Startups, others are aiming to take down Twitter
SAN FRANCISCO — Last month, employees at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, joined a virtual brainstorming session to discuss how to build the next Twitter.
Among the ideas Meta’s workers talked over was a more extensive rollout of a feature called Instagram Notes, where people can share short messages on the photo-sharing site with their followers and friends, according to posts of the conversation that were viewed by the New York Times. Others said Meta should build a text-focused app using Instagram’s technology or add another feed to Instagram.
“Twitter is in crisis and Meta needs its mojo back,” one Meta employee wrote in a post. “LET’S GO FOR THEIR BREAD AND BUTTER.”
A race is on to dethrone Twitter and capitalize on the chaos of its new ownership under Elon Musk, the tech mogul who bought the social media company for $44 billion in late October. Since then, questions have swirled about how viable Twitter might be as Musk has laid off thousands of employees, started changing the platform’s content rules and proclaimed that the company is in such dire financial shape that bankruptcy is possible.
Sensing opportunity, all manner of people and companies have jumped in to fill the potential breach. Apart from employees at Meta, former Twitter workers have begun projects for what they say could be the next Twitter. Startups such as Post and niche services such as Mastodon and Hive Social have also reared their heads, as has the microblogging platform Tumblr.
Some of these services are presenting themselves as less toxic versions of Twitter, which has reversed suspensions of some users and reinstated previously banned accounts, including that of former President Donald Trump. Others are positioning themselves as heralds of a new era in social media.
“The toxicity that surrounds Twitter and some of the behavior of the new ownership led me to believe there’s an enormous opportunity for a microblogging platform with a different business model,” said Scott Galloway, an investor in Post and a marketing professor at New York University.
Since Musk took over Twitter, some prominent users have said they would leave the service, including talk show host Whoopi Goldberg, producer Shonda Rhimes and singer Sara Bareilles. Other users have expressed interest in migrating to other services. It’s unclear what Twitter’s user numbers are now since Musk has taken the company private, but he has said use is at a high.
“Record numbers of users are logging in to see if Twitter is dead, ironically making it more alive than ever!” he tweeted last month.
Musk didn’t respond to requests for comment, and Meta declined to comment.
After Musk bought Twitter, one alternative service that immediately gained attention was Mastodon, which is known as a federated platform and functions as a collection of social networks. Started in 2016 by Eugen Rochko, a software developer who is now 29, Mastodon, by design, can’t enforce platform-wide policies on what posts to keep up or take down. And because Mastodon’s original source code is publicly available, anybody can create their own version of the service.
Since the beginning of last month, Mastodon accounts have grown nearly 33 percent to 6 million, according to the federated platform guide Fediverse.party. Mastodon has no ads and remains mostly crowdfunded. It has hired more employees and encouraged people to start their own versions of Mastodon.
Mastodon did not respond to requests for comment.
Last month, Hive Social, a social network founded in 2019, more than doubled its users, to 1.8 million. Its founder, Raluca Pop, 24, attributed part of the growth to fan communities, such as those for K-pop and “Star Wars,” moving away from Twitter and finding a new home on Hive Social.
The tiny company is trying to take advantage of the newfound interest to raise funding and hire more employees. Hive Social is funded through loans taken out by Pop, as well as $25,000 from a private investor and more than $300,000 from a crowdfunding campaign. It has four employees and is hoping to hire content moderators and more engineers, Pop said.
But as people have joined, the platform has run into growing pains, including multiple accounts sharing the same username and people not flagging content that is unsafe for work. On Thursday, Hive Social temporarily shut its servers to resolve security issues, Pop said.
“Twitter is going through a lot of changes with the new leadership,” Pop said. “The timing of it is kind of impeccable. Everything lined up for us.”
More established social media companies also began aiming to capture people departing Twitter.
Tumblr, a microblogging website, posted a “reasons to join Tumblr” thread about a week after Musk’s takeover of Twitter. It also shared memes and Tumblr posts about people leaving Twitter for Tumblr. Then it started selling “Important Blue Internet Checkmarks” for $7.99 — the same price as a monthly subscription to Twitter Blue, a service Musk has promoted where people pay for features including a verification check mark.
Downloads of Tumblr on Apple’s App Store soared 62 percent the week after Musk’s takeover of Twitter, said a spokesperson for Automattic, which owns Tumblr. Automattic has also posted jobs tailored to former Twitter employees.