I remember it was around 2008 when I first came across Twitter. Oh boy, the moment I saw that website, I fell in love with it.
I had been a heavy user of microblogging - particularly Twitter - ever since. I used to share random thoughts, post interesting links, and retweet things I found interesting. I also tried almost every microblogging platform that was around at the time: Jaiku, Google Buzz, Plurk, Pownce - you name it, and I probably used it. I still remember using many of these services with my friends and family. It felt personal, casual, and fun.
Fast-forward ten years, and most of those microblogging websites had disappeared. Twitter was still around, but it was no longer the product I had fallen in love with. It had slowly become something else entirely.
My followers were no longer my family and friends. Instead, they were mostly a bunch of random strangers. I continued using Twitter, but mainly as a place to broadcast updates about the apps and websites I was building and to retweet things I found interesting. It wasn’t personal anymore. None of my family members were using it, and only a few of my friends were still around.
Then Elon Musk bought Twitter, and for me, that was the final nail in the coffin. With all the chaos surrounding the platform, I eventually deleted my account.
After Twitter, I tried Pebble (formerly T2), Bluesky, and Mastodon, but none of them ever felt like home. Eventually, I stopped using all of them. I even tried running my own ActivityPub-based service for a while, but honestly, it wasn’t worth the time and effort.
Even as a software engineer, understanding things like ActivityPub and AT Protocol wasn’t particularly easy. I can only imagine how confusing these concepts must be for regular users. And now, the people I want to follow are scattered across different platforms that don’t always interoperate easily. I have to rely on various hacks and workarounds just to make these different pieces work together.
In my opinion, open protocols and decentralised social platforms, despite their good intentions, have made the social web more fragmented rather than less.
People often talk about these new platforms as the saviours of social media, but, to be honest, I don’t think any of them have solved the fundamental problem. If anything, they have added another layer of complexity to an already complicated social web.
And perhaps that’s why microblogging has lost its charm - at least for me.
I’ve now moved back to good old-fashioned long-form blogging. Instead of trying to squeeze my thoughts into short posts and scattered timelines, I’m using this website as a place to slow down, write more, and reflect on myself.
Maybe that’s what I was looking for all along.