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I understand what you mean not wanting to deal with politics, but tbh you’re on a website filled with people (and bots depending if you believe dead internet theory). Politics affects more and more people everyday. At this point if you can afford to not pay attention that’s a privilege.

Threads, more or less, has replaced Twitter for me. It has the real time news, funny accounts, & social connections that Twitter had before fuckface ruined everything. They're just slow to add necessary features. Not Bluesky slow, but still...

The kind of people who these guys want to come back all quit Twitter because quitting Twitter was the cool hip thing to do and didn't really think about why it was they'd gotten on Twitter in the first place.

Good take.

It was the friends we made along the way. Black Twitter was a masterclass and I learned.

I've heard some good things about a Canadian social network called hey.cafe (no US servers, no CLOUD Act), and there's BlueSky as well - there are still good things about the Internet, it's just that a lot of them get drowned out by the voices of people who can afford mass marketing.

This is what people need to realize. Same deal with the legacy media, and with the entertainment oligopoly. The old world is dead or dying. You can't get it back by staying on twitter, watching cbs news, or subscribing to wapo. Mourn and move on, the only way out is through.

But Dan! Imagine being a reporter and having to work to find sources! You might have to, I dunno, DO REPORTING? Call people on the phone? Find sources outside of a social media search? THINK OF THE REPORTERS DAN.

Going to go sit with this for the rest of my life.

I both appreciate Dan's post and really find your overall argument very compelling and stirring. Thank you :)

The worst people ever are the ones who read up on how to peg the algorithm. I’ve said for at least a decade that relying on SM for news was insanity. It’s part of an even bigger problem of people expecting quality things for free and then lying to themselves that the worse yet free version is equal.

There was politics and humor! Here is ok, but it’s missing something.

Maybe that's really the thing: The modern internet is a microcosm of wealth inequality.

Thing is it got ruined before. The advent of influencers ruined everything.

99% of content written by 1% of users (a user base which was roughly 35% of the US in the US). If you identified with that content then great but it wasn’t for everyone. Never used it myself. Don’t deny Bluesky is smaller but do deny Twitter was as big as people think it was. Didn’t work for lots.

I can’t believe you’re now having to explain chronological time

I try to tell myself this every day, dan. it's so hard. I'm on the verge of throwing my phone in the sea and getting a landline.

SO MUCH THIS

A typical thing on my local one is for someone to say "Remember what used to be here?" then others remember about six different things. Many of them "remember" things that have not been there since before they were born.

bsky.app/profile/damo...

Not the “entire” my child.

I'd like SOME things to go back to the way they were before Trump's ride down that escalator, when we had a semi-functioning democracy that needed a lot of work. But I was 20 when the Vietnam War ended. If you think I'm happy that he's returning us to those days, you're crazier than he is.

It’s kinda like saying something about north Brooklyn in 2026 if you lived there in the late oughts. Like sure it physically still exists in the same place but it’s a fundamentally different thing now.

I think wistfully of Gawker. It wasn't perfect by a long shot, but still miss it. Miss OG Jezebel too Peter Theil is indeed evil.

We made it too easy

I think that this has a lot to do w/ who you follow and when you got here. I feel like the info in my feed is informative and legit, for the most part, and that I don't long for the days where I blindly trusted, checking out sources has to be a thing cultivating your feed is essential, is my point

I mean, social media killed off all of society’s attention span, polarized people, induced depression even pre and post musk.

people say this but whatever garbage they're seeing, I'm not

Yes. There has been a huge, unreported exodus of government folks from X to LinkedIn, past and present. The quality of the shares & conversations is underappreciated & underreported; many people tell me they find my work there because it’s the only social media they use. Dismissing it is foolish.

i only really lurk on linkedin but it could be a lot worse given the current landscape

I loved Web 1.0.

This is the start of an essay about techno-conservatism (lowercase c) that neither of us has time to write. The web has been around long enough for a growing contingent to miss multiple eras of “the old days.”

yeah I happen to think this place is decent as 2026 social media goes but you cannot step into the same river twice and certainly not if that river is from 2014

Truth. When I get nostalgic for Twitter *then*, I remember that *then* itself was just so different. Musk killed whatever remnant was left, but the era was gone even before that.

Twitter was already in a steep decline before Musk bought it, though of course he made it much worse.

“Independent journalism” as some replacement is just silly. You’re not going to find someone on Substack successfully covering your local court system. The people who succeed there cover what will peg the ol’ algorithms. You will get politics, sports and super niche channels.

Jesus every month the same stuff about why the Nazi site is better. It's old and tired.

As a veteran of several MMOs (not proud of this), you will not get the launch experience again, no matter what they do.

I understand that reference.

My version of this is that it somehow hit the sweet spot of scale, diversity of thought (or interest, or expertise), guardrails and user experience to work across multiple use cases. X lost at least three of those post-Elmo, Bluesky and Threads struggle on a couple as well.

Jeff Tweedy is the best showman in concerts at theatre venues. His interactions with the crowd are funny and enjoyable. He picks the best venues to perform, here in Los Angeles. I love him.

OMG. You are an ICON sir.

humans are annoying humans online are insufferable

yes, because it's entirely different than it used to be

I’m not sure why so many people think we all must bury our face into the scratchy pillow of politics with every post. Does anyone enjoy that in real life? I get way more video game stuff than I care for, but at least these people kinda sorta touch grass.

Sure that helps but this isn't then by a mile, it's just not

😢

The old Twitter had great depth of content and interaction that I've not found elsewhere. It did require a large blocklist, especially to contain the bots.

Why? Because of something I can only describe as perceived uncoolness, mostly made of: Lack of a shared generational sense of humor, lack of content regarding interests, and in the case of bsky, most people either don't know about it or has a rep for being home to the most annoying breed of leftist.

"Something good existed, so a billionaire bought it expressly to kill it." is the 21st Century in one line.