Is there really a viable alternative to Twitter? Elon Musk has made sweeping changes to Twitter since taking over in late October. He fired more than half of his staff, announced plans to allow a huge swath of previously suspended users to return to the site, and raised fears that the site would fall apart or be overrun by harassers.
As a result, many users started looking for a life raft, another platform where they can continue tweeting without all the chaos. There’s just one problem: there’s no viable alternative to Twitter yet.
With the ripe moment, many people are looking to build one. Small businesses and developers are racing to put their own spin on the Twitter formula, hoping that changes to moderation and the tools people use to connect with each other will solve fundamental problems with the platform and hopefully give users a reason to switch.
Those already in business somehow quickly saw an influx of interest. “We had tons and tons of people on the waiting list”says Nick Thompson, CEO of The Narwhal Project, a new platform on the way.
Improving the quality of conversations is at the heart of some of the most exciting alternatives to emerge so far. The Narwhal project aims to provide a space where users “with different points of view” can have discussions online.
It has a small but notable group of leaders trying to make it happen, including Thompson, who is also CEO of The Atlantic, Raffi Krikorian, former vice president of engineering at Twitter, and Brian Barrett, former executive editor of Wired.
Narwhal’s team is studying how conversations work on other major platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Discord, Reddit, Quora and Slack, in an effort to find a fusion of “features that seem to fit together well” with “new features that have never been tried before.”
Narwhal isn’t publicly available yet and hasn’t shared precise details on how the service will work. But Thompson says there will be at least one major difference from Twitter: Narwhal will focus on conversation quality, rather than speed.
“We want there to be a place on the internet where people have thoughtful, interesting and surprising conversations,” notes Thompson. “We think there are mechanics that we can use in ways that no one else uses.”
Another budding platform, Post, is taking a similar approach and is already bringing in tens of thousands of early adopters. The service looks a lot like Twitter, but intends to set itself apart with one “strict” content moderation and a focus on distribution of “premium news”.
Post is led by former Waze CEO Noam Bardin, who describes the network as “a social platform for real people, real news and civilized conversation”. The platform will allow users to purchase individual articles from news providers “premium” and suggestion makers via “integrated micro-payments”something Musk also mentioned adding to Twitter.
Post’s prioritization of civil conversations is part of what’s keeping the site from being launched on a large scale. Bardin said that being able to actually perform the robust moderation Post promises is one of the biggest constraints to getting people to the site.
Bardin first introduced the platform on November 14th and it hopes to reach 50 million users active per day over the course of a year. As of Bardin’s latest update, the platform has granted access to 65,000 people out of 335,000 waitlisted users.
The service has already stalled somewhat, however, with Twitter users contesting some decisions made by Bardin and Post. The platform is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, the same venture capital group that invested $400 million in the Musk acquisition, and Bardin said he won’t focus on accessibility to begin with.
Twitter and its clones, but what about moderation?
While Post and Narwhal aim to reinvent Twitter, other projects aim to largely recreate Twitter, only better and without Musk. Hive, a fledgling social platform that grew to 1.5 million users in November 2022, was a project that some joined as people celebrated what they thought were the last days of Twitter.
It’s a user-friendly clone of Twitter, offering a feed of text-based content, photos, and videos from users you follow, as well as an option to browse user-posted media in various categories, such as memes, pets, or games.
However, it’s clearly not ready yet. The two-person team running the site announced Wednesday that they were shutting down its servers as they worked to fix “security issues affecting the stability of our application and the safety of our users”.
Even before that debacle, it was clearly still in early access, with the Android beta feeling painfully slow and overdue. While Hive has some rules in place to combat spam, it doesn’t include any bot language, and it’s unclear how well the team will be able to moderate actual humans using its platform.
The biggest name in this race to replace Twitter is Mastodon, which has been building its technology and reputation for years. Its interface will be familiar to anyone who has used Twitter, with its versions of timelines, hashtags, favorites and retweets.
The big idea behind Mastodon, however, is to put users in charge and allow them to create their own spaces (sometimes of special interest), instead of a company unilaterally controlling the software and moderation, even though the CEO swears he’s only following the will of the people.
Unlike the other platforms, Mastodon is a mature platform that has been fixing moderation and glitches since 2016. The problem is that the way it puts people in charge may make it much less appealing to a general audience.
Instead of there being one main Mastodon site where all your friends and favorite celebrities are located, it’s a distributed system. There are dozens of instances of Mastodon, each of which runs on its own servers, has its own admins and moderation policies, and is located on different websites.
And while there is a way to talk to people and get content across multiple instances, it’s nowhere near as simple as having to manage a single account on Twitter.com and be able to @ any public user.
“I hope Mastodon really takes off and maybe even gets the number of users that Twitter has now”says Ruud Schilders, administrator of mastodon.world, a general interest Mastodon server and one of the most popular instances with around 100,000 users.
“But it shouldn’t be on one server, or ten, or a hundred. It should be on thousands of servers; this is the idea of Mastodon. There shouldn’t be servers with tens of millions of people.”
Schilders didn’t set out to be in charge of a social network with over 100,000 users, and he certainly didn’t expect to have to moderate so many people. He says he started the server about a year and a half ago because he was interested in using it Mastodon after bouncing around five or six years ago.
Until the end of October it had only a few users. So after Musk took over and started pushing for a Twitter 2.0 “hardcore” and after Schilders requested to be added to the Mastodon official server directory, mastodon.world exploded.
“When all the people were fired on Twitter, there was an even greater influx of users”says Schilders. “The result is that I now have over 100,000 users on my server.” So far, it has maintained active service through donations.
While nowhere near the scale of Twitter (according to Musk, the site it has about 250 million active users monetizable per day), there’s still a lot to worry about when you have 100,000 people in the same place.
Schilders says he has hired several volunteer moderators, one of whom is a professional ethics coordinator and helped write a new code of conduct. When mastodon.world started, there were four rules, now there are 16.
Schilders is also looking for moderators who can speak other languages now that he’s started getting some reports of posts written in, say, Arabic.
Aside from people’s personal block lists, he says Mastodon administrators can cordon off entire parts of the network if necessary, protecting their users from poorly moderated and malicious servers.
“If there is a server with only Nazi people”He says, “we simply block the entire server”. This means that people from Nazi servers cannot contact its users and its users will not see any of their posts.
Mastodon has gained about one million new users in recent weeks, according to data shared by Eugen Rochko, founder and CEO of Mastodon. Clearly people are willing to give it a try, but the service is still struggling in obvious ways.
Mastodon.social, the instance run by Rochko and co., is currently not accepting new signups, and members of the press have complained that the platform is slow and difficult to understand or even sign up for.
In theory, it’s time for Mastodon. But if Twitter users move, they’ll like having to understand the rules and policy of each instance they want to join, or knowing that the admins of those servers can they read their DMs?
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