Honestly, me being gentler about Twitter is largely a result of the past two weeks. It's less that I look back fondly, and more that I've learned the other side of the story: how hard some of those folks were working behind the scenes on real free-speech issues (rather than Techbro bullshit), and the number of communities that really relied on Twitter.

There's a graph that came around my Mastodon feed a few days ago that was really striking, showing (IIRC) positive / negative sentiment towards Twitter. For white liberals like us, it was fairly negative -- but for the black community, it was pretty positive. There's a lot of "eye of the beholder" there.

They had an episode specifically talking about satire, and from the perspective of now, it feels so weird to think of a time when PM John Major was considered a major satirical target.

I mean, politicians are always satirical targets. But yeah -- it's really remarkable is how easy it is to look back on John Major fondly by comparison with today, given what a punching-bag he was at the time.

(Of course, I can largely say the same about Reagan and Thatcher vs. the modern Republicans and Tories in general, which is even more astonishing...)