I missed Twitter so I made my own (sort of)

14 March 2026

First, a verbose screed. If you just want the solution, skip to here.

In 2018, Jaron Lanier wrote a book called Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. It's precise and compelling but eight years later, it feels a bit redundant. His prescience was such that you no longer really need to make a case for why social media is bad: it seems to be near-universally regarded as an unfortunate vice.

Within this cesspit lies a greater cesspit still, an accretion of faecal sludge more commonly known as Twitter (or as "X" by people who, in a just world, would be Mario-cannoned into the sun). I aged out of Snapchat ten years ago. Being younger than sixty, I have always felt an aura of mind-melting radioactivity around Facebook, so that too was easy to lose. Instagram was harder, but the incessant itch of watching brainrot reels fades within days of deletion. My drug of choice was Twitter, and I miss it still.

Many people who attempt to leave Twitter or switch to an unsatisfying alternative lament the loss of network effects. I think this is fair: once upon a time I had a relatively large pseudonymous account and it opened up an incredible number of opportunities: meeting cool people, landing an internship, and travelling for free. But I am pessimistic about our ability to recover this on any app and sustain it for the long-term. The degeneration from what it was into what it is today seems structurally inevitable: as Lanier points out, the network effects themselves are the dark pattern.

To build out a network in the first place is unavoidably to engage in the slot machine of "doing numbers". If you've ever tried to build up an account from scratch, you will know that Twitter is in consumption-only mode until you've had a couple of tweets go big. And to engage in the slot machine at all is to rapidly succumb to a variant of Goodhart's law: the measure becomes the target, so you become a hopeless addict drowning in a puddle of your own drool.

What is recoverable?

The format itself is special. Even stripped of all of the social machinery, the feel of writing tweet-length posts that show up in a reverse-chronological feed is at the core of what I miss about using the platform. I've tried to break down what I enjoy so much about it:

• Entrenched norms around tweets mean that they can accommodate a huge range in seriousness, from earnest threads to dumb jokes
• If you post a lot, a reverse-chronological feed naturally forces old content into obscurity, providing comfort that what may feel cringe in time will fade into a rarely-accessed sedimentary layer
  • This transience also means that posts can be autobiographical or inane in a way that allows for ad-hoc journalling and recording insignificant moments
• The format encourages brevity, which brings clarity
• The format liberates you from the need to contextualise and hedge
• Frictionless capture and publish lend themselves to 'letting it rip': putting out inchoate ideas and low-commitment thoughts which may never see the light of day if subjected to the regime of refinement that a full-length essay entails

The general conclusion is that your timeline is a kind of low-judgement "staging area" to try ideas out or say things for the sake of it. Since I have lost this my writing output has dropped precipitously, and I think it's because so many of my previous essays started out as scattered fragments in tweets that I later wove together into a coherent picture.

"Why not just use your notes app?" you might ask. Frankly, I'm not sure why public exhibition is load-bearing for me to get these benefits – I have just found that it happens to be, and without this I tend to have little motivation to record and produce at all.

My solution

• Send new posts by DMing a Telegram bot
• A Cloudflare Worker commits the contents of this message as a new markdown file to a /src/timeline/ subdirectory in my blog repository on GitHub
• Attached images are automatically compressed, resized and deployed to Cloudflare R2
• Editing/deleting in Telegram will mirror the change to the timeline, meaning the posting experience is totally self-contained
• My static site generator (Eleventy, read my review of it here) handles displaying the posts reverse-chronologically
• The posts don't have permalinks or pages of their own; the sands of time will have their way with them

You can see the outcome at my timeline page. The worker repo is public if you want to make one for yourself.