ScottinSoCal 🇺🇦 🕊 🏳‍🌈 @ScottSoCal@computerfairi.es

@100mountains @markusl @pathfinder @anantagd @actuallyautistic @RolloTreadway

Twitter (x) has changed due to the influence of Elon Musk, the new owner. He's unleashed quite deliberately, by his own invitation, a tidal wave of hate speech, racism, far right tropes, and these kinds of voices are becoming more and more dominant. The US fascistic right-wing is flooding into twitter more and more and they now see twitter as one of "their" online spaces.

English-speaking twitter isn't specifically "American" but certainly it often expresses a part of the US that is toxic, depending on which corner of twitter you hang out in, but with the new algorithms its hard to avoid the toxicity.

So, yeah, many people are leaving twitter, Americans included, and coming to mastodon, or going to other platforms. Twitter for many of us is dying a slow death. I still check in there to get a sense of political patterns and trends. The US in in a period of major flux with politics, with fascistic impulses on the rise as it is in other parts of the world including parts of Europe (see Hungary for ex).

Anyway... I'm "American" in terms of birth. Culturally being American is hard to exactly pin down, because it's a large geographic area. West coast is very different from East Coast. Urban different from rural. All the things that make up my world-view including being multiply-neurodivergent make me quite different from most others around me. My values and mind-set are so different from others in the US that I feel often socially alienated (mostly because I'm autistic). For me, it's not where someone is from, or where they grew up, it's their values, awareness of diversity, acceptance of differences. In the Portland area where I live, people tend to be very progressive compared to other areas of the US, and for that matter, probably more progressive on average than most other parts of the world, with some of us being far left. People here are often open as autistic. We have a lesbian governor. And yet just travel a short distance into the eastern part of the state and it's culturally very different.

But the internet collapses space in terms of giving a platform for all voices... and often the loudest are the most toxic.

Anyway... yes, I'm "American" whatever that means... I feel estranged from the world in my own country most of the time, these days.