News about Operation Bluebird first broke back at the end of 2025 on Ars Technica.
An attorney from Illinois named Michael Peroff and his business partner Stephen Coates, who used to be on Twitter's general council, got the idea for the project when Elon officially dropped the Twitter branding and switched to X.
In 2025, they filed a petition with the US patent and trademark office claiming the branding had been abandoned:
“The TWITTER and TWEET brands have been eradicated from X Corp.’s products, services, and marketing, effectively abandoning the storied brand, with no intention to resume use of the mark,” the petition states. “The TWITTER bird was grounded.”
It's been the better part of a year since that Ars Technica article was published, and Twitter.now has been online for a few days now. You can pay either $20 or $40 for early access, so of course I couldn't pass up an opportunity to see yet another microblogging site start off at the ground floor.
That said, as nostalgic as it feels right now, there are definitely a few areas of concern. For one, it's as centralized as OG Twitter. The Fediverse and Atmosphere are both decentralized; they both have their flagship servers like Mastodon.social and Bluesky respectively, but anyone can break off and make their own instance if they want. Mastodon has thousands of third party servers now, and ATProto is slowly but surely expanding out to places like BlackSky, Eurosky and Northsky.
The whole idea of making alternative microblogging sites was to do it better than Twitter did; to avoid some fuckass space nazi like Elon Musk ever ruining another one of these things again.
Their approach is different; it's being touted as more of a trademark challenge, with the intention to blow up in popularity because of the familiar branding:
“There certainly are alternatives,” Peroff said. “I don’t know that any of them at this point in time are at the scale that would make a difference in the national conversation, whereas a new Twitter really could.”
It feels like more of an outsider's approach at building something for the sake of going viral than something built out of passion and love of the game like Bluesky or Mastodon.
I'm pretty opinionated on that idea; that in order for a social network to be "successful" it has to be this behemoth where everyone you know has an account. I prefer smaller spaces online, so I definitely don't see it as a weakness. If anything, that's a selling point for me.
I have to say, it feels a lot like the Digg reboot — which failed miserably, for the record. With Digg, you could pay $5 for early access and get in on the ground floor as a Groundbreaker. Kevin and the rest of the Digg team took feedback and suggestions from these early backers and, honestly pretty quickly, built an app as polished as Reddit. The problem was that it wasn't an overnight sensation like they hoped it would be and it ended up having a bot problem. So in an ironic twist, Kevin promptly shut it down and turned it into an AI news hub.
And that's another thing Twitter.now shares with the short-lived Digg reboot: AI moderation. It's a selling point here; an AI that filters every tweet for authenticity and weeds out the ragebait that powers places like X. You can set a slider to what kind of trust score is acceptable and it hides anything that doesn't make the cut.
At the time of writing this, the moderation tab has been taken offline for upgrades or something, idk.
All of that being said, I'm still poking around on there and enjoying the familiar experience of joining yet another microblogging startup with only a handful of users.
There's no pressure; post whatever you wanna post. No cliques have formed yet. It’s mostly just the chaos of awkward introductions and cat pics.
The UI leaves a lot to be desired, but coming from two guys who (as far as I know) aren't developers by trade, that makes a lot of sense. I'm almost positive this thing is vibe coded but I'm not basing that on anything but a gut feeling, so I could be wrong.
I'm cautiously optimistic. I would never go all in on something so centralized; I am a total Atmosphere nerd. So many cool things are being built on ATProto there's not even any debate for me. This feels more like someone re-claiming that old MySpace swag and building a nostalgic throwback like SpaceHey than a X or Bluesky killer. Honestly though, if it pisses off Elon Musk even a little bit, or if it can get a sizable amount of people off of there — people who might be on the fence, or maybe someone who has tried Mastodon or Bluesky and just didn't vibe with it, I consider that a win.
My handle is @nic over there and you can check it out for yourself at Twitter.now.