There’s no question that Twitter’s self-inflicted mishaps and dreadful behaviour has driven people to Mastodon, but I also think that the move towards blogging and a slower, more artisanal form of short-form updating is fundamentally a reversion to the mean.

Which is to say: even if @Jack (Twitter’s CEO) wasn’t an utter asshole, I think people would have gone to blogging/Mastodon anyway. He’s just massively accelerated the migration.

In this reading, the fact that Mastodon is slower, less connected, and has more characters, is indicative of a desire to move away from the brain-melting shit-heap that Twitter has become. It turns out that blogging wasn’t dead, and there is still a place for longer-form personal writing on the internet.