How a social network shaped India’s first digital community

Before algorithms, influencers and trolls, Twitter was a digital café where strangers connected, debated, forged friendships

- Priyal Sanghavi

While Old Twitter is gone, what has endured are the friendships and relationships forged during that time.

(PHOTOGRAPHS FROM ISTOCKPHOTO)

Good day to those and only those who still call it Twitter.

For someone who wasn't online in the 2010s, that would sound like a message on a housing society WhatsApp group.

Social media netizens today are all tagged and labelled—influencers (mega, mid, nano, max, ProMax), their fan clubs, hardliners on the left, centrists, or right-wingers, and in between it all, us common folks just trying to research how to sleep better.

When Twitter (now X) emerged, it was a social network that enabled you to connect with complete strangers in a wholesome way. Back then, we had Facebook for folks you knew, Orkut (RIP) for its large slam books, LinkedIn minus the bros, and blogging sites like Tumblr. Twitter launched in 2006 and was adopted in India soon after, a period that we now refer to as “Old Twitter”.

Photographer Naina Redhu, one of India’s first Twitter users, who was 25 then and based in Delhi, recalls joining in 2006 out of curiosity and only finding users from Palo Alto. She logged back in two years later, when more Indians began joining the platform. “The internet was a small place,” she says. “Everything was out in the open. You followed each other’s personal journeys.”

Old Twitter was weirdly wonderful and intermittently chaotic. People wishing good morning, people sharing jokes, people asking for help, people having subgroups to make fun of other people, people finding love, with mostly everyone knowing everyone.