On Falling in Love with Twitter, Love Lost, and New Beginnings for Text-Based Social Media
I loved Twitter. For years I loved Twitter.
Twitter’s beginnings and my love for words
In 2009 I got a desk job and began to pay attention to the world of tech. It coincided with my first-ever Apple Keynote, headlined by Steve Jobs introducing the first iPad. By “first-ever” I mean the first time I watched (and followed the liveblogs)—I wasn’t actually there. I was hooked.
That’s also when I got my first Twitter account. In the early days, I would share a lot, too much, and of course I cross-posted it all to Facebook for good measure. Nowadays I usually check Facebook just for the Memories feature, and laugh (and cringe) when I see occasional tweets that made it over to Facebook that are plain embarrassing.
Sometimes, though, what I see on Facebook memories is nostalgic, like the early manual retweet days, when you would write your comment, then “RT @username:” and then copy someone else’s tweet. Beyond the @-symbol for usernames, the #hashtags (all common now, but gibberish to most folks at the time), and a code-language including RT, yfrog, and link-shorteners like ow.ly, it was fun to watch a social network like Twitter take off.
Then Instagram happened, and we Twitter users leveraged Twitter to bootstrap Instagram. And of course, Instagram became way bigger than Twitter ever would be, because generally speaking people like pictures more than words.
But I always loved Twitter. With the advent of Twitter I started paying attention to words. Twitter’s 140-character limit was originally designed because Twitter was built with the idea that a @username plus 140 characters could fit into an SMS message. While the need to forward tweets via SMS faded quickly, the 140-character limit defined the platform. It intrigued me. In the early years, we would tweet with such intention, trying to make every word count. I thought about how poorly I had written so many papers for my undergraduate degree, and how much better they would have been if I had designed each sentence with the care I put into a tweet.
As Twitter grew, it needed to drive engagement for the sake of its ad business, and so grew the cynicism and toxicity that Twitter became famous for. I didn’t see much of that, however, thanks to 3rd-party apps. Twitter’s early years had been built on a rich 3rd-party app ecosystem, where people like Loren Brichter helped define the platform. He invented pull-to-refresh and the app Tweetie (which gave Twitter the idea for its logo). Eventually, Paul Haddad built Tweetbot (see the memorial). As I write this, the iOS App Store just celebrated its 15-year anniversary, so these early Twitter apps coincided with a brand new platform that was interesting and good. One of the great benefits of using a 3rd-party app for Twitter is that you never saw ads. (Another great benefit was seeing Instagram photos inline). And when Twitter switched to an algorithmic timeline, Tweetbot allowed me to continue viewing tweets only from the people I followed, chronologically.
For more than 10 years, I checked Twitter every single day. And once I whittled down my follow count to 100, I read every tweet every day. Every. Day. A bonafide Twitter completionist. And I like to think that it made me a better person. Since I had never really read websites before Twitter (remember my desk job?), and since I was careful about who I followed, I used Twitter like an RSS feed for websites like Daring Fireball and Six Colors. I followed writers and thinkers from all walks of life. Once I realized my own white male myopia , I followed some amazing women and people of color. I eventually came to know and learn so much from writers like Clint Smith and Nikole Hannah-Jones.
I like to think that my daily practice of reading Twitter enriched my life and expanded my understanding of diverse humanity.
Twitter’s Self-Destruction
Then, early in 2023, Tweetbot broke. A self-important oaf bought Twitter, shut down 3rd-party access to its APIs without any warning, and took over ruining Twitter, completing a years-long journey. And just like that, my daily practice of reading Twitter ground to a halt. I stopped cold turkey.
That was really weird. I didn’t miss Twitter per se, because I was (and am) bitter toward the company. I had long since stopped posting to Twitter, other than the occasional recommendation or retweet. But I missed reading my favorite websites.
The solution? Based on Marco Arment’s recommendation, I downloaded Unread, an excellent, minimalist RSS reader, and added a few websites that I had continue to read after Twitter’s demise. But I missed the community element of conversation around big events, like, say, WWDC, or the serendipity of an amazing thinker, like Esau McCaulley, sharing something they had read.
Twitter taught us that, while it may not be for the billions, there are at least hundreds of millions of people that have room in their life for a text-based micro-blogging platform, and in Twitter’s absence I was missing that. For WWDC 2023, I downloaded Ivory and followed my favorite tech writers on Mastodon. The familiarity was amazing and the conversations around Apple’s announcements (especially Apple Vision Pro!) was awesome. But for better or worse, Mastodon’s federation design and plurality of instances are a barrier to entry that limit its appeal to a wider audience. It’s great for my world of Apple hobby, but the women and people of color that I followed on Twitter were missing.
So, in June, I started checking Twitter again, every so often. And…meh. So many ads. And only a handful of the people I wanted to hear from were still there. And it’s Elon Musk’s thing. So many reasons not to love Twitter. At that point I was convinced of Twitter’s demise.
Then, the week of the 4th of July, it happened.
No, not BlueSky. I did get an invitation to BlueSky in June, got my username and— sad trombone —no one was there either.
Threads and my Current Optimism
Enter Threads.
Another Musk Misstep™ and it looks like Mark Zuckerberg and the Threads team decided to move up the timeline. It grew faster than any platform ever has, with 100+ million in the first week. I’m Threads user number 512,647, and it’s been fun so far. There are some early Twitter vibes to balance the caution Twitter taught us to have over more than a decade of seeing humanity’s worst in that medium. Clint Smith, Bernice King, and Esau McCaulley are on Threads, as are friends of mine Steven Hovater and Mark Slagle. Sandwich Analyst and friend Ben Lamb, table stakes. The one writer who I miss from Twitter is Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project. I find myself reaching for Threads even before Instagram. The algo is wonky (because I’m in Peru, I think), and there’s not a ton of content, but it’s been good.
The fact that most of the tech community I followed is over on Mastodon is a plus; maybe I can wean myself off of my obsession with the world of Apple. And now that I use an RSS client, the websites I know I want to read are in a designated place. So Threads exists for me in this happy medium of connecting with people over words and becoming a better person by leaning on others’ curiosity and expertise.
The Way Forward
I know that Threads is owned by Meta, which makes it tainted from birth. It doesn’t have a chronological timeline yet and no 3rd party access either. But I’m hoping that, at least for a time, it can just be, and that those of us there (read in Coach Beard’s voice: 78 followers for me so far, baby!) can enjoy sharing life and learning through words on a screen.