There will NEVER be another Twitter

Part II

Randy Resnick
3 min readOct 1, 2023
Birds flying over a river

In the first part, I mentioned that Twitter was more than just a website or an app: Initially, it was a platform that many found perplexing, often filled with mundane posts about lunch sandwiches, step counts from fitness trackers, and other trivial matters. However, as time passed, it attracted a global audience, including wine enthusiasts — wine has always been huge on the web, just behind porn — and journalists from various fields. By 2010, it had evolved into a news hub, unparalleled in its uniqueness and widely referenced by various media outlets. Everyone involved in any form of communication was present on the platform — from subway lines and cities to scientists and elected officials. Despite Facebook’s advantages in terms of post length, hosting capabilities, and a larger user base, Twitter held its ground until 2016. The turning point was the American election campaign which led to an influx of automated posts. By mid-2017, the platform became highly contentious, marking the onset of its current toxicity, further exacerbated in October 2022 by a change in management. By November 2022, a mass exodus of users, desperate to find their “friends” or news sources, registering on Mastodon.

So why can’t there be another Twitter?

Because there are at least 5 twitter-like sites and there will probably be more to come. At this moment in time, there is not one site that attracts all the communicants.

A squre of four screen captures of four sites: Mastodon, Bluesky, Spoutible and Pebble (formerly t2).
Four candidates to replace Twitter: Mastodon/Elk, Bluesky, Spoutible and Pebble (formerly t2)

As you can see in the image, the visual functionality of Twitter is basically replicated by all four sites. The are important differences in features and philosophies, but they look pretty much like the ‘birdsite’. I think it’s fair to say that the big communicants from Twitter are either still on Twitter and also on the other five, being most active on Bluesky and Threads, with handles reserved on all of them. The biggest question is, do people have the time and energy to be on several platforms until things shake out, if they ever do?

I know this could never happen, but had the founders of Bluesky, Pebble and Spoutible been a coalition together, that site might just have been the destination for the news, science, culture and PR folks. Threads just muddies the waters, although it could become the alternative everyone wants, except that it’s part of Meta, the company everyone loves to hate.

Can the clock be turned back to the point where there’s one site that rules in the same way Facebook did it its prime, and maybe still does for a segment of the population and the world? I think it’s more likely an explosion will happen and the Internet will go back to being a lot of independent sites and the consumers of news and the other content will be collected by RSS readers. The only key missing then is the ability to have two-way discussion. There are protocols that can do this. You could open your morning feed, as you read, respond to things, engage as always, but on hundreds, thousands of different platforms. How will all this be monetised? I’m sure the winners will find a way.

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Randy Resnick
Randy Resnick

Written by Randy Resnick

Ex-Bluesbreaker, still active in composing, playing and recording my own music and helping other artists distribute their music on the Each Hit Music label

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