When Elon Musk brought his disputes with Donald Trump to his social media platform, how long had I refrained from using the service in question? Long enough that my browser failed to autocomplete the URL Twitter.com (which I had stubbornly continued to input, like numerous users, in defiance of X). It felt like a gentle nudge from a friend: Dude, you’ve been clean for six months. Are you certain a bar is the ideal spot to be at this moment?

However, with due respect to Bluesky and Threads, this specific bar was the only venue to be as the wealthiest individual in the world and the U.S. President squared off on Thursday. In a series of posts and responses, Musk even proposed Trump should face impeachment.

Notable right-wing supporters of both figures, compelled to take sides, were involved in an unforgettable showdown, while critics mainly focused on having enough popcorn for the event.

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For at least one night, classic Twitter was revived — in bar terms, the “Cheers” of the web.

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After 15 years of sharing posts, I went silent on X/Twitter following the U.S. election. This was my reaction to Elon Musk’s new mandatory AI-training terms of service and his capacity to dodge the service’s fact-checking; it also served as a way to halt doomscrolling and reclaim numerous hours of productivity. But I was far from the only one.

X’s user count was dropping in 2024 and was predicted to keep falling in 2025. This is particularly evident in the EU, where over 11 million users departed Musk’s platform this year. While Bluesky and Threads saw user growth post-election, they don’t quite reach the same levels. Many fatigued users simply transitioned from X to… real life.