Marco Arment wrote a post today called “Community”, about taking six weeks off Mastodon, feeling lonely, and deciding to wade back into social media everywhere, X included.

I’ve written a lot about X lately. Three whole pieces, which is roughly three more than I planned to. So you might expect me to come out swinging.

I’m not going to. Mostly.

Because Marco did the thing I’ve been wishing John Gruber would do.

He made it about himself.

Read Marco’s post and count the “I”s. He works alone, in his house. Nobody in his town is a computer nerd. He felt the same loneliness he felt as a teenager in the ’90s, before he found his people on forums and Tumblr and Twitter. Without a tech community, he says, his work has suffered, his skills have stalled, and his world has gotten smaller.

That’s vulnerable. It’s not easy to write “it’s been profoundly lonely” on your popular personal blog.

And crucially, Marco never claims X is good. He never says it’s cheerful, or friendly, or inclusive. He calls its owner an asshole. He isn’t telling anyone else that X is fine. He’s telling us that he needs a community, and that he’s going to go look for one.

In my last piece, I wrote that there’s an enormous difference between “X is a cheerful place for me” and “X is a cheerful place.” Marco lands squarely on the correct-for-him side of that line. He’s describing his own experience and his own needs, and he’s not pretending they’re universal.

I disagree with his decision even if I appreciate his approach. I do, and I do.

I hope he finds his people. Everyone deserves a community. He’s right about that.

But there are two things in his post that I can’t let slide.

X isn’t less political. It’s just not political at you.

Here’s how Marco sizes up his options:

All I’ve found on Bluesky is even more anger and politics, the last things I need or want.

A few sentences later, X is the place with “a strong but different tech community.”

I understand the feeling. Bluesky really is full of politics, and some of it is angry. People are angry because there’s a lot to be angry about.

But X isn’t a politics-free alternative. X is the most political social network on Earth. It just doesn’t feel political if you agree with the house, or if you’re not the one it’s aimed at.

The owner of X is a bad person. He uses it to boost Germany’s far right and Tommy Robinson’s rallies. He posts slogans from The Turner Diaries. He’s spending $100 million to elect Trump allies in November. He tuned his chatbot to be less “politically correct” until it called itself MechaHitler.

Politics are so pervasive on X that they underscore everything there.

On Bluesky, the politics is loud because it’s people yelling about power. On X, the politics is quiet for some users because it is the power. If you’re a white, straight, cis guy posting about Swift concurrency, it’s easy to mistake that quiet for calm. If you’re trans, or Black, or Jewish, the wallpaper is talking to you, and it isn’t saying nice things.

Choosing X to get away from politics is like moving into the campaign office to get away from the campaign signs.

I don’t think Marco means it that way. But it’s a framing that John has used, too — Bluesky and Mastodon are full of angry kooks, X is chill now — and I’ll push back every time it shows up.

Mastodon isn’t owned by an asshole.

Marco’s argument boils down to this:

I’d love to participate in communities without any assholes benefiting from it, but in the modern world, that simply isn’t possible.

He then lists everything he’d have to give up to avoid assholes: his smartphone, his computer, his car, most of his food, and his country.

I made this point in my second piece: You can’t avoid every bad billionaire, but that’s an argument for never doing anything at all. Imperfect lines are still lines. I live in the US, which, as Marco pointed out, has an asshole in chief. I can still log my protests.

But here’s the thing. For social networking specifically, it is possible to avoid bad billionaires. Marco knows this, because he was just there.

Mastodon isn’t owned by an asshole. It isn’t owned by anyone, really. The software is open source. The organization behind it is a nonprofit. The network is thousands of independent servers, and if you don’t like how yours is run, you can move, or run your own. No billionaire profits when you post there. Nobody is using your posts to make their own timeline louder.

To his credit, Marco says “most of them” are owned by assholes. He’s not claiming otherwise. And his frustration with Mastodon isn’t about ownership; it’s that the community stopped feeling like a good fit. I won’t tell him he’s wrong about his own experience.

But “the community there isn’t what I want right now” and “there’s no way to have community without an asshole benefiting” are two very different statements. The first is true for Marco. The second isn’t true for anybody.

The asshole-free option exists. It’s imperfect, it can be cranky, and it’s smaller than X. Those are reasons to help make it better, not reasons to declare it impossible.

Fewer absolutes

Marco closes by saying he’s learning to declare fewer absolutes in a complex, imperfect world.

That’s a good instinct. I’ve tried to avoid absolutes in my own writing about this, too. I’ve never said everyone on X is a bad person. I’ve never said Marco or John or Barack Obama should be shunned for posting there. People can post wherever they want.

But “it’s impossible to avoid assholes” is an absolute, too. And “X is the calm one” is a judgment that only holds up from a pretty specific vantage point.

So welcome back, Marco. I mean that. I hope you find your people again, and I hope a lot of them are on Mastodon.

X is still bad, though.