About three weeks later Elon Musk After acquiring Twitter in October 2022, #RIPTwitter started trending. Musk had eviscerated the staff, and more workers quit when he gave them an ultimatum: Work “challenging” hours or take time off. Due to the platform being on the brink of the abyss, its users held a funeral. They spent the evening saying goodbye to their followers, making one last rambling post on #hell, and collecting the best and worst tweets they’d recorded in the platform’s 16-year history. They were gloomy, giddy, and anxious about the future of online dialogue. It seemed certain that a rival would rise.

Just then, Gabor Cselle, a former director Google and the Twitter employee was working on a rival app. Originally called T2 and later Pebble, the goal was to create a reliable, secure site that would fill the void left by Twitter.

Cselle was not alone. As the bird app outlook grows bleaker, several alternative chat platforms have emerged: Narwhal, Spoutible, Spill, Post, and Cohost among them. In July 2023, Meta tried to seize the moment by launching Threads. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sought to right what he saw as Twitter’s wrongs by launching Bluesky. (In May 2024, the platform’s “literally repeating all the mistakes“Twitter had done it.)

Meanwhile, Twitter continued to shake. Musk told advertisers “go fuck yourself” abandoned most content moderation and changed the logo from a friendly bluebird to a cold X. At the end of last year, The Verge published a news package reporting that 2023 would be known as the “Year of Twitter.” Dead.”

But two years after Musk took over, the platform is still where the action happens. Misinformation has skyrocketed and growth has stalled; Market intelligence firm Sensor Tower says the number of active daily users dropped 28% from October 2022 to September 2024, while Threads users increased. But when big news breaks, like a major sporting event or a sitting president’s decision to drop out of the race or an assassination attempt on a former president, X is where the conversation begins.

Most of Twitter’s upstart rivals have folded. I spoke with several founders about what they learned trying to compete with Musk and the state of civil debate online.

You can’t start a Twitter alternative by saying ‘We want to be the new public square’.
Gabor Cselle, founder of Pebble

“I kind of misread that moment,” Cselle says today. He thought all these mourners wanted something that would reliably work just like Twitter but without the excessive trolling, hate speech, and deepfakes. “The purpose of #RIPTwitter,” he says in retrospect, “was the panicked feeling of, ‘I could lose my status, my followers, my username, and this whole network I’ve built.’

Cselle says he learned that “trust and security are a secondary value proposition” for social media platforms.

“When something gets really bad, it becomes important to you as a user – and it becomes important immediately,” he says. But he said people “don’t join a new space that is otherwise empty. You can’t start a Twitter alternative by saying, ‘We want to be the new public square.'”

Pebble had around 20,000 registered users before it became stagnant and shut down in November 2023. It lives on as a smaller server on Mastodon, which peaked at 2.5 million active users in December 2022 but has fallen to around 865,000. Cohost, made by the Anti Software Software Club (which describes itself as “a nonprofit software company that hates the software industry”), said last month that it was running out of money and would become read-only by the end. of the year.

When the Post, a platform “built for news,” launched in fall 2022, publishers like Politico, The Boston Globe and Fortune signed up and hundreds of thousands of people joined the waitlist. Founded by the former of Waze The idea, funded by CEO Noam Bardin and partially funded by Andreessen Horowitz, was that people could pay small amounts to read individual news articles rather than subscribing to many news sources. “I believe streaming is the newspaper of the future, and I want to make it more civil for users, profitable for publishers, and better for society,” Bardin said in a tweet announcing the Post. However, it closed in April 2024 as slow growth left it no way to become a “significant platform”.

Many of these alternative chat platforms grew out of a similar ethos, trying to correct the chaos and anger that legacy social media encouraged. Powered by Narwhal Works by Laurene Powell‘ Emerson Collective marketed itself as a platform for “productive discussions based on good faith.” It began by invitation only, and the dialogue focused on the topics of the day as determined by the Narwhal; Sometimes environment, politics or technology. Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic and co-founder of Narwhal, says that although conversations between hundreds of users are meaningful and engaging, Narwhal lacks the support of Twitter. “It was also a trade-off,” Thompson says. “If there was a way to make this more fun and thoughtful at the same time, that would be the path to success.”

A few months later, Narwhal evolved into Speakeasy AI, an AI software-as-a-service platform aimed at enabling civil, engaging dialogue on other platforms. Thompson says his goal is not to replace Twitter, but to correct harmful material online. He wanted to create something that Twitter, Reddit or Facebook could use. The company didn’t grow much, and in April Speakeasy’s technology was acquired by Amplica Labs.

But Thompson says civil conversations about Narwhal give him hope. Even if it’s a leak rather than a flood, social media is cracking up. This gives people the opportunity to find different communities or uses of social sites. An old platform like “Whoever controls a major social media platform has a ton of power,” Thompson says. Last week, Musk shared an image edited to illustrate an Atlantic story with the caption “Trump is literally Hitler.” The post has been viewed more than 25 million times. Musk did not delete the tweet, but a community note posted underneath makes it clear that the headline was fabricated.

Some places where Twitter’s former users go are still growing. Spill, a black-owned social platform, has been downloaded more than half a million times. Like other Twitter alternatives, it set out to solve problems with hate speech on major platforms. But its mission is broader: Although the app is open to everyone, it prioritizes elevating minority communities like Black and LGBTQ+ and protecting them from harassment and hate, says co-founder Alphonzo Terrell. Spill has raised approximately $5 million in pre-startup funding. with actor Kerry Washington recently investing.

Terrell told me that Spill uses large language models and artificial intelligence for content moderation. Like Narwhal, its algorithm rewards positive posts. But there’s still room for political debate: President Joe Biden’s announcement that he will not seek re-election and run for Vice President this summer Kamala Harris Terrell says he saw a flurry of activity after Spill became the presumptive Democratic nominee. Black women on the platform specifically talked about bracing themselves for an onslaught of racism and misogyny as a result of Harris’ rise. This is more nuanced political talk than something like X might be trending, but it worked on Spill. “People don’t need to code-switch in Spill,” Terrell says.

The rush to be the next Twitter has slowed; but there is still a chance that an alternative will become popular enough to replace it. Threads has the potential to attract advertisers, but it hasn’t proven to be the cultural Twitter killer many thought it was. Many of these brand-safe or news-focused apps feel like homework rather than recess, but Spill may be an exception for now.

I’ve been on Twitter since 2010. Lately I’ve realized this is less useful to my job as a journalist, but I’m still hiding. And earlier this month, when my beloved Phillies blew their playoff chances in spectacular fashion, I turned to X. The algorithm knew I cared; He knew I wanted to commiserate with other fans, look at memes, and watch highlights of a game where the team played well time and time again; I will do this until opening day in 2025. , I wasn’t promoting thought-provoking dialogue or spreading misinformation or hate. I was doing something in the middle; something comforting. This was exactly what I was looking for.

Amanda Hoover He is Business Insider’s senior reporter covering the tech industry. He writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.