Indie devs keep on bitching about how they’ve helped bring Twitter to the masses and invent some of the features later adopted for official use. Stop bitching. It was a two way street. You amassed reputation, carved out a name for yourself, collected tens of thousands of followers on twitter, your blogs and your podcasts. Some clients were so popular that offers were made and acquisition deals were signed.

It was a community for a few, and then the VC money came in and they want to see a whole different kind of profit. Is it a different community than it was a few years ago? Of course it is. You grew in your popularity and influence, and Twitter did the same. It’s no more yours today than it was yours back then.

Seth Godin talks about tribes. There are two types of tribes that are relevant here. For each such indie dev, there’s his consumer tribe that is interested in following his stream. And then there is also the creator tribe encompassing like-minded devs, sparkling dialogs and conversations with threads that involve some people from their consumer tribes as well. In a sense, there is also a more amorphic meta-consumer tribe associated with that creator tribe, where people interested in following one creator are more likely to follow similarly oriented creators.

The creator tribe that I follow on Twitter is all ready to move to app.net, and yet there are only two people seriously talking about leaving Twitter. Because that creator tribe is ready to move, but not ready to lose its meta-consumer tribe. And so it stays, and keeps on bitching about staying.