it's not original to remark upon. but one of the most interesting things about the fall of twitter and the rush to readymade replacements is how they really do just recapture the form of the thing, in some inevitably marred way, but this ends up mainly highlighting how much of the twitter experience was less about the website and more a kind of culture and feeling its history produced. twitter was twittr and it was launched as a normie micro-journaling website where you said shit like "got a big meeting today!" and posted pictures of your lunch. you did it with those newfangled phones with cameras and internet on them and could ONLY use 140 characters. but what happened was this: suddenly you and a thousand strangers could text message each other. communities consolidated. voices became distinct. you could talk about watching TV live with everyone watching the same show. twittr became Twitter because people found something else to do with it. twitter became Twitter due to a combination of celebs drawn in by the novelty and a bunch of people using the platform against its stated purpose and posting deranged shit (sometimes these were also, surprisingly but crucially, the celebs). twitter became what it was because its developers added things we think of as basic functionalities, like faves and retweets, based on behaviors users had an interest in performing for each other, had invented the language for, independent of them. for a while twitter felt nice because it always carried the sense you were using the thing in a way it wasn't quite meant to be. and now there's all these apps where the pitch is "hey use this like Twitter"
Fun extra fact that I'm realizing zoomers may not know: the 140 character limit wasn't something Twitter chose arbitrarily. It was a consequence of the fact that you could receive tweets (including a username) via SMS text message, and those were limited to 160 characters by the protocol.

