District – by the way there’s only 52 California districts.
All but the Sentinel columnists and Jack Kimble have gone to either Mastodon or Bluesky. There are no more good reasons to stay. I haven’t posted there in over a month. Here are two good articles written about why people should leave – Dump Twitter from The New Republic, and The Case for Abandoning X by Jeb Lund.
So why did I stay on Twitter so long? Look, I know it’s called X now, and I should have left it when it was renamed X. There was a time when people believed that good things come from and will come from Elon Musk, AKA Sissy Space-X (thanks Liam Nissan™). But the acquisition of Twitter showed Musk’s true colors. The articles I linked to just scratch the surface of Musk’s history, but you had me at “Mad Hatter’s tea party with swastikas”.
Which brings me to now. New Year’s Eve. December 31, 2024.
It’s time to delete my account and say goodbye to Rushaw.
Twitter was one of the original services to use the name rushaw, a holdover from my email address I used at SUNY Oneonta. It was auto generated from my last name and first and middle initials. There are many other rushaw accounts out there, and many of them will have continued use, but I’ve begun to reclaim andyrush as a username on many of the new Federated services I’ve begun using. More on that in future posts.
It’s worth noting that I will have the “rushaw Twitter archives” up at andyrush.com. Visit and search the history of that great resource 😉
However, now it’s so long to an old friend who once meant so much to me, but is now not even a shell of it’s former self, but a Nazi bar.
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