Twitter is making a comeback, kinda.

Hey honeys and hustlers,

Every few months, there’s a thread across the internet that whispers, “What if Twitter came back?” Not X. Not the everything app. Not the town square with a subscription tier and a confusing relationship to the letter “X.” I mean Twitter: the messy, hyper-verbal, square-avatar-ish, link-sharing, joke-stealing, breaking-news, mutuals-in-the-trenches social internet that many people insist they hate and then describe with the tenderness usually reserved for childhood pets. The latest version of that ghost lives at Twitter.now, under the very dramatic banner of “The Square Is Back.”

And honestly? I get it. I am not immune to nostalgia with a clean landing page. I, too, have looked at a revived social platform and thought, “Maybe this one will make posting feel like 2014, but with better boundaries and fewer billionaires doing performance art in the product roadmap.”

The pitch appears to be a more user-controlled, fact-checking-friendly, open-source-ish version of Twitter. There are echoes of Bluesky in the promise of interest channels, more control over timelines, and a structure that theoretically won’t punish people for linking out. That last part is especially important for writers, podcasters, journalists, and creators who fled the platform because links were being punished by the algorithm. Some people are trying to send you to an article, a podcast episode, a shop, a newsletter, or a carefully overthought landing page they rebuilt three times because the button radius felt emotionally incorrect (hi, it’s me). But the question that hangs over every new social network is not “Is this a better product?” It is “Do people have the energy to move again?”

Because, friends, we are tired. Social migration fatigue is real. We fled Twitter for Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn if we were feeling professional, and group chats if we were being honest. Every platform promised some version of a better internet. Some delivered pieces of it. Some delivered homework. Some made us learn new words like “fediverse,” which sounds like either a decentralized protocol or a place where raccoons hold city council meetings.

Bluesky has become a legitimate home for many people and journalists who left Twitter en masse. It feels like an intellectual space with early internet optimism and a dash of “we actually read the link before sharing.” The platform is testing interest channels and exploring paid subscriptions, which makes sense. [link to Creator Spotlight podcast] Eventually, every platform has to answer the “who pays for this?” question, and the answer is decreasingly becoming “advertisers and venture capital forever.”

Threads, meanwhile, has the advantage of sitting under Meta’s umbrella. It has money, Instagram connection and distribution, and the ability to ship features quickly when it sees a feature or use case worth chasing. For podcasters especially, Threads has been surprisingly attentive, adding features that make discovery and conversation feel less like shouting into the void. It is not trying to be Twitter exactly, which is both its strength and its occasional frustration. It is cleaner, less chaotic, and doesn’t honor quote retweets with impressions the same way Twitter once did.

So where does that leave a Twitter revival? The optimistic version is charming. A platform built around user control, open infrastructure, link friendliness, fact-checking, and interest-based communities could absolutely find an audience. The internet needs more places where people can gather around ideas instead of merely feeding a “for you” page. If Twitter.now can create something that feels familiar without resurrecting the worst parts of the old platform, it might have a real shot.

The skeptical version is also sitting right there, blatantly staring into the abyss of competition and previous users who have simply moved on. We have seen legacy platforms promise a comeback before. MySpace has become the patron saint of “Wait, are they back?” Every few years, someone announces a revival, a redesign, a cultural reset, a new era. People get excited because nostalgia is a powerful drug and Tom was everyone’s first internet landlord. Then, usually, nothing truly materializes beyond a small flare of press and a few tweets about how we should all bring back profile songs and our Top 8 friends.

That is the risk here. Nostalgic affinity can get people to look. It may even get them to sign up. But it cannot make them stay. Staying requires social gravity. It requires the right people posting often enough, the right conversations happening early enough, and the product being useful enough to earn a tab in someone’s already crowded browser.

The bigger challenge is that Twitter was built for a version of the internet where social networking and news were the primary jobs. Today, many people use social platforms with a much more explicit business motive. They are not just being social; they are building audiences, selling products, driving newsletter subscriptions, clipping podcasts, testing hooks, warming leads, and looking to get compensated for the impressions and engagement they generate. A new Twitter has to account for that reality while trying to calculate its own profit potential.

That balance is hard. Too much creator tooling and the platform starts to feel like it’s incentivizing everyone to be an influencer, creator, or marketer. Too little, and the people who make the platform lively have no reason to invest.

I am tempted to throw them $20 simply because I am nosy and professionally susceptible to a comeback arc. But the practical question remains: what marginal social benefit does another social network add? Not another content slot. Not another place to cross-post the same paragraph with slightly different punctuation. A real social benefit. If Twitter.now can answer that, maybe the square really is back. If not, it may become another nostalgic internet platform: cute, but mostly decorative.

Still, I understand the appeal. We do not miss old Twitter because it was perfect. It was often terrible and ridden with bots. We miss it because, at its best, it felt alive. It was where jokes broke, ideas traveled, links mattered, and strangers became collaborators, rivals, friends, or that one person whose posts you support for years because being a “mutual” was a serious online social contract.

Maybe that kind of internet can come back. We’ll see. Will you give them $20 to find out?

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