A rare earthquake rattled the East Coast today, triggering a collective moment of confusion and digital scrambling as thousands of residents turned to social media to verify if the ground had truly shifted beneath them. From office workers distracted at their desks to remote teams trading frantic Slack messages, the event highlighted our instinctive need for a centralized “public square” during moments of uncertainty.
The Chaos of the “Did You Feel That?” Moment
It’s like a middle school cafeteria, hours after an unplanned fire alarm goes off. We’re all still buzzing with a certain naive excitement and awe, bouncing off of each other’s surprise and exaggerating our memory of what happened, like it was some legendary event. Everyone has lost focus at work. On Slack, Ron says he thought it was a train, and his chair shook a little. Matt says that in California, it usually feels like a car crash. Dom says she used to live in LA, and this was definitely an earthquake. Brian said, as a Californian on the East Coast, he didn’t even feel it. Then I share my own riveting account of this brief moment we all just experienced: I thought it was my neighbor’s washing machine.
The Fragmentation of the Digital Square
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, and critics embarked on a mass exodus to platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon, Tumblr, and even ones that no longer exist, like Pebble, we mourned the end of an era. There used to be just one option for microblogging, and it was Twitter, unless you were really into open source federated software before 2022. Moments like these show that there really is value in the “public town square” — it’s a way for us to know that we aren’t crazy, or our boiler isn’t exploding, before anyone even knows what’s going on.
Why Alternative Platforms Fall Short
But when the most populous town square is becoming actively more hostile to people who aren’t crypto bros or Tesla stockholders, we get a sense of what we’re missing. On Threads, people are talking about cherry blossoms. On Facebook, I am delighted to learn there is a new grocery store coming to my neighborhood, but no one is talking about the earthquake.
Finding Comfort in Real-Time Connection
As a lifelong East Coaster, I experienced something I’ve never felt before as the ground shook beneath me. And immediately, scrolling through my Twitter feed, I felt nostalgic for what the internet gives us at its best: a sense of calm, comfort, camaraderie and reassurance that I wasn’t alone.
