deja vu: another app bites the dust

the tiktok ban could be another casualty in the average millennial's storied history of losing apps

when i was 6 my dad got an offer to move us to singapore for his job. he told the company he’d do it if his home and child’s schools were paid for. the company said yes and put me up in a school full of other kids whose parents were also here on short work assignments. that school had a higher turnover rate than servers at a LA restaurant.

in 1st grade i was mostly a loner, in 2nd grade i made friends with a group of girls. they passed me notes during class. they invited me to their table at lunch. i couldn’t believe it. i actually had friends, despite being the new kid weirdo who barely spoke! i felt on top of the world. in april, the “leader” of the group moved back with her parents to her home country of japan and the whole group fell apart. this exact experience happened at least 3 more times in my time in singapore, and losing a friend to her hometown was a yearly if not biannual event. friends came and went but not me. my dad loved his job and we stayed there 9 years. friends came and went but i stayed, picking up the pieces and starting over. knowing the connections i built would end. but doing it anyway because it was that or being alone.

for years i thought i was alone in this experience. in 2025 i’m finding out it’s shared by my entire generation.

if you’re born in the 90s and early 2000s you’ve lived through the birth, peak, and eventual end of many social websites. piczo, livejournal, myspace, facebook, tumblr, vine, twitter, now tiktok. the first slow website death i remember was myspace and its subsequent migration to facebook. i had a crush on a boy named sam who told me to make a facebook and i obliged because i hadn’t had my first kiss yet and wanted him to be the one (spoiler, he wasn’t). but i hated everything about that website! it contrasted myspace’s fun, alternative vibe, didn’t allow for any customization, and probably the worst is that i had to put in my full government name instead of the x’s and *~*~*<3 i had in my myspace username. i begrudgingly typed in Nikita for my first name, and Nightmare for my last. My myspace username. but it didn’t have the same appeal in the blue and white, adult backdrop. but i succumbed because myspace was for kids, facebook felt grown. i missed myspace. i missed having 100 friends, 90 of whom i’d never met in real life. and most of all i despised that facebook was only for people that already existed in my life. where were the hot emo boys in ohio??! my suggested friends were all people i knew from school. people who made fun of my hair and accused me of being a serial farter (no joke, for a period of time, people in my class came up with a joke that they’d fart and then say that i did it and every single person in my class was in on this joke. the entire year they called me a skunk. it’s why i’m obsessed with perfumes today and probably have enough aluminum in my body to set off a metal detector). anyway these were the last people i wanted to connect with again! social media was supposed to be my escape.

and yet i got used to it because that’s where everyone was going and i didn’t want to be left behind. i used facebook regularly for 8 years and my life was shaped by it. i eventually left singapore for austin, texas where facebook was crucial to make friends. facebook was my life line. i gossiped with my friends on their walls, knowing we were spilling our secrets for an audience. i found a boyfriend and waited until exam time to go “facebook official” - knowing that’s when everyone would be online. performing for strangers was fun, but performing for people who knew you was exhilarating. “i didn’t know u were cool like that” was a message i got sent a lot.

in 2018 a friend scoffed at me when i asked if her birthday party was a facebook event. “no one uses that anymore. facebook is for old people” i panicked. so what are we using?!!?! “i’ll hit you up on insta” she said. what the hell. sure.

me following the masses heading to a new app

i set up an instagram in 2012 but never liked it. it was just a thumb exercise and mostly made me feel bad about by myself. it always existed in the background of other apps. and i wasn’t about to change that now. a few of my friends were on twitter so i went on that.

in 2020 twitter opened up a world for me. i spent entire days on it, forced at home with nothing else to do. i made friends with hilarious and beautiful women and i couldn’t believe it. i was invited into group chats, i was being tagged in follow fridays. it felt like 2nd grade again, that high of belonging. pretty soon i started going viral too, garnering a built-in acceptance because of the women i was associated with.

i took a sentimental screen recording of the twitter homepage and scrolling through it, after the news of elon musk’s takeover. in way i was relieved to hear people were leaving. the app was driving me crazy. i couldn’t spend a minute without looking at it. i couldn’t hear any news without checking twitter on what the correct opinion was. i’d spiral if my tweets got a minimal likes, comparing myself to friends. secretly despising them when their tweets performed better. every social platform morphs you into a different beast and twitter was turning me into a vampire. bloodsucking, never satisfied. i began to fantasize what my life would look like without it. i’d read more, i’d put my phone away when my friends talked, i wouldn’t feel the need to document every thought.

with the potential ban of tiktok i feel a mix of those recycled emotions. there’s relief. the relief of a longer attention span, the relief of talking without worrying if this will be the final nail in my cancellation coffin, the relief of living a life without microtrends and slang that expires when you finally catch up to it.

there’s also a deep sadness. i built my career off tiktok but more i built my voice off it. before it i was a zombie, relentlessly trying to fit into whatever mold was popular that day. for the first time i had confidence. tiktok was the first app that didn’t shape me - i got to shape it. and it was because of my followers, like entirely. tiktok taught me there’s nothing shameful from getting ur validation from people. sure acceptance comes from within but celebration? that’s got to be from others! we’re a tribe species!

i hope it doesn’t go away. but if it does, i’m prepared. i have been my whole life.

ps. the feeling of being a giddy 2nd grader making a new friend never goes away. excited for which app will activate that in me this year.

sincerely,

<3 xoxo *~*~* nIkItA nIgHtM@Re ~*~*~ xoxo