Many of us hope we can return to a glorious past, or perhaps a fleeting moment, with the right policies, owner, and inertia. Maybe we can even RETVRN! to those halcyon days (at least, as halcyon as social media can ever be). There’s still the chance that Musk will save Twitter, though he’ll have to log off first. On Earth 2, Jack Dorsey’s new venture, Bluesky, could come to dominate the landscape. But back here on Earth 1, Meta Platform Inc.’s Threads — which was in no way rebranded and stripped-down Facebook — is the hot new kid on the block.
There’s also the chance the social media we currently know, love, and hate is in its buggy whip stage, soon to be replaced by something actually new. For now, though, we must resign ourselves to the fact that there’s no going home to that magical time in the middle of the ’00s when social media was a revolutionary idea and way to connect.
First, there was Myspace, which in hindsight was better than Facebook. It had its flaws and limitations, but it was more customizable, at least when it came to featuring music. It was the network of Gen X, so naturally it petered out, much like compact disc sales.
Facebook followed and briefly coexisted with Myspace before wholly supplanting it. Twitter, Instagram, and myriad short-lived projects followed.
Twitter would never overtake Facebook, at least in terms of profits or user base (the product that all social media actually
