I joined Twitter in April 2007, a year after its founding as a “microblogging platform.” I didn’t give much thought to my username. I chose an anonymous handle that combined my middle name and birthdate: @page88. I didn’t expect I’d be stuck with it for 15 years and counting.

When I learned that Twitter contacts were called followers, I found the notion cult-y and unnerving. My first tweet, “If they follow, will I lead?” got no likes.

For two years, I mostly ignored Twitter. Then, in 2009, at the South by Southwest tech conference, in Austin, I thought I saw its purpose. Conference insiders used it compulsively, especially to plan bar meetups. I sallied forth, seeking a companion to go with me to see Metallica at a 6th Street club. Again: nothing.

Then I gave a conference talk — and I got what Twitter was really about.

The crowd in the room applauded generously for my presentation, but later I found they’d been live-tweeting it. Sometimes savagely. I was moping when I ran into David Carr, the late media critic who was then my colleague at the New York Times, and he told me to laugh it off: “People who use Twitter are twits.”

Neither of us quit it, though.

I chugged along for a couple of years, tweeting aimlessly about — I don’t really remember. Television shows? Babies? Maybe I did tweet about lunch. When Dick Costolo became Twitter’s chief executive in 2010, he admitted to a crowd that he didn’t know what Twitter was for. I didn’t either.

At 11:11 p.m. on Monday, Costolo, who resigned from Twitter in 2015, tweeted: “Shoutout to the writer’s room at Silicon Valley for tonight’s wild episode.”

Costolo was referring to the flurry around the sudden sale of Twitter to Elon Musk, the self-titled “technoking” of Tesla, for $44 billion.

On Monday, Erika D. Smith trenchantly observed in the Los Angeles Times what many on Twitter fear most about the Musk takeover: In the name of “free speech,” Musk will silence the marginalized voices that are Twitter’s soul.

“Consider this the beginning of the end of #BlackTwitter,” Smith wrote, “the community of millions that figured out how to turn a nascent social media platform into an indispensable tool for real-world activism, political power and change.”

Smith nailed it. In the last six or seven years, Twitter established an indispensable reason for being. At its best Twitter emboldens non-dominant subcultures to create subversive commentary, strategy, solidarity.

Fainting-couch despair may not be necessary.

Rick Wilson, author and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, tweeted, “Call me crazy, but I’m not tearing my (remaining) hair out over this.”

He went on to thread that “Daddy Musk” is not going to stop content moderation at Twitter. And if Musk brings former President Donald Trump back, Wilson added, it would only hurt Trump’s political career by putting his worst traits back under klieg lights.

As long as dangerous and ridiculous true-life twits can be mercilessly satirized on Twitter, I’m staying.

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Virginia Heffernan is a Wired magazine columnist and host of the podcast “This Is Critical.”