Replacing Twitter Won't Be Easy
In fact it's unclear if anything really can
Forget the reasons why, a significant number of people are still looking for Twitter alternatives. MastodonUserCount@bitcoinhackers.org estimates more than 50,000 a people a day have been signing up for a Mastodon server. There are almost 8 million accounts on Mastodon now.
Another place people are flocking to is Hive Social, an app for Android and iOS. It was launched in October 2019 by Raluca Pop, who taught herself Swift that summer before heading into her first term in college. It started with personal loans by Raluca and a designer, they brought on a developer in May 2021 and received their first angel investment in October 2021. It has three employees and they're thinking of bringing on a fourth to help scale. Three. Twitter still has thousands even after cutbacks. Hive just passed 1.5 million users.
Wired's Megan Farokhmanesh wrote up a story on Hive and how it's handling the sudden influx. Raluca told Wired she is “making it a happier place for people … a safe place for [users] to express how they feel, a safe place for them to post content.” Hive has some unique features along those lines like being able to add a Sogn to your user page or change your profile colors. It also lets you choose who can comment on your post and hide specific words or kinds of content. An algorithm filters out certain content before it makes it to the Discover page and the team is looking into third party help as well.
There's a lot of talk about alternate platforms but none of them have reached Twitter's scale of hundreds of millions of monthly active users. And Twitter is considered small for a social network. One big gating factor on new social networks has been that it's hard to get users to try it, because they're friends aren't there. The drama round Twitter has changed the conditions for that giving these alternative platforms an opportunity. But another gating factor is how good they are. It's not just about design and features, it's about performance and the ever-controversial topic of community moderation. So keep these things in mind. If Twitter is expected to fall apart because it only has a few thousand employees, how can Hive make it with even 4? If Twitter was considered too small to make it with only 300 million monthly active users, how is even 8 million enough?
Ahh yes. They have the scale and experience. My only hesitation there is Tumblr feels like a different thing than Twitter. Part Instagram part Twitter.
Just based on my own experience, I don't think Twitter is going to be easily supplanted. I've spent years--since nearly the beginning of twitter. Following--as of this writing--389 accounts. Curated over the years into a dozen different lists. Go to a different platform and recreate all of that? Assuming I can even find corresponding accounts on another platform? Not bloody likely. I doubt I'm alone in my sentiments. Absent some low-friction means of migrating to something else, inertia alone is going to keep twitter viable and shock-resistant. Mastodon? Can't even seem to get passwords set/reset. Maybe need a different server/admin, but so far...color me unimpressed. I can't imagine I'm alone in my assessment of the situation.