Last summer, in a piece for CJR, Karen Maniraho spoke with writers who cover the internet and its subcultures. “The best of these journalists are immersed in the internet but do not obsess over viral moments, which fly by too fast and seem, in isolation, to be trivial,” she observed. “By focusing on creators, communities, and the algorithm-based platforms that drive trends, these writers find ways to cut through the noise—and surface a deeper understanding of life, online and off.” This summer has only reinforced the impression that everything online is ephemeral—including the platforms themselves. A timeline of the cascading social-media dramas that led us to this point might begin last fall, when Elon Musk took charge of Twitter. For a while, Mastodon, an open-source alternative, looked poised to serve as a replacement; a number of journalists set up camp there. But Mastodon was complicated, intimidating, often uninviting. An array of other candidates saw an opening, including Bluesky (a product of Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder and former CEO), Spill (created by two Black former Twitter employees and described as a hopeful “New Black Twitter”), and, most recently, Threads (from Meta).

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