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I think a lot of my colleagues assumed I was procrastinating on Twitter (and they were partly right) or that it was a way to self-promote (and maybe they were right, too): but what it really was to me was a way to stay tightly connected to real problems in infosec/cryptography.
There are some researchers in my field who can just follow the scientific literature and tap away at the next obvious problem. I envy them. In applied cryptography it’s more like running around putting out fires in different neighborhoods.
Twitter (and in the future, maybe Mastodon) was a big source for finding those fires. Random conversations would identify that X was a problem and then 90% of the time there was no research to do, but the remaining 10% of the time it gave me new research topics.
It also sometimes worked the other way. Last August I learned from a colleague that Apple was about to release a client-side photo scanning system to detect “CSAM”. Nobody seemed to want to warn the public what this meant, and Apple had lined up friendly reporters to tell the story their way. Twitter let me bring it to the public’s attention and that changed the news cycle.
(I’m not saying it changed the news cycle to be egotistical: several reporters at top publications specifically told me that the unplanned tweet caused new privacy-focused reporters to be assigned to the story, rather than the ones who had been selected to break it by Apple. I’m happy a social network can do this.)
Anyway Twitter was a great and useful social network for me. But the part I liked the most on a day-to-day basis was being exposed to really smart hackers and whatever they were doing. We are all going to be worse off if it gets destroyed, hoping this place can fill the gap.