With the energy of the innocent
they were gathering the tools

Jackson browne

It really seems like the end is nigh over on the ex-birdsite. I want to say some things. I don’t have time to think it all out, but I can make a start. What I want to do most of all is give the people I followed and interacted with some appreciation. Of course Twitter ate up too much of my time and attention. But I ‘met’ lots of great people, all of whom together represent a number of worlds that are parts of my mental home.

I had two phases on Twitter. The first years were an uninhibited mishmash of everything that interested me or caught my eye. I had about 1000 followers and probably followed a good few more people than that. It was great but my life was disappearing into it and so I pulled the eject handle and started again. I cut things down to following about 200 people. I had plans to do other accounts for professional stuff (which never went anywhere) and the account I stayed active on was the one centred on cycling. What I can say is that if you are one of the [checks notes] 400 people (oops that crept up again) my account @crankular is following, you have mattered to me. Thank you.

Goodness knows whether we will be in contact in some way again, in other places. But Husk doesn’t decide whether we can. This is the Internet. It’s where we can get in touch with odd people all over the place. It doesn’t have to be on big platforms controlled by the whims of some arse of a billionaire. TWIMC, I’m here and also on the . Some of you have already popped up there 😍. (I am also still on Instagram, though I only post there sporadically: @twobiscuits.at). I’m generally hopeful about doing our social-media-like things in decentralized networks like the fediverse. It’s not only Twitter I’ve become sceptical about. All the sites that promise us “community” if we give them some combination of our money and our data are suspect to me: Strava would be one example, Instagram another. I want to have a base that’s independent of them. That’s why I got myself this domain and set up the blog on my own webspace (migrating some stuff from my old neglected blog at crankular.wordpress.com/). The blog is massively centred on bike-tinkering at the moment. I had a backlog of that stuff that I needed to deposit. But it doesn’t have to stay that way.

What I thought I could do in a first post addressing the Twitter era is list the worlds I connected with there. Because what was great about it was the ability to be in many things at once. So I followed stuff like …

  • Cycling, maybe especially British people doing audaxy things. Ah, Steve, Ella, Kajsa, Judith, Olaf, Eleanor, what brilliant bloody characters you are.
  • Cycling campaigning/urbanism/planning, nice to follow vicariously/at a slight distance, having removed myself from the thick of it some years ago. POP, the campaign with the best sense of humour anywhere, with a bonus theme of
  • Scotland, which was my first home from home. I’m nostalgic about it and get a kick out of lurking while people do Being in Scotland.
  • Ireland. Other Irish people abroad, ppl that are as embedded in homes around Europe as I am here. Literary Irish ppl, even if I don’t get their patter, but, you can’t be Irish and completely un-literary, I think. People in Ireland, the country where I didn’t get to spend my adult life; just to have a flavour of what it’s like now, in between visits.
  • Austrians. The local dimension. In some ways (politics!) a tough country to be in unless you know your tribe. We’re here, the other Austria. In fact we’re pretty solid. It’s not just a reactionary little country. Local dialect and jokes. History, especially the brave people who research the dark parts; as everyone knows, they are very dark indeed.
  • Science nerdery. Biologists like Kaeli the crow expert and Rachel whom I first came across as seaworm princess. Science humour.
  • Linguistics, translation and language teaching, hacks and editors: that’s more my current professional environment. I meant to make a separate account for that but it never came to life. A new professional website and blog is now a big priority.

And then there are a couple of things about Twitter that cut across these, so to speak, thematic fields:

  • Chatting with important people. How easy it has been to exchange some banter with the absolute stars of this or that. Even the Pope liked one of my tweets once. In all kinds of areas it’s been possible to talk directly to eminent people. It’s a different kind of fandom.
  • Live tweeting and its sibling, live following, for example dotwatching. Move over, Tour de France on the TV. You can follow someone riding a bike through the Alps in the middle of the night who says “there are some furry animals here that squeak” and you can enlighten them that they have just met their first marmots. Or, when out riding myself, which I usually do alone, tweeting the odd picture and getting a like or two; it’s just the right level of not-being-completely-alone, I find.
  • Being unashamedly bilingual. I live in English and German and never had to give a thought to which language a tweet was in. I read tweets in Italian, Dutch etc. People tolerate stuff being in different language and use the translation function if they need to. Most people at most times have been at least bilingual. Some political tendencies here idealize an Austria where everyone speaks German, only. But people from 140-ish different countries live in Graz and the everyday linguistic landscape corresponds to that. Especially in the education system we need more recognition of multi-linguality.
  • The ability to instantly network and respond to crises. Remembering the refugee crisis of 2015 – when the authorities were too slow or too swamped, ordinary people mobilized overnight and did stuff. Twitter was a medium for that and enabled instant orientation in a huge, very fast-moving situation. Also a place for the top experts on things to bypass conventional media, for example, being able to follow people like Florian Krammer the virologist and Erich Neuwirth the statistician in the Covid times.

In all of these things, Twitter gave me spaces to daydream and learn and have a laugh and get on people’s nerves. All of these spaces are part of me. Thanks everyone 😍🤗🤓. Maybe see ya around.