Twitter’s rivals are still standing, and so is X

Elon Musk, X’s billionaire owner, sees the inevitable.

If paying brands stay off the platform, denying what used to be Twitter's lifeblood of ad revenue, X is toast. Musk himself has admitted as much. But however risky the platform is to advertisers and degraded the experience is for users, X is still standing at the end of 2023.

For a handful of X alternatives, Musk’s recent missteps were their opportunities. If this was X’s year of hanging on, this was a year of ascendence for its replacements.

This summer, in a surprise release, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta (META) unveiled its text-based Twitter rival Threads. The app exploded onto the scene just as Twitter was blundering. Musk had imposed a poorly received update that temporarily limited the number of posts Twitter users could see in a day. Users lashed out at the restrictions, which amplified the turmoil that was defining Musk’s takeover.

Additional changes to the site, such as removing the verification badges of journalists and amplifying the posts of users who pay for premium services, worsened its public standing after it was already damaged by chaotic mass layoffs and a sinking valuation.

Zuckerberg timed Threads’ arrival at the peak of Twitter disaffection. Within hours the app claimed at least 10 million sign-ups.

But while Threads has the backing and built-in user network of a tech giant with a near-trillion-dollar market cap, other microblogging platforms have captured attention and drawn their own nascent user bases too.

Such alternatives aren't billing themselves as a direct replacement.

“There has to be a point where people realize there isn't going to be another Twitter,” said Noam Bardin, CEO and founder of Post, the new social platform, which counts 550,000 registered users. While some new entrants are attempting to recreate the idiosyncrasies behind the success of old Twitter, Bardin said that type of app cloning won’t work “if you are just another Twitter without the content.”

Post’s way of differentiating itself relies in part on emphasizing news, which other players like Meta have deemphasized, ceding ground to upstarts. The platform allows users to buy individual articles from news providers and read stories from outlets within the same interface.

Bardin points to TikTok’s success as a model for Post. Rather than trying to clone YouTube, TikTok leaned heavily on surfacing entertaining content that meets the tastes of its users without having to push them to find and follow other accounts or build out a curated feed using social signals. The result was an endless stream of clips that are personalized to users. For Bardin, TikTok took a slice of the incumbent’s service and ran with it. That’s a path for Post, too.

Bardin also emphasized that Post’s business model of partnering with news outlets and publishers rather than relying on ad revenue based on impressions shapes the incentives for the company in ways that don’t rely on the more toxic elements of social media, like constantly pushing to keep users psychologically trapped on the platform.

“We don't need you to doomscroll for five hours,” he said. “We make the same money by you reading three articles.”

Bluesky, which has 2.6 million users and is still invitation-only, claims its own niche. It aims to offer a more communal and transparent alternative to X that is less susceptible to control by a single entity.

Originally propped up as an initiative inside Twitter to develop an open-source social network, Bluesky is now its own public-benefit company. While it resembles old Twitter, the company has plans for a fully decentralized system that would allow the general public to run their own apps, using Bluesky as a kind of digital infrastructure. For now, the flagship Bluesky app is giving many former Twitter users a home for public conversation.

“The changes that Twitter has been through really demonstrate inadvertently why it’s important for us to exist,” said CEO Jay Graber.

“We are actually trying to build something that’s resilient to a single person or a single company changing the infrastructure that people communicate on very drastically.”

Then there's Mastodon, an open-source Twitter alternative that was among the first social networks to pull in users fleeing Musk's platform. While its monthly active users have wavered this year, there are efforts to continue its early momentum. An array of third-party clients have released polished apps that make using the service more intuitive.

I’ve hesitated to spend more time on other social networks even as I’ve dabbled in them. At first, leaving X can be disorienting in the same way starting up a new video game or hobby can be. You don’t know what you’re doing. The screens look weird. When does it get fun? What’s a skeet?

Getting over that beginner feeling is hard to do when X is sitting right there, even when it's so much worse — clogged with crypto spam, hostile to consuming news, and increasingly lacking of my favorite accounts that aren’t posting as much or at all. I know I’m hung up on X.

I’m lurking more on LinkedIn and Reddit, even when newer, enticing alternatives are right in front of me.

As a friend texted me recently about Bluesky, “Get in here, the water is warm.”

Ryan Broderick, a web culture writer and author of the Garbage Day newsletter, said we don’t have a lot of historical precedents to think through Twitter dying. But there are examples to pull from.

"The big question mark is what kind of crisis is X in right now?" he said, sketching three paths. The first is what many people immediately jump to: Myspace, a complete shutdown. The second is something like what happened to YouTube during advertiser boycotts over brand safety. Eventually, the advertisers returned, and the platform bounced back. The third case Broderick noted was Tumblr, which suffered a huge exodus of users but has limped onward with an ever-shrinking user base.

It's likely X will plod along and get smaller and dumber, Broderick said. "I don't think X is going to disappear one day."

That all depends on Musk and the courses set by X's competitors. Zuckerberg, for his part, has lofty ambitions for Threads, even as the platform has deemphasized news, a crucial element of old Twitter's chaotic magic. During Meta's most recent earnings call, Zuckerberg said Threads has almost 100 million monthly active users. Reaching a level 10 times that number is within a few years' reach, he said. Earlier this month Threads opened up to users in the European Union.

In the days after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza, X appeared to flash some of its old, arresting power as a conduit of breaking news and a portal into momentous global events. At the same time, its limitations were laid bare: the amplification of attention mongers, a flood of abusive and bigoted posts, and design choices that make it harder for people to find trustworthy news sources. When the drama of current events pulls audiences in, X becomes an irresistible destination. It's also a deeply flawed one. That's what makes the race to replace it or bypass it simultaneously intriguing and implausible.

Broderick said he followed the events on both Threads and X, describing the experience of being on Musk's platform as exhausting and horrible without the right filtering. "But I had a better sense of the ticking clock of the conflict on X," he said. "The machinery is still there. It is still a pretty good app."

Hamza Shaban is a reporter for Yahoo Finance covering markets and the economy. Follow Hamza on Twitter @hshaban.

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