A friendly warning: if thoughtful people are punished — reprimanded, punished, doxxed, swatted, canceled — for speaking their mind here, this place will eventually become a boring, safe, dull, Babbitt-like display of conformity to center-left or far left platitudes and dogmas.

I didn’t want to join Parler. But it’s getting increasingly easy to tell who is worrying about saying what they really think, retweet, like, or follow in Twitter for (very understandable) for fear of personal or professional repercussions. And it is making this place...boring.

This is still my main and almost exclusive hangout, but if this places continues to devolve into mindless, mediocre conformity to center left or worse cultural and political norms, those of us who still think for ourselves can go somewhere else.

My position all along has been that we are guests in Twitter’s house and they are free to run this place any way they want. But if they are going to run it as a safe space for conforming leftists, we need to support competitors. Once upon a time, mighty Twitter was just Parler.

I’ve been doing online social media in some form since 1995. It always works best when people can be themselves and say what they really think. Twitter was once that way. It has had nice long run, but this isn’t my first rodeo with the decline and fall of social media platforms.