I think "is X the next Twitter" is the wrong question to ask.

When I started working at Twitter (now years ago) my relatives asked me if they should join. And after thinking about it, my honest answer was "no". The only person who needs to be on Twitter is somebody who wants to feel like they're part of a global conversation. Most people just don't and won't.

Twitter is only successful because it started in an era where that was a novel and appealing idea, and because it developed a critical mass of users. Both traditional participants in that conversation (journalists, politicians, media personalities, etc) and new ones (like dril) came on board. It is now gradually losing that critical mass.

These days there are just too many options tuned to too many sets of needs. Mastodon will get a chunk of those people, as will existing social media properties. But I don't think we'll ever again see a global groupchat at the scale of Twitter. Assuming Musk persists in running it into the ground, I think in a decade's time Twitter will be in that bucket with MySpace or SixDegrees, one of those early-internet things that people remember with varying degrees of fondness but would never go back to using.

I think Twitter's popularity and endurance suggests that there is interest in that global groupchat.

What's unclear to me is whether or not there is enough money in it to make it worth maintaining/moderating.

I'm not saying there's no interest in global groupchat. I'm saying that after Twitter dies, there will be insufficient critical mass in any one spot to have a global groupchat.

TBH, I really like Facebook's groups in terms of UX and maintainer level. I don't like FB themselves though, and their warnings are sometimes just at a level of insane.

Keep thinking I'd like to create an easy button for FB groups like self-hosted community setups. Then you can control/host your own interest group... add in live group chats (that FB used to have for groups) and just have a centralized auth and search that are opt-in.

It may be losing a critical mass for a certain user base but it’s a small user base that everyone else disliked anyways.

Honestly, the product is better than it has been. And there’s a wider range of voices. Non-political content is thriving as well. I’ve been exposed to accounts I’d never seen with the new “For You” feeds.

I see. As somebody who left Twitter, I'm glad somebody finally had the courage to tell me that everyone always disliked me. At last, the truth.

Ok, probably a poor word choice by me. I guess what I was trying to say is a number of people that left came across as self important and that Twitter would somehow be less good without them and someone else taking their space.

The truth is, very few people are missed. Others have filled the gaps. The algorithm wins.

Everyone I talked to who worked at or joined Twitter early on talks about how they felt like they were part of a global conversation but it was always really puzzling to me. I read Twitter occasionally in the early days but most of my friends were on IRC or GChat, with a lot being offline, and my networks migrated but never got onto Twitter. Twitter never really felt that relevant to me and over time it felt like it only got more not less insular. I lurked on it the way I lurked on tons of IRC channels. Once IRC began to fade, early Reddit (from the founding) was where I found the community I was looking for.

My feeling as an outsider is that Twitter was useful and valuable ("high engagement") for the folks who enjoyed the culture that built up on the platform, but for everyone else it was always a bit insular and self-important. Since Twitter's founding, more and more online communities and spaces have sprung up, so if Twitter does indeed decline in usage its regulars will diffuse into the many other alternatives that have sprung up.

That's my $0.02 at least as someone who's watched from the sidelines for a couple decades.

I mean, every platform develops its culture and attracts the people who enjoy that culture. If it's not for you, nothing wrong with that.

But I think "insular" is a funny word to use here, in that it being one giant space meant that self-segregation was a much harder choice to make than on, say, HN or a given subreddit. The thing that always kept me using it was the great variety of voices there. Some of my favorite people to follow were not the ones saying much, but the ones with excellent editorial judgment about who to retweet, exposing me to so many different perspectives.

Twitter is indeed a place with a lot of interests and topics but after the initial period it built up a pretty unique culture. As you say, it's just an aspect of platforms. But there was something unique about how Twitter folks really felt like their network was the "global conversation" that I never felt elsewhere, even though it felt just as self-selecting as the other networks.

Early Reddit definitely attracted a pretty interesting, insular bunch but there was never any feeling that Redditors were creating a similar global network. I was on IRC channels that had Americans, Europeans, Indians, Singaporeans, and Hong Kongers but we all knew we were weird. There was always something unique about Twitter users that made them think of their space as a global village, and I think the large presence of journalists and MSM friendliness was a big part of that.

Twitter also managed to create a product that its sticky users loved in a way that I'm not sure any other network managed. Redditors loved Reddit but not nearly as much as Twitter users liked Twitter. Whatever it was I hope product folks study it closely.

Sorry, I'm not getting what you're not getting. IRC channels and subreddits are defined around special interests. There is a thing that unifies people. Sometimes that topic can have a well-distributed membership, but there is always a selection bias that comes from the chosen topic bias.

Twitter is unique in that it had both wide international reach and no topic structure. Reddit is an engine for shutting you off from 99.9% of the Reddit discussion. Twitter, for better and for worse, didn't and couldn't do that.

As you say, the journalists were definitely part of that. To the extent a global conversation existed previously, it was among journalists and the people they covered, like major politicians, NGO heads, and the like. Twitter expanded and disintermediated that. Suddenly you could hear from all those media subjects directly. And even more unusually, you could try to join in, speaking directly to people previously unreachable, maybe even getting replies. One major motivator for people joining Twitter was exactly that, as the Waiting for Bieber art piece demonstrated: https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/waiting-for-bieber

The only platform with anything like that reach was email. And although email has global reach, it isn't a global stage like Twitter was. No other platform has that, and I doubt one ever will.

I’m with you on this. I suspect with hindsight the Twitter story will have “self importance” and traditional cultural factors like journalism and political institutional buy-in as major factors behind its apparent significance. Its friendliness mainstream media and news, where it was perfect for news that hashtag trending could be monitored.

Did any other platform ever get so much attention from mainstream media?

> that help make twitter feel lively

But also that help make twitter feel like a constant outrage factory that impacts negatively on a lot of people's mental health. I got off of twitter a year ago (deleted my account after 14 years,even) and I'm really appreciating mastodon's less addictive, less "lively"ness.

Imho it was the quote tweets that were the big problem, those were mostly for directing lynch mobs.

I just find the "follows of follows" or "include some frequently-favorited users" that twitter does for the algorithmic view is useful for expanding and finding more interesting content.