There was definitely a period in time where you could use Twitter as public infrastructure, you could push data from anywhere with HTTP to it, and read it the same way. The firehouse was free to use too at one point, with a large ecosystem of (some even FOSS) 3rd party clients.
But then they killed that, and the ecosystem basically evaporated over night. I could understand if you started using Twitter after that, you'd get that feeling you described.
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There was definitely a period in time where you could use Twitter as public infrastructure, you could push data from anywhere with HTTP to it, and read it the same way.
Even at that time Twitter was not public infrastructure, but corporate-owned infrastructure that was temporarily a little bit more open than others regarding unofficial clients.
I thus know not one single person who at that time considered Twitter to be public infrastructure, since it simply never was.
It felt like public infrastructure. I don’t think anyone mistook it as such but its openness probably made many of us forget, at times, that it was private and things could change in an instant.
