You Shall Know Them by their Hashtags
If memory serves the video opened with Teletubbies dancing to a music box tune but soon devolved into a mosh pit of beatings to a raging guitar. The Twinja Movie, produced by Piney McKnuckle, was less than a minute long and portrayed the darling-to-deadly-conflict dynamic of Twinja, the online community that began as Kinja, a commenting platform on Gawker and its affiliate blogs (RIP) that later assembled on Twitter and then on Bluesky; there is also a Twinja group on Facebook. The running joke is that no one gets it when you try to explain what Twinja is, but it’s more or less a social club for people who don’t really want to see other people or join anything, they just want to read your posts, or barring that, get in a fight about them.
Twinja consists of an extensive roster of characters but everyone reads a fair amount and is obsessed with food. Politically, Twinja spans a range from very liberal to saying they are communist and is mostly Millennial, although some of us are a little older. I don’t know how we compare to the general population in terms of mental illness and disability but I would guess offhand that our rate is on the higher side. There is something to recommend an online community during a loneliness epidemic, a pandemic, and this slouching, astigmatic time when people are expected to work a lot, or to look like they are, mostly in front of a screen.
Twinja has crossed into the physical world, and it has become a legitimate source of support and sincere friendship (and in some cases romantic love) in spite of its characteristic smarm and snark. Some Twinjae have vacationed together and become lasting friends, some have dated and married and had children, some dated catastrophically, a few have avoided eviction through Twinja-organized GoFundMe campaigns, and sex pests and simply the disappointing have been outed, as in any group of more than 10 people in this year of our lord etc.
In 2018 when a lot of Twinja people were leaving Twitter for Mastodon, a Twinja member collected everyone’s contact info so people could keep in touch, summer camp slam book-style. One year a Twinja member organized a Jolabokaflod celebration, that Icelandic Christmas one where you send each other books. Another year there was a sock exchange. After that I think the women (always women) who organized these things either didn’t have time or were run down by the logistics of leaving out the person who defended the police involved in the murder of George Floyd; that person has since died of cancer.
There are plenty of Twinja narratives if you like to sort of keep tabs on people. One long-departed Australian member (Twinja is overwhelmingly American, in the way Gawker was, but there are a few from the UK, Canada, one Brazilian, and a handful of other countries) was a known manipulator with a traumatic past and a history of antagonizing people online. Not long after direct messaging me to assure me I was in good with her, she got into a huge fight with a number of people in which she wished that much of Twinja would die horribly. Another ex-Twinja ordered a serial dog fosterer to take in a cat who had shown up on her doorstep; she was insistent and controlling about it. The foster lady did take in the cat in the end but not before a huge blowout that eventually resulted in the cat lady unfollowing everyone in Twinja. She’s still on social media but I won’t invoke her by name; she was an incredibly entertaining poster in her Kinja days but current Twinja will only mention her in to Pig Latin-esque manner as she is ever-present on the platforms. These are just the people who have left—everyone who stayed is more interesting.
Some people gravitate toward online conflict and there is an aspect of going to a hockey game about Twinja. Recurring conflicts include defending or voting for the wrong politicians, stanning corporations, following the wrong people online, posting something really shit about another Twinja person, and any other actually serious issue of values or lesser bugbear mirroring the reasons why the IRL left is unable to get anywhere in the U.S.
And yet people stay, supporting each other during deaths, financial hardship, covid, job loss, miscarriage, illness, and the camaraderie of wtf, of living más, of being ungrayed, and of contributing to novel-length threads about pineapple pizza. Proposed Twinja compounds have been floated a number of times, with utopian real estate postings of castles, fallout shelters, and beach houses jokingly mentioned, sort of, but it’s probably for the best to keep living—and posting—separately.