Twitter Returns, Uhm ... That's the Post

Permalink

Follow me via:

---

Text-to-speech support required

Although many people still call “X” by its birthname, the … original rightsholders? Or, something? Have decided to launch a new app by the name of “twitter.now,” promising that we’re about to “take back the town square” and that it belongs to us! A familiar line of branding that you’ve probably heard once or twice, or ninety seven times before. And, if you take a glance at their homepage, their entire identity is, “We’re not Elon Musk.” And they want 20 bucks so that you can be their guinea pig. But, what’s this all about?

Twitter.now, for all intents and purposes, appears to be yet another closed-network social media app. Except the framing is that, it’s basically exactly what Bluesky was doing and promising from the start, but with a 20 dollar ask for registration, and no open protocol. You got that right! Your data doesn’t belong to you, on this apparently brand new social site, in the year 2026.

That’s how we’ll take back social media. By making ourselves beholden to yet even more strangers who can erase your entire digital existence on a whim.

But hey, at least they won’t sell your data?

Or, that’s what they claim.

Anybody whose been around for the past seven or eight years, and hasn’t just stuck to Old Twitter the entire time, probably knows that launching a new social app without an open protocol is a death sentence. It’s what happened to Ello, and it’s what happened to Cohost. Being stuck behind a wall where the entire app’s success relies on how many people sign up for your app, specifically, is doomed to fail from the start.

Why would I pay you 20 dollars to preserve a username and begin posting on your app, when I can just log onto my own server, that I own, where nobody can ban me, where I maintain full control over user and content moderation, and post whatever I want to the Fediverse and ATProtocol simultaneously?

Do you see what I’m getting at here?

So many people want to return to the ethos of the 90s internet, and that ethos is entirely, “Own your data, create whatever you want.” And that’s what open protocols are all about. Your Twitter 2.0 is, apparently, none of those things. Your entire investment is based on the idea that people care more about the name of an app, over what it actually has to offer.

And right now, twitter.now appears to offer … basically nothing you can’t get somewhere else.

I am not intrigued.