I joined Twitter in May 2008. I was what you would call an ‘early adopter’ back then. For the first few months I didn’t really ‘get’ it. It wasn’t really clear at the time how you should use it, it didn’t come with any instructions. I think what perhaps got me going on it was joining in with a TV hashtag – maybe something like BBC Question Time. As you watched the programme on TV you could see people commenting on it in real time via the hashtag #bbcqt. There was something really fun about talking to other people you didn’t know offline and making jokes – a bit like passing notes in class.

When it first started, whenever you followed someone on Twitter they automatically followed you back. So I can proudly say that Stephen Fry and Barack Obama followed me on Twitter! In the early days I absolutely loved the relative anonymity of it – none of my offline friends were on it, I found a whole new community of people on Twitter that shared similar interests. I had a big group of people who worked in my work sector covering workbased learning, libraries, education etc. I remember making great friends with a librarian in the States called Lisa Molinelli. We went on to become Facebook friends. I’ve kind of lost touch now but that was probably the first friend I made on Twitter. I also made friends with @drbexl – Bex Lewis, who went on to become a very close friend. I also had people I interacted with over TV shows like the Apprentice. It got to a point where I didn’t watch any reality TV without watching the online commentary via Twitter – it was so much fun! In the early days it was a very friendly place, a very open place and was frequently hilarious.

I loved the fun of comedy accounts. I remember early on following the Big Ben account – it literally tweets ‘bong, bong’ for 2pm etc. I still follow that account and it is still going. I can remember about 10 minutes after the ‘Bigoted woman’ comment from Gordon Brown in the 2010 election campaign was reported, an account sprang up.

The main area Twitter benefited my life was professionally. I remember organising a conference for work in 2009 largely via Twitter, it was probably the first such public sector based conference arranged in this way – I’m still really proud of that. Because of my enthusiasm for social media and what I was learning about its application to Education, I ended up getting a promotion at work (LLUK) becoming an ‘e-learning’ workforce development advisor. I was later headhunted for a job at Frog, an education technology company. After working there Liz Cable who founded the first social media consultancy Reach Further saw this blog post of mine and offered me a job! I worked with her for a year before going to train to be a priest. So twitter helped me massively professionally.

The other thing Twitter did was enable the building of community, particularly with @drbexl around our work on the Big Bible Project with CODEC at Durham University. We ran an online 9 lessons and carols service back in 2011 before anyone was really thinking about doing church via social media! The site doesn’t exist any more but here is my youtube video introducing it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=TmQZAVkaSIU

I made so many Christian friends on Twitter, many of whom I met up with offline at the Greenbelt Festival – including Fr Simon Rundell (@frsimon)who I ended up doing a placement with and Robb Sutherland (@changingworship) of Rock Mass fame.

This was a whole wonderful community who I got to know on Twitter and who enriched my life and I am still in touch with many of them, albeit now more so on Facebook and Threads.

Since being ordained my use of Twitter has reduced, a lot because of my job role changing significantly. But the place has changed too. For the first 10 years of its existence it was a place of joy, learning and professional development for me. In the last 6 years or so it has become very bloated, there are a lot of bot accounts (fake accounts) and the tone has lost its joy and it’s become a place of vitriol and anger. Since Musk took over and named it X I have lost most of my interest in it. I built up 4,813 followers over the years. Now, when I tweet, though, the engagement has mostly gone. Since Musk began having a pop at Keir Starmer and stoking hate during the UK riots, I’ve decided to disengage. I don’t want to delete my account, there’s too much history there, however, I have decided to try and use Threads instead.

Threads isn’t exactly the same as Twitter but I am trying to post on it in the way I used to post regularly on Twitter to see what ‘sticks’. The algorithm is a little irritating. For example, I started following a load of journalists on there and now my feed is full of ‘journalismthreads’ and nothing else! It’s a bit of a learning curve being on there but in some ways that’s fun, a bit like the early days of Twitter.

I think the golden age of social media is gone and that it has now become rather corrupted by a few very rich men. I don’t think we’ll see its like again. It was a magical time for 10 year s of my life and brought many wonderful perspectives and people into my life. But that season is over now. I’m sad about it but a new season is beginning. Maybe we can try to bring some of those early principles of Twitter back? Whatever, I lament Twitter’s death but I’ll see you on the other side on Threads!