So long, Twitter

I joined Twitter on February 6, 2009. I know because my very first tweet was: “started to use twitter”, a sentence so earnest it could only have been written by an 18-year-old excited about a new thing on the internet.

Sixteen years later, I exported my archive and closed the door.

The good times

Early Twitter was genuinely something. A small timeline of people you actually knew, sharing things they were actually doing. No algorithms deciding what you saw. No engagement bait. Just a stream of people being enthusiastic about their lives in real time.

For me that meant Joomla Days and hackathons, getting a PS Vita on launch day, live-tweeting E3 at night, finishing games I’d been looking forward to for months, going to Zwarte Cross and catching Kamelot on stage. All of it captured in short bursts — a little rough around the edges, but real and immediate in a way a blog post written a week later never quite is.

2011 and 2012 were the peak. Nearly half of everything I ever tweeted came from those two years. I was going to events regularly, playing everything I could get my hands on, and genuinely excited about what was happening in both the Joomla and gaming worlds. Twitter was where all of that energy went.

Building the archive

Going back through 3,336 tweets turned out to be more interesting than I expected.

Most of those tweets were throwaway by nature, reactions, retweets, short observations that don’t mean much without the moment they came from. I filtered those out and kept only the ones that captured something worth keeping: an event attended, a game finished, a personal moment.

But here’s the thing: very few of those tweets stood on their own as blog posts. A tweet that says “Gravity Rush is amazing” isn’t a memory, it’s a pointer to one. So for most of what made it here, I went back to my old Blogger posts and combined the two. The tweet gave me the date and the raw feeling; the blog post gave me the story. Together they became something neither could have been alone.

The 2012–2014 period worked especially well for this, since those were the years I was also writing properly on Blogger at the same time. The later years were quieter but the posts that made it through still meant something: finishing The Last of Us, HyvaCamp, the Analogue Pocket arriving.

The end

After 2014 the numbers dropped and never really recovered. The platform changed around me. The ratio of signal to noise kept shifting the wrong way.

The 2022 acquisition made it worse in ways that were hard to ignore. The moderation dissolved, the toxicity crept up, and the people who had made it worth visiting started leaving for Mastodon and Bluesky. I stuck around longer than I should have, out of habit more than anything. Eventually the habit broke.

I don’t miss it. But I’m glad the memories are somewhere they won’t disappear.