Thirty on Bluesky and 24 on Mastodon over the weekend. Fifty-two since yesterday on Threads. Probably some on Post.news, though I haven’t checked. Whenever Twitter has another fit, I get bursts of new followers on the many copies of the one social network that remains, for now, an indispensable tool for people trying to understand the news.

Well, they’re not new followers. They’re old followers, looking for ways to maintain the connections that Elon Musk has seemed determined to break since buying Twitter last fall.

I’ve built up about 19,400 followers, many of them real people, through reporting on everything from local zoning to federal politics. Not just an audience, they’ve added invaluable context, corrected errors, pointed me to new things. New sources can check me out in a jiffy when I approach them. 

Musk’s ceaseless messing with Twitter’s social qualities—turning a flawed identity-verification system into something even worse, letting Nazis back on, slashing the platform-safety teams—have been bad but endurable. Crank up filters, block and mute, and it’s OK. (Being a white guy probably helps).

But last weekend’s weird throttling of service, possibly brought on by an accidental denial-of-service attack by Twitter against itself, is yet another sign that Twitter’s wiring is gnawed by rats. It’s survived longer than some expected when Musk began cutting last fall and he’s got a rah-rah new CEO, but between the wobbly tech and the red ink, it seems increasingly possible that one morning Twitter just won’t load.

Meta’s Threads is the latest attempt to supplant it. Threads has had less than a day in the wild, to be fair, but it’s a strange product that feels rushed—bolted into Instagram, with no mechanism for seeing only the posts of people you’ve chosen to follow, let alone anything fancier. Whole lot of strangers posting about their coffees this morning. And for now no desktop version, only a mobile app.

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg boasted in a Threads post today of 30 million signups, though he admitted “we’ve got a lot of work ahead to build out the app.” Yes. Also, if Meta’s threat to clear Canadian news links off its properties includes Threads—something Meta is “currently assessing,” spokesperson David Troya-Alvarez told The Logic—then it’ll be tough to discuss current events there.

Mastodon and the “fediverse” (which Meta says Threads will eventually join) offer the most Twitter-like interface, but needing to understand words like “fediverse” to start using it seems a barrier to adoption. Bluesky is still in beta, invite-only. Post seems dead.

All of them, including Twitter, are inferior versions of what Twitter was a year ago.

Anyone who ever treated Twitter as a full digital version of the public square was making a grave mistake, but it has long been great for nerds—all kinds of nerds. Tech nerds, transit nerds, foreign-policy nerds, “Succession” nerds, crypto nerds, cooking nerds, menswear nerds, dog nerds. Virus nerds and Russian-military nerds. Submersible nerds, lately. 

You have to be wary of pretenders and flat-out liars, heaven knows, but if you are, the genuine experts and practitioners are there alongside politicians and policymakers and smart analysts and subject-matter enthusiasts. When something happens, you can find out fast what people who spend their lives paying attention to such things are thinking.

If Twitter did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. If Twitter—or Twitter as we knew it—ceases to exist, we will need a replacement. We don’t have one yet.