Anyone who has spent time away from Twitter can find a very different social network when they reopen the app. Golden badges , verified accounts whose only merit is paying a monthly fee, (even more) polarization… The arrival of Elon Musk is causing a lot of disappointment, and many users are already considering joining one of these 10 competitors who can become the alternative to Twitter .
T2
Unseating Twitter will not be as easy as many predict. The blue bird’s social network is one of the oldest, just like Facebook, and getting a transfer from the vast majority of its users is little less than a chimera. However, some entrepreneurs like Gabor Cselle are convinced that they can attract disenchanted tweeters with T2 , a social network that offers a very similar experience to Twitter (hence its name), allowing messages with a maximum of 280 characters. At the moment, T2 is taking its first steps, but it is already attracting its first investors.
Post
Another social network trying to carve out a niche as a potential successor to Twitter is Post , which makes a plea for real news as opposed to hoaxes that find in traditional social networks the perfect subscription to expand uncontrollably. Its current design is very rudimentary and allows you to ‘like’ a publication, share it or reply to the author, with the novelty that it also allows you to give a tip without having to enable this function, as is currently the case on Twitter .
Hive Social
Hive Social highlights on its presentation page that one of its main hallmarks will be the preservation of chronological order , one of the great workhorses of users in all social networks. However, despite the media impact that this alternative to Twitter had, its security flaws ended up monopolizing the limelight. The Hive Social servers had to be shut down for a few days to be able to fix the mess, and the difficulties encountered by cybersecurity experts in reporting this vulnerability make it clear that it is not enough to have a good idea, but rather to know how to execute it accordingly.
Mastodon
Mastodon has been appearing as one of the main alternatives to Twitter for quite some time now. Although it is common to find contacts on this social network who threaten to switch to Mastodon, its use is not as intuitive as one might expect and, ultimately, the transfer of users has not been as massive as many predicted. This alternative runs the risk of becoming the equivalent of Signal, that application that was positioned as the new WhatsApp, paying greater attention to security without consolidating itself.
What if the coup de grace to Twitter was hidden in the notes of Instagram ? This new feature of the Meta social network has been in vogue in recent weeks, and opens a new seam for those content creators who want to bet on text instead of video or photos. Keep in mind that notes don’t allow you to go as long as a 280-character tweet, but it’s a novel step that may attract some new users to Instagram, positioning it as the most unexpected alternative to Twitter.
However, the classics will prefer to take refuge in another social network that they know very well and that does allow much longer texts. Facebook not only continues to be one of the social networks with the greatest user presence , but in the last year it has once again made its algorithm allow greater visibility for those who share reflections, links or photos publicly. Facebook has a great point in favor, and that is that any user who enters will find that a large percentage of their contacts continue to use this platform.
Cohost
Another competitor for Twitter in the medium and long term could be Cohost . This social network promises that there will be no ads on it or any kind of tracking of user behavior. In the same way, the chronological order will be one of its main characteristics, without an algorithm that reorders the content that is seen in it. Still in beta phase, it also has a paid version with which, for five dollars a month, you can get extra functions, such as the possibility of uploading larger multimedia files or configuring the profile in more detail. As in the vast majority of new alternatives, there is still very little content in Spanish, which may discourage many from taking the leap.
Spill
The T2 founder includes a stint on Twitter in his work life, as do Spill co-founders Phonz Terrell and Devaris Brown. Both hope to launch the first alpha version of Spill in the first quarter of 2023, seeking to create a social network that provides “humour, knowledge and connection with incredible people.” Among the attractions that Spill can bring to the table is the use of artificial intelligence to make content moderation more effective than on Twitter or the economic remuneration for users whose ‘spills’ (the equivalent of tweets) go viral.
Plurk
From Taiwan comes another of the possible alternatives that disenchanted Twitter users can embrace: Plurk . This platform already has several years of experience, since it was launched in 2008 and its design is somewhat chaotic , with a horizontal timeline. This chaos can throw off more than one, especially if what you want is a clean and easy-to-use social network. The content that predominates in this social network is usually related to ‘anime’, and finding profiles that publish in Spanish is complicated, although not impossible.
Entering Twitter and moving to LinkedIn is like crossing the border into a new dimension. All the negativism and hemlock poured into the Elon Musk-owned social network turns into positivity and perhaps an excess of self-help posts on LinkedIn. Although the main use of LinkedIn is to look for a job and put professionals in the same sector in contact with each other, there are many who seek to give it other uses, such as socializing and even flirting through it. Who knows, maybe for this Eurovision Song Contest the real sauce is on LinkedIn and no longer on Twitter.