It's been more than two years – 768 days, to be exact – since Elon Musk bought Twitter. They have been filled with many things. But one very obvious thing has happened for each of those days: someone would predict that this one would surely be the last.
And yet, through everything, Twitter – or now X – has limped on. People claimed that Musk firing the vast majority of its staff would force it to stop working, but it still did. Others suggested that the exodus of advertisers would make it financial unviable, but Musk continued to fund it. Probably the most common threat was that people would stop using it and it would serve little purpose.
The other complaints did actually come good, just not dramatically: the site does not work quite as reliably as it once did, and it has not introduced any new features; advertisers have boycotted the site and it is only Musk's vast personal wealth that keeps it going. But it has been much harder to judge just how big that exodus has been: it never happened en masse, as some predicted, but it felt like it was happening, in ways so small that they were almost impossible to measure.
Until, that is, recent weeks. Since the election – and Musk's leading role in it – it feels that X has changed in deep and fundamental ways. More and more, people are refusing to post on it; the gap is taken up by posts that feel low-effort, offer little value and are quite often emotionally or ethically outrageous. At the same time, at least in my personal circles, people are more actively moving to competitors like Bluesky.
The very fact that Bluesky and Threads are no longer simply "Twitter alternatives" but whole sites to themselves marks a major change that is worth remarking on itself. Those apps might never be a "new Twitter"; there might never be such a thing again. But they are other Twitters, or things with something of the same force; X is no longer the Twitter, which in itself could be terminal.
The pull of Twitter in its glory days was always that you had to be there – that you would miss out, or would at least fear it, and that you would look like you were failing if you didn't keep up with it. That, now, is no more. It won't lead to a great death; there will be no spectacular bang in which people stop posting on the site. But there was never going to be a grand moment that pushed everyone off X. Instead, it was always a question of when it lost its pull; as of recent days, that fear of missing out doesn't look quite so anxiety-inducing.
Each day, that pull will lose its effect, and fewer people will log on fewer times. One of them might be the last. And the final tragedy of Twitter might be that you don't even notice.
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