What is the alternative to Twitter?

By Fay Capstick

The news has been full of reports of the changes that Elon Musk is making now that he has bought Twitter. It is causing chaos on the social media and micro blogging platform. This week we will look at a brief history of Twitter and what alternatives exist for those wanting to jump ship.

A brief history of Twitter

Twitter was started in 2006 and Jack Dorsey is its best known founder. Users can post short posts known as tweets. You can post, like, reply to and retweet tweets. Tweets were originally limited to 140 characters, but this increased to 280 characters in 2017. The point of Twitter was to be a micro blogging site where the character limit meant creativity was needed to express your message.

By 2019 Twitter had grown to 330 million monthly active users. However it is fair to say that most users are there to read and not post. Twitter has caused controversy due to the behaviour of some users and the content that they post and harassment of other users.

The most famous person to be banned from the platform due to their behaviour was Donald Trump (the ban is now lifted, but as of writing, Trump has declined to rejoin). Twitter is considered to have the most toxic environment of all the social media platforms.

As we all know, Twitter has now been taken over by Elon Musk in a buyout that cost him $44 billion. This has meant that Twitter is now a private company. This move has proved controversial and there is a growing backlash towards Twitter and its user policies. Since the takeover 900,000 Twitter accounts have been deactivated.

So what are the alternatives? There are some and these are expected to grow their user base.

Bluesky

First off, we have Bluesky. Bluesky is a decentralised social network, originally organised by Twitter itself. Announced in 2019, it is now owned by its team and is free from any involvement with Twitter. Jack Dorsey is again a key founder.

As of last month, interested users were able to sign up to test a forthcoming version of Bluesky. It looks like it will be a potential alternative platform to Twitter, but the problem is that it isn’t ready yet, though plenty of people are waiting and have signed up to express their interest.

Mastodon

Mastodon is something that is ready and working, and is currently gaining a lot of new users and publicity (489,000 new users in the past couple of weeks). It was started in 2016 and until recently had a niche following. The same as with Twitter, you can post and follow people and companies, and you can like and repost the posts of others. Tweeting is called tooting.

Mastodon is different from Twitter, in that it isn’t a single platform. Instead it is run on many interconnected servers, thousands of them. Where there is no common area you will need to pick a server to register on when you join. There is a server for everything so you can pick by geography, hobby or niche interest. Some, such as mas.to and mstdn.social, are large general servers. You can join and leave as many as you want.

Mastodon’s toots are slightly longer than tweets, running to a maximum of 500 characters instead of 280. You can decide from 4 levels how public, or not, your toot will be. You can give your toot a content warning, so that it can’t be viewed without a reader clicking to confirm. Toots can be edited.

There are apps that can help you migrate to Mastodon by finding accounts that you have followed on Twitter. There are three timelines, Home, Local, and Federated, which seems like a way to bring order to what could be a chaotic mess.

There is no direct messaging feature, unlike Twitter, which might help reduce incidents of harassment.

Mastodon is free to use and advert free, and if you are looking for a Twitter alternative it seems a good place to start.

Tribel

A further alternative to Twitter is Tribel, a free social networking service. Tibel is more like Facebook. Your posts can be customised and Tribel say that your posts are more likely to reach the right audience. However it doesn’t seem to have a big take up at present.

Hive

Hive seems to be a lot like Twitter. It is very new, having been founded in 2019. It is currently having a viral moment, gaining huge numbers of new users over the weekend as Twitter teetered on the edge. Current users are at 1 million. It shares features with Instagram, as users can post large images, and MySpace. There are guidelines on hate speech in place, but as it is so new it remains to be seen how this plays out as users and posts build. A positive feature of Hive is that the feed is chronological.

Conclusion

Many people and organisations are not happy about the toxic environment of Twitter and of the changes that Musk’s new ownership is bringing. There are alternatives out there. Currently it seems that the closest is Mastodon, or rather it was when I started writing this article. Mastodon comes with a learning curve of new many and features, but on the whole it seems worth trying. As with anything, it will only be a real long term alternative if it catches on and stays in use by a large number of people. If not it will sink back to being the niche service that it was before. Only time will tell.

Hive is has caught up on user numbers after a flurry at the weekend, and is easier to use than Mastodon which might make is the winner in the race to grab users. It seems as though people aren’t as much leaving Twitter as hedging their bets and making accounts on alternative servers should Twitter permanently fall out of favour or cease to exist.

Final thoughts

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