Thanks to Elon Musk’s rather erratic approach to free speech, employee relations, subscriptions, parodies and disinformation, a lot of people have taken to Twitter to declare that they are leaving Twitter. They will find it hard.

This is not because Twitter is addictive; for most people it is not. It’s because Twitter gives them something they can’t get anywhere else — a set of connections with other users and the ability to reach them and be reached by them. If you could only get to one supermarket, you wouldn’t describe it as “addictive”. You’d describe it as a local monopoly.

Like many, I have departed for pastures new, namely Mastodon (you can find me on Mastodon’s EconTwitter server). But I’m sure I’ll still be tweeting, because I have nearly 200,000 people following me on Twitter. It’s an annoyance; it would be much better if I could bring them all with me to Mastodon. It’s an outrageous failure of public policy that I can’t.