---
layout: post
title: "Twitter Becomes X: The Case for Open Protocols"
date: 2023-08-12
description: "Yesterday Twitter became X. It doesn't really matter, and that's the whole problem."
tags: [social-media, nostr, decentralization, twitter]
---

Yesterday Twitter became X. The bird is gone, the brand is gone, and a social network that defined a decade of internet culture is now named after a PayPal spinoff from 2000. The discourse around this has been predictably loud, but I want to talk about something that gets less attention: why it doesn't actually matter what they rename it, and why that's the most damning thing I can say about the whole situation.

## You Don't Own Your Presence There

When Twitter dies, or transforms into something unrecognizable, everyone who built an audience there discovers the same thing: they were building on rented land. The followers, the links pointing at their profile, the years of posts — none of it is theirs in any meaningful sense. The platform owns the relationships. The platform owns the distribution.

This is not a new observation. It's been said every time a major platform has pivoted, died, or changed its terms. MySpace, Tumblr, Vine, Google+. We watched it happen and we kept building on closed platforms anyway because that's where the people were.

<!-- Replace with a screenshot of the old Twitter bird logo next to the X logo, or a terminal showing a curl to api.twitter.com returning 403 after API lockdowns -->
![The Twitter to X transition](/assets/img/twitter-x-rebrand.png)

## What Actually Changed This Year

The rebrand is cosmetic. What's more significant is the systematic destruction of the API ecosystem. Third-party clients are gone. The API costs that killed them were not a mistake or a miscalculation. They were a policy decision to force everyone through official clients that can be monetized and monitored.

The rate limits on reading. The removal of the free tier. The requirement to pay for basic functionality that was free for a decade. Each of these individually could be explained away. Together they paint a clear picture of a platform that has decided its relationship with developers and power users is adversarial.

The people building on this platform subsidized its growth. They got API access and a network in return. That deal has been unilaterally cancelled.

## The Protocol Alternative

I've been on Nostr for a few months now. I wrote about it in April. It's still rough and the user base is still small, but this week it became significantly more relevant to me.

The difference is fundamental. On Nostr, I hold my own private key. My identity can't be revoked by a board decision or a new CEO. My posts are signed by me and can be verified by anyone without trusting a central server. If a relay goes down, I switch to another relay and my identity goes with me, intact.

This is what a protocol-based approach actually buys you. You're not at the mercy of a company's product roadmap. The clients and relays are interchangeable components. The thing that actually matters, the cryptographic identity and the content, lives with you.

## The Practical Reality

I'm not naive about where the people are. Most of the interesting conversations I've had online over the last decade happened on Twitter, and most of those people are not moving to Nostr anytime soon. Network effects are real and powerful and they don't care about your principles.

But I'm done optimizing my digital presence for platforms I don't control. X can do whatever it wants with its rebrand. I'll keep using it until I don't, and I won't build anything meaningful there that I'd be upset to lose.

The interesting question is what comes after centralized social media. I don't know if Nostr is the answer. But a signed JSON message sent to a relay you can run yourself is at least asking the right questions.