Lifting a Dreamer
the infamous Fail Whale rises to help ease our transition to 𝕏.
To put it mildly, Twitter (now 𝕏) has had an interesting year. Since the EM acquisition last October, the company and service have seen tremendous volatility, consequential staff cuts, advertiser disgruntlement, and seemingly impulsive and detrimental service changes to the platform.
It couldn't have happened at a more advantageous time that Threads, a new platform by Instagram/Meta, would rush to launch their new text-based social network the weekend Twitter (now 𝕏) was imposing asinine 300-600 tweet/post read restrictions for nonverified subscribers and a complete inability to view tweets/posts unless you were logged in. The chaotic change resulted in people hitting their rate limits within minutes and being unable to see any more tweets - effectively barring up the platform. The turmoil on the bird site, not just this weekend but this past year, in addition to Threads virality and ease of onboarding via Instagram, helped it reach over 100,000,000 accounts in under a week.
All that commotion inspired me to resurrect a version of Twitter's infamous Fail Whale, a graphic that existed on Twitter (now 𝕏) until 2013 to represent that the service was down or overcapacity. The whale, albeit cute, fell out of favour with time as the plucky startup worked to distance itself from what the Fail Whale represented and improved the service. To read more on the Fail Whale origin story, check out Adrienne LaFrance's piece over on The Atlantic.
I'm still formulating my thoughts about Threads, Twitter (now 𝕏), and the social media landscape as a whole, and I may write my thoughts and struggles to manage the ever-changing terrain later.
Update: I originally wrote this post on July 08, 2023, but dottled releasing it. Since then, Twitter (now 𝕏) has undergone a name change, torn down its iconic San Francisco sign, and did away with one of the most recognizable brand logos of all time in favour of a basic unicode double-stuck X (𝕏). So, as both an homage to Twitter's plucky past and a helpful visual aid to help spot the icon on your Home Screen, enjoy this Fail Whale alternate icon in Twitter's iconic #1DA1F2.
If you're unfamiliar with setting custom icons in iOS via the shortcuts app, good friend Stephen Robles (aka The Bearded Teacher) has created a great tutorial to guide you through the process.
