There will NEVER be another Twitter
Part I
There will never will be anything to replace what Twitter was.
Why? Twitter wasn’t just software or visible leadership (for better or worse) but an entire important slice of Internet history. Trying to reproduce it out of its context can not work. Over a few middle years of its existence, Twitter assembled large groups and became an important channel of communication over those years.
Some other thing will come along with a similar impact but it won’t be a “new Twitter”.
Taking the world of wine, for example, wine enthusiasts and professionals had a lot of forums where people met, many were successful. In the years when Twitter went mainstream (that is, most people on the net had heard of it), wine lovers and professionals gradually came en masse and started chatting about wine, exchanging tasting notes, etc. The professionals, including the most respected names, came on board. Twitter became the default channel for wine talk. Also, as wine is produced in other countries than America, these wine capitals like Bordeaux, and countries like Spain, Italy, Germany, etc. all wanted a presence. Wine critics, clubs, stores, auction houses all showed up. You can find and talk to producers of wine all over the world.
Mastodon would be the ideal place for the same end result, but right now, I don’t think that’s ready to happen. Actually, I think if no one everspoke of federation and protocols, pretending Mastodon was just another place, the onboarding would be happening at a greater degree. I think these ideas muddy the waters for the average user. The biggest thing is obviously instance choice. Because the federated world is constantly growing, organizing an accurate list of instances is a challenge.
I joined Twitter in October 2006, my user number is in the 10,000s. Jack’s cellphone number was on the front page. No one knew what it was for. People posted things like “Ham sandwich for lunch”. Then came the foolishness of tweeting your weight or daily step count (see API, below). Eventually, some started posting realtime local news. Major media came onboard. I think that may have been the real beginning of Twitter’s golden years, when it reached a critical masse of authentic sources. During those years, we put a lot of wine producers on the map. We saw the growth as it happened.
Many of the constructive things on Twitter came because of the API (Application Programming Interface). Innumerable creative programmers used this in an infinite number of ways, adding much value. One of my own modest creations was a weekly tasting note for the site of world-renowned Burgundy critic The Burghound. I used PHP to tweet an excerpt of a random report weekly from the site with a link to the full article. Twitter was once chock full of this kind of thing.
I do not believe one should think of Post, Spoutible, BlueSky and whatever else is out there as potential Twitter replacements. That time has passed.
