Since Elon Musk took over Twitter in late October, there’s been a way that the ship is sinking, with the platform’s customers scurrying offboard to security. Musk’s actions, from mass layoffs to impulsive function modifications, have prompted widespread (if obscure) hypothesis that Twitter itself will quickly stop to exist, on account of chapter, technical failure, or a mix of the 2. And whereas the platform’s future is unsure, its present plight is an excessive model of one of many web’s enduring qualities: Everything is continually altering. We are nomadic in our platform utilization, shifting from one platform to the subsequent—usually involuntarily. And our ongoing efforts to interchange what we’ve left behind are by no means totally profitable. Whether we cobble collectively a post-Twitter existence throughout a collection of Mastodon and Discord servers or migrate our earnest skilled posting to LinkedIn, no mixture will totally substitute Twitter (even when we’re higher off because of this). 

If a longtime web person compares their present on-line habits with that going again a decade—or perhaps a few years—important variations will likely be obvious, as this animation demonstrates. New platforms are continually rising as others die out. TikTok solely debuted in 2016, whereas Myspace had entered its closing demise spiral by 2011. Tumblr sputtered out within the mid-2010s on account of a collection of possession transfers (earlier than rising again as a symbolic relic of a bygone web). Some platforms merely turn into out of date, usurped by superior alternate options, undermined by broader technological traits just like the rise of cell, or duplicated by a competitor. And then there are platforms like Clubhouse, which loved a burst of explosive reputation earlier than petering out. At the person degree, we age out of sure platforms and into others or just exhaust their potentialities and lose curiosity.

A number of platforms, nevertheless, have remained very important for nearly everything of the social media period: LinkedIn (launched in 2003), Facebook/Meta (2004), YouTube (2005), and Twitter (2006). Now Twitter’s relative stability is abruptly threatened. A full shutdown nonetheless appears unbelievable—Twitter will most probably stagger ahead in some recognizable kind. But for individuals who show to be severe about quitting Twitter, the age-old query stays: Where to go subsequent? Or fairly, how does one reassemble all of Twitter’s advantages outdoors of Twitter and probably throughout an array of apps and platforms? What have been Twitter’s important options, and the place else can they be discovered? Nearly 1,000,000 customers are estimated to have left Twitter within the first week after Elon Musk took over, in order that’s a query plenty of individuals are already asking (after all, many will simply find yourself returning to Twitter, assuming it nonetheless exists).

Max Read not too long ago imagined the aftermath of a situation wherein Musk paywalls all of Twitter and irreparably degrades the platform: “Tech workers decamp to LinkedIn and Hacker News; academics set up a series of semi-functional Mastodon instances … underemployed TV writers start overlapping, poorly produced political podcasts; sports fans go back to talk radio, message boards, and maybe Twitch streams.”

Read’s listing highlights the incompleteness of any single substitute for Twitter. Many choices, comparable to message boards and speak radio, even predate Twitter, implying a regression to the previous. Mastodon—a federated community of self-hosted social community companies with options much like Twitter’s—has emerged because the closest direct substitute, but it surely lacks the identical cultural centrality and can most likely not attain it anytime quickly. Twitter’s best energy, arguably, is its perceived standing as a digital public sq.: Everyone necessary appears to collect directly, and consequential issues occur there. Mastodon is unlikely to duplicate that.

It’s tempting to imagine that the market will rapidly furnish sufficient replacements for tech merchandise that decline or die out, but it surely’s troublesome to recreate the particular bundle of options, customers, and content material {that a} main platform like Twitter affords. Google’s notorious discontinuation of Google Reader in 2013 exemplified this: Other options, like RSS, may do what Reader did, however they weren’t seamlessly built-in into Google’s platform, which was a serious supply of Reader’s usefulness. Nearly a decade later, individuals nonetheless mourn Google Reader, suggesting that no true substitute was ever created.