Shop Talk: Social Media Succession
Twitter users have been growing increasingly unhappy as Elon Musk continues to make questionable decisions in his role as the social media platform’s new owner – from requiring users to pay a monthly subscription fee to have their accounts verified, to limiting the number of tweets that users are able to view per day, to just generally making the experience of using Twitter worse overall.
Understandably, many users are now fleeing Twitter to explore the various new social platforms that have emerged to potentially be its successor – but it remains to be seen which one will come out on top:
Threads – Meta’s long awaited Twitter rival that is slated to launch Thursday and appears to share many features like ability to like, share, post, & repost content. But with a key selling point being its deep integration with Instagram (such as the ability for users to use their same usernames across the two platforms).
BlueSky – The closest thing to the old “Twitter Experience” offered from these other platforms, but with a decentralized approach to social media that gives users more control over their data and what content they see. The app is currently still in beta & only available via invite code.
Spill – Launched in December & created by a pair of former Twitter Engineers, Spill is geared towards creating a safe space for marginalized communities, especially Black & LGBTQ+ users. It drew a surge of interest after Twitter’s recent decision to limit how many tweets users can see per day.
Mastodon – Released in 2016, Mastodon is one of the older & more-populated Twitter alternatives out there. It features a decentralized open-source network of social platforms that are all linked together, and it’s also a nonprofit (unlike all the other social platforms on this list).
Hive – This mobile-only app was launched in 2019 but generated a lot of recent buzz on social media after Musk took the reins at Twitter. It has similar features to Twitter, but claims to be free of all the algorithms that are used to determine what content you see on other social media platforms.
Post News – Created by former Waze CEO Noam Bardin, Post News brands itself as a new way of thinking about the relationship between publishers & social media, focusing on how users are able to generate money via micropayments from publishers. The app is currently still in a beta & testing phase though.