Elon Musk completes Twitter purchase ➹

I don’t have any plans to leave Twitter (and I can be found on Mastodon if you look hard enough), but to be honest I haven’t been deriving any real enjoyment from it for a few years, so I hope this will at least make it a bit more interesting.

However, it needs saying that “general purpose” social networks have, by and large, become less and less appealing. Messaging has spun off into its own thing, Instagram and TikTok are largely view-only or have become a Darwinian meme zoo, and smaller, more focused communities are a lot more engaging (at least for me).

The one thing Twitter has accomplished over the past couple of years is demonstrating how we are all, everywhere, still in thrall to the US tech industry (well, discounting the WeChat universe, of course).

And that, in turn, reminds me that the EU is still trying to sponsor an European search engine, which feels almost steampunkish in this day and age.