For a quick second, this was the Web at its finest. I stared at a vase of dried-out flowers from Dealer Joe’s that sat on my desk for perhaps thirty seconds, however I used to be too shocked to even course of what was taking place. Then I noticed the tweets (which, on this second of shock, I refuse to name X-posts).
“Did we simply have an earthquake in New York?”
“was that an earthquake????”
“Did everybody simply really feel that?”
“THIS IS ONE OF THE REASONS I MOVED CALIFORNIA”
“So excited that us east coasters can lastly get Earthquake Twitter”
Folks on microblogging websites (it wasn’t simply now X – I see you, Bluesky) had already decided and confirmed the magnitude of the earthquake was onceprincipally an earthquake, and began posting jokes in regards to the state of affairs earlier than the much less chronically on-line individuals even realized what had occurred.
It’s uncommon for one thing to occur so out of the blue that it unites a whole geographic area; individuals from New Jersey, Philadelphia, New York Metropolis, and Massachusetts chimed in on my timeline, all unashamedly sharing our experiences. It is like old-school Twitter, the place you would submit “consuming a ham and cheese sandwich” and it wasn’t ironic. You had been invited to say precisely the way you felt, and everybody else did too. It is just like the outdated LiveJournal or Fb statuses, the place you would submit “I am feeling sleepy” and by no means think about that nobody would care.
It is like a highschool cafeteria, hours after an unplanned hearth alarm goes off. We’re all nonetheless buzzing with a sure naive pleasure and awe, bouncing off one another’s amazement and exaggerating our reminiscence of what occurred, as if it had been a legendary occasion. Everybody has misplaced deal with work. On Slack, Ron says he thought it was a prepare, and his seat was shaking a little bit. Matt says more often than not in California it seems like a automotive crash. Dom says she used to reside in LA, and this was positively an earthquake. Brian mentioned that as a Californian on the East Coast, he did not even really feel it. Then I share my very own riveting account of this transient second all of us simply skilled: I believed it was my neighbor’s washer.
When Elon Musk purchased Twitter and critics started a mass exodus to platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon, Tumblr, and even platforms that now not exist like Pebble, we mourned the tip of an period. There was once just one possibility for microblogging, and that was Twitter, except you had been actually into open supply federated software program earlier than 2022. Moments like these present that there’s actual worth within the ‘public city sq.’ – it is a method for us to know we’re not loopy, or that our kettle is not going to blow up, earlier than anybody even is aware of what is going on on.
However when essentially the most populous metropolis sq. turns into actively extra hostile to individuals who aren’t crypto bros or Tesla shareholders, we get a way of what we’re lacking. On Threads individuals speak about cherry blossoms. On Fb I’m pleased to listen to that there’s a new grocery store in my neighborhood, however nobody is speaking in regards to the earthquake.
As a lifelong East Coaster, I skilled one thing I’ve by no means felt earlier than as the bottom shook beneath me. And as I scrolled by way of my Twitter feed, I instantly felt nostalgic for what the web provides us at its finest: a way of calm, consolation, camaraderie, and the reassurance that I wasn’t alone.
