Hi there, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.
Last year, I left Twitter gradually, then all at once. Throughout 2024, Elon Musk’s wildly irresponsible stewardship of his social network—I refuse to call it X—left me increasingly disengaged. But the role he played in Donald Trump’s reelection proved to be my breaking point. As of this week, it’s been a year since my last tweet.
Now, I can’t claim to have abandoned Twitter entirely. I’m still lurking, though only sporadically. When my reporting for a story leads me there—it’s certainly one of the principal places people talk about AI—I go. Add up all my activity, and it amounts to maybe 2% of the time I once spent on the service. (Strangely enough, when I do check in, my feed is flooded with tweets from Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who’s still in federal prison but seemingly using the platform as an exercise in reputational repair.)
Largely weaning myself off the social network that served as my principal online hangout for more than 15 years has been an unalloyed blessing. Before I stopped tweeting, I felt increasingly embarrassed by my participation in a club led by Musk. The 12 months since then have been his most indefensible to date, from the pointless humanitarian nightmare inflicted by DOGE cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to Grok going Nazi. Being appalled from a distance has been far preferable to tweeting my way through it.
The fact that I’m a happy ex-Twitter addict isn’t just a moral stance. For all of Musk’s still-unfulfilled blather about turning Twitter into an “everything app,” the site is shrinking. That’s true in a literal, daily-active-users sense, where it’s now at risk of being consistently surpassed by Meta’s Threads. However, I’m thinking more of Twitter’s cultural relevance. The site that once aspired to be “the pulse of the planet” is clinging to the residue of what it once was. The tweets still flow, but the spark of life is gone.
That’s not a universally held opinion, of course. If there’s a case for staying on Twitter, it’s the one outlined by The Argument’s Jerusalem Desmas in a piece titled, well, “The case for staying on Twitter.” Calling it “the most influential public square we have,” she maintains that departing the site for an alternative such as Threads, Bluesky, or Mastodon amounts to deplatforming yourself.
If Twitter were a public square, her argument might be airtight. But public squares aren’t private enterprises operated to serve their owners’ interests. Twitter is. That’s true even before you consider Musk’s whim-based management, which has gamed the conversation in ways that consistently make it worse.
That said, I may have stayed on Twitter as long as I did in part because nothing else out there seemed any closer to being the internet’s one true forum. Certainly not its most populous rival, Threads: Every time Meta changes its mind about whether it wants to discourage or boost conversations about news and politics, it’s a reminder that the company is algorithmically shaping the discourse.
One of the lessons I’ve learned over the past year is that we don’t need a single, defining hub of Twitter-style conversation. Why resign yourself to tolerating Musk’s vision for social networking when you can assemble your own?
Instead of choosing between Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon, I’ve been posting to all three simultaneously using Openvibe. I’m also having fun with two apps that weave Bluesky and Mastodon posts together with items from RSS feeds and other sources: Flipboard’s Surf and Iconfactory’s Tapestry. And sometimes I use two fine single-service third-party apps: Graysky for Bluesky and Icecubes for Mastodon.
My new social network-of-networks is smaller than the one I once had on Twitter, where I peaked at around 95,000 followers. The quality of the conversation is excellent, though, in part because the vast majority of people whose tweets I once cared about are active on the services I use now. And Musk doesn’t get to pull any of the levers, though he does pop up as a character—most recently when Bluesky was awash in glee over Joyce Carol Oates eviscerating him on Twitter.
It’s to all the Twitter rivals’ credit that they’re partaking in the open ecosystem reflected in the various apps I’m running. (Bluesky and Mastodon are all in, while Threads is still dipping its toe.) Meanwhile, Musk has doubled down on Twitter’s long-standing policy of preventing people from using the service in any way except via its official apps and website. The service’s walled-off nature is yet another reason why it feels like it’s fading away.
I stopped tweeting because I couldn’t stand having my online identity wed to Musk’s any longer. Now I’m sorry I didn’t divorce myself from his mess earlier. We’ll never get the lovable Twitter of yore back, but I’m too busy enjoying my post-Twitter social networking life to be all that wistful.
You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on fastcompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at [email protected] with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard.
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