It may happen more frequently on the timescale of human history, but my firsthand opportunities to actually watch someone repeatedly and earnestly implement the answer to "what exactly would I do if I were in a comedy sketch, either deliberately or accidentally ruining everything?" have been few. But we'll get to that.

My first Twitter post was in 2009, and the last was this week. Over 13,000 posts in total, including replies.

When I decided it was time to leave Facebook and rebuild my main site, Twitter was my remaining social account. For its gaping faults, Facebook was great at connecting people who already knew each other. Shutting that down meant networking with only a relative handful of my friends or acquaintances.

Twitter's original format was radical at the time. In a world of online journals, the challenge was succinctness: convey your thoughts in 140 characters. It wasn't clear what it would be used for. Random thoughts, jokes, moods? All of those, it seemed. There were apparently open APIs and a flourishing of third-party apps, one of which is credited with the idea of a bird-shaped logo and the new sense of "tweet". It seemed pretty lighthearted.

And it would prove popular. Not just for nerds. Twitter scaled and gained such technical nimbleness that it became commoner not just to visit, but to "hang out" there. With replies and quotability, micro-blogging was used more like direct messaging. Users would keep it open to congregationally react to news. The platform earned enough general respect and investment to become a reliable place to get those updates, before even traditional media could break them. Apple supplied widgets to tweet right from the Mac and iPhone's system interfaces. In a first for the Internet, movie stars and public figures began appearing en masse. It was arguably the first time since the rise of Hollywood that the firmanent beneath celebrities seemed to fade, in a strong and overdue reminder that we were all just people. That was Twitter as I'll remember it.

The platform had its minor flaws too, of course. The ease of use and passiveness about self-identification meant anyone (or anything) could join, hurl something resembling an opinion, and bolt, perhaps bringing the modern sense of "troll" to higher awareness. The platform's aesthetics were subject to taste. The convention of prepending a pseudonym with "@" in place of something tidily pronounceable, let alone an actual name, remains a dreary commonality. But compared to the appalling underpinnings of Facebook as they were emerging, these were just imperfections.

Until 2022, of course.

In retrospect, it was as though the moment Elon walked into the foyer with that sink was the moment the Dixieland band spun up with Panama (thank you, gentlemen). Elon's exit into the building would be followed by the first in a series of loud crashes and dull explosions, punctuated with a few bird feathers.

Fully detailing the hundreds of inept, silly and stupid remarks, changes and decisions symbolized by that imagery is a task many, including Twitter's users, have smartly taken up, and we needn't do it again. To summarize: many of the staff were promptly fired, the trusted identity verification program for well-known figures has been replaced with a universally-available monthly credit card fee for a resultingly meaningless icon, the repetitive bots and ads aren't just wallpaper but have largely replaced the content, rhetoric of free speech has belied targeted bans and a rise in compliance with government censorship requests, the platform-level notifications have been bizarrely tampered with, the third-party APIs have been thrown out, the beloved notion of the "tweet" disowned, several platform crashes have proved remediable only by manually removing local browsing data stored by the platform itself, and the technical garden walls have been sealed almost all the way around. It became barely possible to tell who was real, let alone to cordially meet and chat with another person. "Lighthearted" is generally not to be found. A platform-wide name change was attempted which years later still hasn't taken. The reserve of earned respect and prestige has essentially dissolved. What's left today is something that feels more like the growing churn of apathy, artifice and money in a pressure cooker. The clarinet soloist passes it to the trumpet, and we await the next muffled sound of a box of something thrown down a staircase.

They're remarkable, those few opportunities I've had. There have always been wackier and more obscure social networks that one notices but feels no particular pull to engage with, and it's been fascinating, watching with disbelieving and amused awe, as Twitter has settled into their ranks, before I arrived at the moment of those final clicks.

Facebook and Twitter were giants in this first era of the Internet. For years it seemed this was the new state of the world, and no competitor could outdo them. What's exceptionally interesting about these events is that competitors didn't have to outdo them. They essentially defeated themselves, through deliberate choices, each within 20 years of starting. It turns out Twitter's competitors didn't have to do better than Twitter – they just had to provide the unadultered basic ingredients that Twitter began failing to. Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky and others gained millions of new users just by showing up.

As with Facebook, I took some time to message the few real people I wanted to thank and let know where I'd be. Unlike's Facebook two dozen, this list contained just a few, and those short exchanges were the humanest flecks of time I'd spent there in ages.

One point I've heard for not closing one's Twitter account is retention of the username – even if you're not using it, no one else can assume your preferred identity there.

The point I found more convincing? I might have continued to use my account exclusively to share links to my own site, relegating the platform to the role of a tool rather than a second home. But I arrived at the question: just who am I expecting to reach that way? Elon has spoken, and the 44 billion have been spent rearranging something benevolent into an infinite ticket booth for people who behold the inside of that pressure cooker believing it's more or less reality. Visible counters affirm that even with hundreds of followers, it's foolish to believe it's seriously there to help its original users reach each other. All considered, it seems more efficient not even to expend the occasional seconds of effort sharing links there.

The anticipated sense of relief was indeed refreshing. But the truly hopeful ending concerns the wider Internet.

When shining skyscrapers collapse under their own weight and the dust finally settles, it begins to feel as though the humbler marketplaces, community centres and residential areas deserve another look.

The ways of the earlier Internet and Web, with its forums and personal sites, had perhaps receded from the front of the world's minds, but it's always quietly been going on. And the past few years have led me to more talk of reminiscence and wistfulness about those ways than I've ever seen.

I've spent more of this time where I should have been spending it all along: nurturing this site, aiming not just to welcome and host myself and you, but to add my own example of a home on the Web – a humble place, but one immune to collapsing in the style of a skyscraper.

I'll continue to check out online social platforms just as I'll spend some time in places in town or in cities. They're exciting when done right. But I move from yesterday to tomorrow with time-tested certainty on one point: this really is my home.

And that's how that turned out.