Looking back, me I think I can pinpoint the exact day I loved Twitter the most: May 24, 2011. I was in a small Oregon town for work, dealing with loneliness and stress in a shabby motel. With a 22-ounce bottle of high-proof beer, I passed the evening with a random assortment of tweets: an article I’d read about hunting wild garlic in Quebec, images of an apocalyptic mural in Los Angeles, my reasons for loving on the 1985 B-movie American Ninja. In a reflective moment, I also managed to make a heartfelt comment about my work: “The more social media makes journalism a game for everyone,” I mused, “the more I get inspired to dig deep into not digitized sources.”
To my surprise, that tweet received what seemed like an avalanche of approval at the time: a whopping six retweets, plus an admiring reply from a minor internet celebrity. This validation blew my mind: The account I’d always thought of as mere public scrap paper actually had an audience that found my wanderings worthwhile.
I kept chasing that same pinnacle for the next decade plus, but it proved elusive most of the time, even as my retweets occasionally soared into the thousands. As the platform exploded, I became self-conscious about drafting tweets. I was afraid that any slight misstep in wording or context would reveal to the masses that I am, in fact, an idiot. I regularly got sucked into trivial controversies over some expert’s stupid opinion; once the thrill of scrolling through the resulting dunks faded, I’d feel dirty for once again turning into a cog in the Global Outrage Machine.
There was nothing unique about the arc of my relationship with Twitter, of course. Almost everyone who became a hardcore user went through a honeymoon phase before posting gradually turned into a chore with diminishing psychic rewards and an increasing quotient of destructive abuse. My Twitter compatriots posted bewilderment at their inability to leave “this hell site”; our joy of being heard had turned into a fear of being ignored.
Last June was the end for me. I decided to take a break from Twitter until Labor Day, but early September came and went and I never returned to posting. I still used the platform as a search engine, a way to get in-the-spot coverage of breaking news and gritty highlights from paywalled football games, but even those visits became rarer over time.
I never thought of restarting my social media presence anywhere else until Elon Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter last fall. As the new regime fired hundreds of engineers and moderators, the platform quickly frayed. Service outages became routine, the algorithmic feed degenerated into a soup of useless tweets, and Musk continued to troll through it. As Twitter became an increasingly miserable place, I watched as the users on my timeline began to venture into new territory.
It started in October with a wave of defectors to Mastodon, an open source, ad-free, decentralized community hosted on an archipelago of independent servers. For a moment, everyone seemed to agree that this smart successor was destined to save social media. But the enthusiasm quickly waned as people struggled to navigate the platform’s sprawling “Fediverse” and the Twitter exodus poured elsewhere. Media obsessives were drawn to Post, a news platform founded by Noam Bardin, the former CEO of Waze. “Mastodon is complicated and unsatisfying,” Kelda Roys, a Democratic state senator from Wisconsin, tweeted. “Post could be a winner if there was critical mass.” Legions of gamers, meanwhile, flocked to Hive Social, an Instagram-influenced app run by a trio of recent college graduates. For all their differences, these platforms were unanimous in voicing one ambition: to recapture the spirit of “early Twitter.”
While I usually try to resist nostalgia, I was hoping that one of these new platforms would rekindle the elation I had felt in that Oregon motel. But all my test drives followed the same daunting trajectory. After an initial wave of excitement, I would lose interest within a few days. Mastodon’s labyrinthine structure was tricky, Post’s commentary was bland, and Hive’s app kept crashing. In the race to supplant Twitter, there was no clear winner in sight. And as the awfulness of the Bird app kept hitting new lows, it seemed the cycle of restless searching would drag on.
