I miss Twitter, and so far nothing has replaced it

#socialmedia

I miss Twitter so much. It’s dead and never coming back and I have tried to accept that. I never cared for Facebook, the Myspace days were too fleeting, and Instagram was ruined once Meta took it over. But Twitter…that was my PLACE. And I really thought it would escape the internet’s enshitification because it was so unique. But alas, it was indeed majorly enshitified and, thus far, nothing has been able to adequately replace it.

Back in the day

I started using Twitter in early 2007, not long after its release. A coworker turned me onto it and from the moment I sent my first tweet via SMS, I was hooked. Living in DC and regularly using the Metro, Twitter quickly became the way to share information about Metro outages and problems. Soon we were using it to follow food trucks throughout the city, get real-time updates on street closures, and pithy observations about the city and politics. It felt so cool; techy yet accessible to the masses.

President Obama’s campaigns made heavy use of social media, especially Twitter. News outlets gained Twitter accounts and those accounts were faster to get out news information than traditional news outlets. Random people on the street would tweet about local events long before the newscasters could get to it. Before long, news was being generated by what people were tweeting about. Using hashtags and trending topics, it was easy to see what was happening in the rest of the world too. Even government agencies got in on the game, each trying to outdo one another with funny yet informative tweets about their work.

Even at its peak, Twitter was a non-representative microcosm of society. In 2021, Twitter had about 436 million monthly visitors. This was a fraction of the reported 2.91 billion monthly active users on Facebook, 1.48 billon users on Instagram, and 1 billion on TikTok.

Yet, in politics and presidential campaigns and news, Twitter held an outsized influence relative to all these other platforms. It held an outsized cultural effect as well, bringing together people from around the world into communities, connecting people in a way that had never been possible on any other platform.

Twitter was more than just snarky short tweets and hot takes. It was a vibe of an era.

The Dark Side of Twitter and then X

In 2016 I noticed a distinct shift in Twitter that coincided with that year’s presidential election. Racism, always present but generally kept to a minimum, surged. There was also a huge increase in accounts that didn’t appear to be real people, many with the same bios and broken-English copy-pasta Tweets. We now know that these were largely coming from Russian bot farms and other efforts to spread disinformation and sow discord.

But even in that era, it was generally fairly easy to filter out the garbage and stay within known communities. Third-party apps like Tweetbot, my personal favorite, gave users better controls to mute certain words and personalize feeds.

🗒️ The vibe of Tweetbot lives on!
The developer who made the awesome Tweetbot app thankfully did not disappear. He instead shifted his energy to Ivory and Phoenix, third-party apps for Mastodon and Bluesky, respectively.

Where did everyone go?

The saddest part about the demise of Twitter is that everyone just scattered to the wind. People who I grew to know via Twitter over many years vanished in an instant.

Mastodon had a moment, and I hoped people would see the value in the decentralization of social media, but alas, the momentum didn’t seem to last. People didn’t like the onboarding process, the confusion of multiple servers, the weird vibe. The people who had already been on Mastodon for years resented the newcomers. The whole concept of decentralized and interoperable social media did gain a lot of attention during that time and I still have hopes for it, but it’s not Twitter.

Bluesky was late to the game, but has taken off in the last year and I think holds the most promise of being able to replace Twitter. Its vibe is definitely more Twitter-like, and it finally has some politicians and news outlets posting regularly. It recently added a way to verify accounts, and offers some degree of decentralization without the complexity of Mastodon. I enjoy the “feeds” feature of Bluesky, as this gives users the ability to focus on posts about specific topics, and gives niche communities a place to gather. The only thing holding Bluesky back is its lack of broader adoption.

Substack has also been interesting, although I don’t see it ever replacing what Twitter was given its very niche role in promoting longer-form writing. In think Substack will continue to attract a very specific audience.

Some people resorted to starting their own blogs or going back to Tumblr (remember that?). I think blogging/micro-blogging is great but it doesn’t make for easy social connection.

I predict 2026 is going to be a time when social media becomes less important in our daily lives. Anecdotally, my friends and my tween’s friends are no longer posting on social media or have moved to very niche platforms for their specific interests. Group texts are increasing, kind of like personal little Twitter feeds for friends. TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat…none of them have an appeal anymore. It’s all just noise and people seem to be tired of it. Personal blogs and RSS feeds are getting attention again. More people I know are getting news from actual news sites.

Maybe we shouldn’t try to replace Twitter at all. Social media on a large scale has proven to be exceedingly dangerous. Maybe smaller niche communities is more of what we need. Maybe we need to just get out of the house