Reports of the death of X have been greatly exaggerated.

There’s been a strong whiff of nostalgia at Meta since the first week of July. Threads – the company’s Twitter-clone – has taken off like a rocket, signing up tens of millions of users per day. For veterans of Facebook’s early days, it must feel like a return to their halcyon startup phase.

Meanwhile, the odour at Twitter (now hastily renamed “X”) is more like the stink of desperation. Between alienating large advertisers, upsetting prominent users by removing their “blue tick” verifications, limiting how many tweets users can see in a day and rebranding overnight, the company seems to be in disarray.