by CD Damitio
**A note from several months later: My profile on X (@vagobond) didn’t have any noticeable improvement by my efforts or by following the advice of the X AI, Grok. The algorithm is too powerful and it has decided that I am not worthy of appearing in any feeds on X. I don’t want to start a new account, I don’t want to spend more time on X, I don’t want to give Musk any more money – so I deleted it again. The blue checkmark made absolutely no difference in my stats.
I deleted the app. Twice. Maybe three times. I gave speeches about it. I wrote the post explaining why I was leaving, got a satisfying number of likes from people who agreed with me, and walked away feeling clean. Principled. Like someone who had finally chosen integrity over convenience.
That was the story I told myself. Here’s the one I didn’t.
While I was busy being principled, my books sat unread. My philosophy stayed unfound. My work — 30+ books, a decade of Baoism, a worldbuilding universe, a privacy-first social network I built from scratch — continued its quiet existence in the dark, available to no one who hadn’t already found me somewhere else.
Principles are expensive. I just finally admitted I couldn’t afford them.
Let me be clear about what X is and what it isn’t. It’s not a good platform. It’s not run by a good person, at least not by my definition of good. The politics are real, the toxicity is real, the way it has been weaponized against journalists and dissidents and people I care about is real. None of that has changed. None of that is going to change because I downloaded the app again.
But here’s what’s also real: 600 million people are on X. Writers are on X. Readers are on X. Publishers, agents, journalists, philosophers, nomads, weirdos, misfits, people lying awake at 3am looking for something that makes sense of the world — they’re all on X. And for a writer whose entire purpose is to reach people, walking away from 600 million people because of how I feel about the man who owns the pipes is a luxury I cannot afford.
I’ve been acting like I have a salary. I don’t. I have books. I have ideas. I have a body of work that exists to reach people who need it. And every platform I abandon in the name of ethics is a limb I’ve cut off to prove I’m fighting fair.
There’s a version of ethical warriorship that makes sense. If you have a job that someone else pays you for, if your income doesn’t depend on your reach, if your mortgage gets paid whether or not anyone reads your work — then by all means, take your stands, delete your apps, feel good about your choices. That costs you nothing but the principle itself. I respect it. I mean that.
But for a creative? For someone whose work only matters if it reaches people? Cutting off your own limbs to fight fair isn’t noble. It’s just losing. It’s losing while feeling righteous about it, which is arguably worse than just losing, because at least if you’re losing without the righteousness you might eventually change your strategy.
Here’s what X actually is for writers, underneath all the noise:
It’s the last major platform where a single good piece of writing can still reach people who have never heard of you. Not through advertising. Not through an algorithm that requires you to post Reels or dance or optimize for watch time. Just words. A thread that lands right, a sentence that cuts through, a take that makes someone think — and suddenly you’re in front of ten thousand people who didn’t know you existed yesterday.
That still happens on X. It barely happens anywhere else anymore.
It’s also where the literary conversation lives. Not all of it. Not the best of it. But the real-time argument about books and ideas and what writing is for — that conversation is happening on X in a way it simply isn’t on Bluesky or Farcaster or anywhere else I’ve tried to replace it with. I can believe in decentralized social networking, I can be building Xcrol, I can post to Bluesky every day — and still acknowledge that the conversation I want to be part of is happening somewhere else.
Writers need readers. Readers are on X. That’s the whole equation. Everything else is commentary.
The $8 a month for X Premium is the part that stings the most, I’ll admit. Not because $8 is a lot of money. Because it goes to someone whose politics I find genuinely alarming, whose vision for public discourse I think is actively harmful, whose ownership of the most important real-time conversation platform on earth keeps me up at night in ways that have nothing to do with my book sales.
I’m giving him the $8 anyway.
Because the alternative — staying pure and invisible while my work sits in a drawer signed by nobody — costs more than $8. It costs the whole point of why I write.
There’s a Baoism principle underneath all of this. You work with the materials available, in the place you actually are, not the place you wish you were. The ideal platform — privacy-first, decentralized, owned by no one with a political agenda, populated by the exact readers who need what you make — doesn’t exist yet. Xcrol is my attempt to build it. Bluesky and Farcaster are pointing in the right direction. But right now, today, in the world as it actually is, X is where the readers are.
So I’m back. App downloaded. Premium activated. Thread posted.
I still think the ownership is a disaster. I still think the politics are dangerous. I still think we need alternatives and I’m still building one.
But I need to be read more than I need to be right.
And that, in the end, is what it means to be a writer instead of a warrior.
CD Damitio is the author of 30+ books, the creator of Baoism, and the founder of Xcrol.com — a privacy-first social network he’s building as the alternative he wishes existed. He writes INDIGNIFIED at https://indignified.substack.com