Is it just me, or was that an earthquake?

For only a transient second, this was the web at its greatest. I stared at a vase of dried out Dealer Joe’s flowers, rumbling on my desk for possibly 30 seconds, however I used to be too shocked to even course of what was taking place. Then I noticed the tweets (which, on this second of shock, I refuse to name X posts).

“DID WE JUST HAVE AN EARTHQUAKE IN NEW YORK?”

“was that an earthquake??????”

“did everybody simply really feel that?”

“THIS IS ONE OF THE REASONS I MOVED AWAY FROM CALIFORNIA”

“So excited that us east coasters can lastly get earthquake Twitter”

Individuals on microblogging websites (it wasn’t simply X — I see you, Bluesky) had already decided the scope of the earthquake, confirmed it was, the truth is, an earthquake, and started posting jokes concerning the state of affairs earlier than the much less chronically on-line individuals even realized what occurred.

It’s uncommon that one thing occurs so instantly that it unifies a complete geographic area — individuals from New Jersey, Philadelphia, New York Metropolis and Massachusetts chimed in on my timeline, every unabashedly sharing our experiences. It’s like the old fashioned Twitter, the place you can submit “consuming a ham and cheese sandwich” and it wasn’t ironic. You had been invited to say precisely the way you felt, and everybody else was doing it too. It’s like previous LiveJournal or Fb statuses, the place you can submit “is feeling sleepy” and by no means take into account that nobody actually cares.

It’s like a center faculty cafeteria, hours after an unplanned fireplace alarm goes off. We’re all nonetheless buzzing with a sure naive pleasure and awe, bouncing off of one another’s shock and exaggerating our reminiscence of what occurred, prefer it was some legendary occasion. Everybody has misplaced focus at work. On Slack, Ron says he thought it was a prepare, and his chair shook just a little. Matt says that in California, it normally appears like a automobile crash. Dom says she used to dwell in LA, and this was positively an earthquake. Brian stated, as a Californian on the East Coast, he didn’t even really feel it. Then I share my very own riveting account of this transient second all of us simply skilled: I believed it was my neighbor’s washer.

When Elon Musk purchased Twitter, and critics launched into a mass exodus to platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon, Tumblr, and even ones that now not exist, like Pebble, we mourned the top of an period. There was only one choice for microblogging, and it was Twitter, until you had been actually into open supply federated software program earlier than 2022. Moments like these present that there actually is worth within the “public city sq.” — it’s a approach for us to know that we aren’t loopy, or our boiler isn’t exploding, earlier than anybody even is aware of what’s happening.

However when probably the most populous city sq. is changing into actively extra hostile to individuals who aren’t crypto bros or Tesla stockholders, we get a way of what we’re lacking. On Threads, individuals are speaking about cherry blossoms. On Fb, I’m delighted to study there’s a new grocery retailer coming to my neighborhood, however nobody is speaking concerning the earthquake.

As a lifelong East Coaster, I skilled one thing I’ve by no means felt earlier than as the bottom shook beneath me. And instantly, scrolling by means of my Twitter feed, I felt nostalgic for what the web offers us at its greatest: a way of calm, consolation, camaraderie and reassurance that I wasn’t alone.