Photo: Clockwise, top left, Spoutible logo (Spoutible), Twitter logo (Twitter), Threads logo (Threads), Bluesky logo (Bluesky), Spill logo (Spill)
In a blink of an eye, Twitter has more competition than it can count. Since Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform in October 2022 and the backlash that ensued, several companies have popped up to take over that space.
Here are five things to know about social media wars.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is taking in Twitter, and it’s off to a strong start. Threads has drawn more than 30 million sign-ups since its launch on July 5 night, Zuckerberg said in a post on the new social media platform.
Zuckerberg also said on the app that he plans to build Threads as he did Facebook and Instagram–get to 1 billion users and then monetize.
Threads has yet to offer many of the features of Twitter, such as direct messaging. Right now, Threads also only shows people a feed of posts recommended by the app, NBC News reported.
And this is a catch that new users are complaining about. Some weren’t thrilled that if they decided to opt out of Threads, you have to, so they must also delete their Instagram account since the two link together, The New York Post reported. So you can’t readily get off of Threads without losing.
Spill founders are Alphonzo “Phonz” Terrell and DeVaris Brown, who both worked at Twitter.
“We were the only two Black guys in there, and we were like, ‘Hey, we’ll be friends!’” Terrell told TechCrunch.
The new Black-owned social media platform Spill is getting such a migration of people from Twitter that its server crashed.
It’s no wonder the server crashed; even before the platform launched in January, they had a waiting list for signups of more than 20,000, Business Insider reported.
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey may have left Twitter behind, but he is still in the space. He’s developed Bluesky, a decentralized social app. Although still in beta, it has a Twitter-like user interface with algorithmic choice, a federated design, and community-specific moderation, TechCrunch reported.
Using an open-source framework built in-house, the AT Protocol, Bluesky offers transparency into how it is built and what is being developed. Dorsey actually introduced Bluesky in 2019 while still running Twitter.
Spoutible was created by Brooklyn, NY-born Black entrepreneur Christopher Bouzy, the founder of the Twitter analytics service Bot Sentinel. It launched in February 2023.
“Building a platform like Twitter is not difficult,” he told Wired earlier this year. “All it is is a fancy message board—you’re just taking people’s posts and storing them in a database.”
Lots have been going on at Twitter since Musk took the reigns.
Most recently, Twitter announced that only verified users will be able to access TweetDeck; Twitter started rolling out a new version of the web app to users on July 3, TechCrunch reported.
Twitter tried limiting the number of tweets users can read in a day, and you will have to have an account to view tweets. But days later, Twitter silently removed the login requirement for viewing tweets.
Musk also removed himself as CEO and placed Linda Yaccarino in the role.
Photo: Clockwise, top left, Spoutible logo (Spoutible), Twitter logo (Twitter), Threads logo (Threads), Bluesky logo (Bluesky), Spill logo (Spill)
