People are leaving Twitter. Many of them are moving to Bluesky. Some others are already on Mastodon, and are getting upset at the popularity of Bluesky, imploring others to “maintain a meaningful presence elsewhere”. I can’t remember the last time I was so infuriated by a phrase in English. So here is a handful of ideas for “maintaining a meaningful presence”.

1. Sit and breathe. Set the timer for 10 minutes, sit your ass on a floor and stare at a wall. Expect nothing. When the time is up, you’re done.

2. Walk. On the streets where you live. In the countryside around you. Around the block where you work. Use your feet, your wheelchair, walk with what you’ve got.

3. Notice stuff. This works as you’re doing step 1 or 2. It works with plenty of other things. It doesn’t need recording, producing, inscribing. Be there, and let senses bring the “there” to you.

4. Love every thing. Ram Dass says it better than I ever could.

5. Do nothing. Jenny Odell says it better than I ever could.

6. Help others work out their presences. Does your friend need a lift to the book club? Is there a community group you could help out with? Whose voices are missing from the conversations around you?

7. Get pen and paper. You are your own constant reader, editor, and critic. A notebook and a pen might be all you need to be persistently, meaningfully present to the most important person in your life.

8. Build something mind-bogglingly different. I’m not talking about another attempt at out-facebooking Facebook. I’m not even talking about another killer app, or another internet protocol. We’ll be forever circling the drains of the funnels which the Musks and Zucks and Bezoses want to keep us in, unless we start being somewhere radically different.

9. Learn. The steps above all connect (if you let them) into another experience. We’ve come to expect “learning” to mean logging onto a website, clicking “next” until we get to a quiz, and then bragging about the certificate on LinkedIn. I think if you’re after “a meaningful presence” then, these days, you’re also going to need a slower, steadier way of learning to build it for yourself.

10. Do your thing, your way. The reason I’m so angry at the phrase “maintaining a meaningful presence” is that it implies that other people will decide whether you’re present enough, and meaningful enough, and whether it’s all sufficiently well-maintained. Maybe you’re not happy with that. Maybe you prefer to be around actual people. Or paper books. Or outdoors. Or living off-grid. Or keeping an intentionally blank account on every social medium so that nobody impersonates you. Or coming online every month to post an unbelievably sexy story on the only alt account that hasn’t been banned yet. You are already present and meaningful. You don’t need to bend that to fit any online space; it’s the online spaces that need to bend and flex to fit your presence and rhythms.

Photo credit: Statue in front of Museum für Kommunikation, Frankfurt. Photography by F. Bucher - Wikimedia.org