Ten years ago I helped build a web site that served pony radio stations. It was my pride and joy, and I poured my soul into it, and it showed in the code. Six years ago, that project was taken from me and put on semipermanent "life support", with no engineers maintaining it, but with a server that could cheaply host it almost forever.
For six years, I've watched it from afar. It never died, but it never truly lived either. Bit by bit, little chunks of it have stopped working. Other companies have retired APIs, some data sources just stopped existing, and protocols advanced and the app never kept up. The OS, the server, and the web scripting went from up-to-date to end-of-life to having dangerous unpatched vulnerabilities. It's a fragile, paper-thin sitting duck. Anything could knock it over.
And, truth be told, I wish something would. Watching something you're passionate about wither away slowly as a sad shell of its former self is, in many ways, harder to deal with than having it just shut down one day. There's no closure, no way to decisively tell everyone "it's over, pack it up, let's go somewhere else". There is no "post-that-site" period.
This isn't meant to be an apt metaphor for what will happen with Twitter. We don't know what will happen with Twitter. It's just something I've been thinking about a lot, because it shaped how important it is for me that services stay "alive at all costs". I've seen that happen, and it hurts like hell, and I'm just preparing myself mentally to watch it happen again.