I’ve been on Twitter since 2007. That’s almost 16 years years of breaking news, snark, professional serendipity, and the occasional late-night doom scroll. I watched it become the de facto town square for journalists, policy nerds, NGO communicators, and pretty much everyone in the DC orbit I work in. I also watched, in the span of about six months, someone light it on fire.
The Musk acquisition and its aftermath — the layoffs, the verification chaos, the algorithmic whiplash — wasn’t just a tech story. For those of us who’ve spent years advising nonprofits and international organizations on their digital presence, it was a genuine strategic crisis. Clients were calling. Leadership was asking: Should we stay? Should we go? Is this a moment or is this the end?
My answer, then and now: it depends — but it mostly doesn’t matter as much as you think it does.
Here’s what I mean. For years, we’ve told organizations that Twitter was a must-have. Embassies, development banks, advocacy groups — if you weren’t on Twitter, you weren’t in the conversation. That was probably always overstated. What was true is that Twitter was convenient. One platform, one audience that skewed toward journalists and influencers, easy to monitor. It flattered our efficiency.
What’s replacing it isn’t one thing. It’s several things, which is messier to manage. Mastodon attracted the techie idealists and a wave of academics fleeing the chaos — I know people who migrated there in November and genuinely love it. Bluesky exists, apparently, though it’s still invite-only and feels more like a rumor than a platform at this point. Meanwhile, some organizations have quietly gotten better at their newsletters and left the whole platform debate behind.
The honest advice I’ve been giving clients: don’t migrate in a panic, but do take this as the forcing function you’ve been avoiding. Audit what Twitter was actually doing for you in terms of real engagement, not vanity metrics. For most nonprofits and international organizations I’ve worked with, the answer is: less than you thought. The followers were real; the action downstream often wasn’t.
The identity crisis Twitter is having right now is also, conveniently, a good excuse for organizations to have an honest conversation about why they’re on social media at all, and whether the effort-to-impact ratio makes any sense. Most of the time it doesn’t. Most of the time it’s inherited habit dressed up as strategy.
I haven’t deleted my account. I’m not sure I will. But I do look at it now the way I look at a dying plant I keep forgetting to water — with a mixture of guilt, detachment, and a faint suspicion that it was probably already too far gone.