Goodbye Twitter

I am getting off Twitter after eight years. This is not some noble act of resistance but being part of Elon Musk’s magical mystery agora of free speech just makes my skin crawl. Personally, the choice was easy.

Professionally, it was more difficult. Twitter is currently the most important channel for communication among scientists and for public-facing work. I have „met“ many colleagues there for the first time and several opportunities have arisen from being visible and active on Twitter.

Hence, my first thought was: „Where do I go then?“ I am already on LinkedIn, ResearchGate and YouTube. Visual social media like Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok are uninteresting for my academic niche, ethical concerns notwithstanding. Don’t even get me started on Facebook. I briefly considered trying Mastodon for a while but the idea of starting over there just fills me with ennui and dread. Given my lack of job security, building a Mastodon profile would take longer than I can currently justify.

So I decided to use my own little platform more. I’ve always had fond memories of the golden age of the blogosphere in the 2000s and was dismayed to see it shrink, sucked dry of readers and engagement by the rise of platform monopolies. I am not going to become a prolific blogger – the present number of visitors does not support any grand plans of this nature. But I will use this blog to publicise professional news and maybe the odd short-form article. Feel free to comment.

If you want to be notified of news, may I suggest the humble RSS feed? This is (still) a wonderful and accessible technology to curate your own tableau of news. I use Feedly for this purpose and it works great. You can follow this site at https://www.daniel-lambach.de/feed/. And if you would like get (or stay) in touch, you can email me via kontakt (at) daniel-lambach (dot) de.