As I reflected on the impact of Twitter on the world of cryptocurrency, I was reminded of my first tweet about Bitcoin, sent on April 4, 2013. Scrolling back through these ancient scribblings, I also found a timeline of the evolution of my own thinking about crypto, I thought. Twitter has been a great platform for connecting with experts in the crypto space, and its decline has many crypto types looking for alternatives.
Bitcointalk.org – The most venerable and important discussion board in the cryptocurrency ecosystem has never gone away, I noted. Nostr, Bluesky, Discord, Reddit, Mastodon, and Threads are all being explored as potential replacements for Twitter.
The variety of attractive options for Twitter emigres strongly suggests that there will be no single, easy replacement for Twitter, I concluded. The features and infrastructure of services like Bluesky and Nostr matter when you’re forced to choose a new social platform. But no feature can compete with the multitude of connections built up over many years, the follows and followers known as your ‘social graph.’
The decline of Twitter may be a blessing in disguise, as it could lead to a greater public understanding of data portability and other issues that have been discussed in the crypto space for years.