As someone who is active on tumblr and twitter but in wildly different ways, it is alarming that the collapse of twitter is also the collapse of a certain kind of public sphere (in the habermas-ian sense). Like 90% of environmental disasters, election news, etc. rely on Twitter for time-sensitive updates about world news. It should be considered a public utility. There isn’t a replacement, anymore, for the kind of crowdsourced news that Twitter made possible. This shitty apartheid bro basically tanked the public sphere because he couldn’t handle people being mean to him.