Although I'm not a fan of attempts to milk as much money out of Twitter as possible since Elon Musk bought it, the branding change is one of the changes that are actually for the better.

Twitter changed... a lot. And at the same time, from the point of view of an average lurker, not a lot. Some of the changes are quite comical, some of them are outright braindead.

Just a bunch of changes from what I remember:
- the blue checkmark we all have been recognizing as "this thing is the real deal" – we've got used to colored checkmarks instead (which I hope, at least for government accounts, are manually approved) and treating the blue one as a false sense of legitimacy
- restricting SMS 2FA to paying users – forcing non-paying users to use TOTP/security keys instead, which is somewhat a great thing – as long as the users actually switch to it and don't keep it disabled – as TOTP and security keys are considered more secure than SMS. By the way, having a TOTP app also has an added benefit of helping you to keep track of places you're signed up to 🙃
- paywalling the API from a developer standpoint is something I heavily disagree with, especially when the data is available for free, as it encourages scraping – which puts more load on the service itself, but the average lurker probably doesn't care.
- removal of the "posted using app XYZ" marker is also a bit sad (we all remember brands selling Android phones tweeting from iOS, right?), when scrolling through content though, the average lurker probably only cares about what stands out – the tweet content.
- paywalling certain features is sad, but most of the benefits (high resolution video, tweet editing, long tweets, and formatting options) are for the ones composing the tweets, not the ones only reading them.
- hiding the website from non-logged in users hurts discoverability (although individual tweets are still viewable without signing up after Musk backed off a bit)
- ranking paying users in search results and co. higher, is to say the least, corrupt... but I don't search for tweets that often and the majority of tweets in my timeline comes from non-paying users.
- the fact that most paying users are right-leaning didn't affect my timeline that much either... probably because I don't visit Twitter for political content.

From this list, the change that I believe changed Twitter the most is the change to the maximum character limit for paying users. Probably the most iconic feature of Twitter itself. Remember the times when we all struggled to fit our thoughts into 140 characters? Remember the feeling of relief when the limit got bumped up to 280? Now, for paying users, it's a whole 25 000 characters. That is almost a 180x increase against the original limit. Almost 90x compared to non-paying users. You could probably stuff a whole news article in a single tweet just fine... but it loses the Twitter-ness, you know? Threads were a good enough balance between long tweets and preserving the Twitter-ness already. Just like over here on the fediverse we've got content warnings to put your headline on (and who would like to see the rest, would just press "show more"), on Twitter, you'd just slap a headline in the first tweet and continue down from there in the thread.

The next thing that changed Twitter is the chaotic management since Musk took over. It is way more unpredictable and different. It makes you think "what stupid thing will he come up with next time?"... and then this is translated onto Twitter itself. Not like this, please.

In the end, the branding change is the end of an era, and a beginning of a new one. As much as one on the fediverse can complain, the users (both big, and small) are still *there*, not here. And the branding change (even though we'd *LOVE* the users to be here with us 💚) probably won't make them flock to the fediverse en masse either – they're going to stay there. I am talking from experience – a close friend of mine (who I know in real life and is less of a nerd than I am) has an account on both the fediverse and Twitter, and compared to Twitter, they're finding the content on the fediverse uninteresting.

So, in the meantime, as we're watching Twitter shatter and burn down, goodbye, #Twitter. Hello, whatever comes next. 👋