There will never be “another” Twitter

And why you shouldn’t care

Twitter, as you know, is experiencing difficulties. I have had multiple Twitter accounts since the early days of it, so I’ve been watching it and posting for about 16 years. My first account is in the 10,000 — yes when I joined there were less than 11,000 other people on Twitter, and maybe a few bots, too. I’ve seen the platform grow and change, not always for the better, but I’m positive there will never be a perfect replacement for it, because there’s a history and because, for journalism and news, it’s the establishment. Assuming it survives, it will remain the de facto place for certain types of users.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest all have one thing in common. They are what techies call “silos”. In the first decade of the Internet, AOL and Compuserve were silos, or “walled gardens”. We were stuck in there, and in the early days you couldn’t even email to anyone not in that same service. You have heard more about federation since the Twitter ownership because unpredictable. Certain kinds of people are arriving en masse to federated sites. Mastodon seems to be the most affected, showing huge growth in user numbers in the past week or two. It looks something like Twitter, but the goal in its design was not to replace Twitter, simply to have a similar interface, like Yammer (purchased by Microsoft), social.net and several other social networks. It is my feeling that there are two types of people jumping on Mastodon.