Where you can go if you want to get off Twitter (although it’s not as simple as it seems)

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Elon Musk officially bought Twitter just 15 days ago. Since then, his opinions, decisions and swerves have generated three types of opinions: I want to continue on Twitter anyway, I want to continue to see what happens and I want to get out of here. According to Musk’s own figures, the first two groups are overwhelmingly in the majority; Twitter has grown these two weeks and now has more than 250 million daily users.

If the subscription or payment wall is confirmed, Twitter users can emerge first and second (those who pay against those who do not). That can generate a creeping groundswell of interest on other networks.

Not only that: in a meeting with employees on Thursday said it “does not rule out bankruptcy” in the event that “no more money comes in than goes out”. Also on Thursday, executives with crucial security positions resigned. The uncontrolled deployment of new functions makes them fear legal consequences from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC): “Elon sends rockets into space, he has no means of the FTC”, was a phrase about Musk that circulated in an internal channel of the company. An ending with tragic chaos is not a minor option.

Because another issue that is creating considerable chaos on the social network is Musk’s decision to sell the check blue that identifies verified accounts and that is causing many users to buy names of companies, politicians and personalities and tweet on their behalf: in a few hours, they have been falsified the accounts of Lockheed Martin, Roblox, BP, Lilly and even Tesla itself, also owned by Musk.

On Twitter now the only certainty is impermanence. Musk has announced that users can expect a lot of “nonsense” and “news” in the coming months, coming and going.

Before looking at other options, a word of warning: For regular Twitter users, leaving is a rocky road. It is because of the network effect, getting followers and choosing well who to follow takes years of tweets and routine. For those users, Twitter is an essential source of information, entertainment or discussion. Abandoning it from one day to the next is not easy.

New or young users of text-centric networks may better value other options. But one thing must be clear: there is no other Twitter like Twitter at hand.

The tendency to diversify the use of apps can contribute to having others similar to Twitter and that we now do with several apps what we used to do with just one, but there is no single alternative. These ups and downs also give a new idea of ​​the fragility of a social network system that just two years ago was seen as unbreakable.

1. The cool network: Mastodon

Mastodon is the eternal cool candidate to replace Twitter. Its operation is similar: you write a message with a limit of 500 characters, it is public, you can retweet it, like it and the last message appears first in the chronology. These days it has grown a lot and now has more than a million accounts.

Magnitude is one of the big differences. Mastodon has only one full-time employee, Eugen Rochko, its founder, who lives in Germany. Twitter had more than 7,000 workers before Musk’s mass firing. Rochko has 190,000 followers on Mastodon. Musk has 113 million on Twitter. Size Matters.

It is a cool network because it is the image of what social networks could be like if we were all pleasant conversationalists in a public square. It is also partly an option for the future of social networks: without algorithms, without advertising, with servers controlled by their communities, so that if one type of speech is censored, there is always another. And it does not have extreme right because Rochko does not allow it. This conversation went viral a few days ago: a user wants to convince him that the Nazis no longer exist. “That crap doesn’t work on me,” says Rochko. (Although a network with elements of the extreme right since Gab uses the Mastodon protocol, which is free. What happens then is that the rest of the servers that want to disconnect it and it is isolated.)

A common metaphor about Mastodon is that it is the vegetarian network against the carnivorous Twitter: more conscious and healthy, less aggressive with the planet. The tweets have the unattractive name of toots.

The creation of an account is slightly complex because you have to choose a server/community and it seems complex (almost everything is in English), but the process is then normal. The server is not forever, it can be changed later. And once inside, it looks like Twitter in 2007. There are few people, there are bugs and there is hope that it will grow.

Can it be an alternative to Twitter? Rather it is a complement. Right now, people with Mastodon accounts are still on Twitter announcing their Mastodon account. There are services that allow you to see who of your followers is on Mastodon, such as Twitodon Y debirdify. There are also tools for tweeting (or tweeting?) on both networks.

Leaving Twitter today is losing influence and topicality. The cybersecurity community has already created enough of a network to share information and have an impact. Then they go to Twitter to tell about it. But the forecast of watering an alternative seen the events on Twitter is reasonable.

Other apps similar to Twitter such as Parler or Truth Social have hardly any traction outside the US at the moment.

2. The established but distinct alternatives: Reddit, Tumblr, Discord

Mastodon is a mix of Twitter, Reddit, and Discord. Reddit emerged around the same time as Twitter. It is a network of millions of communities with their own moderators divided by interests: tech, solo travel, Los Angeles Lakers, Tinder, memes, sushi, you name it. Each community has its tone and norms. Viral posts are published on a front page for everyone, but each user only follows what interests them. The problem? Non-English language communities are small and users are anonymous. It is not a place where celebrities or companies go to share information. Nor is it a news network: it is more about debate than the last minute. But it serves to be informed in a general way.

Discord are huge WhatsApp groups but public and organized by topic. It started as a place to discuss video games. Now it has expanded to all kinds of topics. It is more public than WhatsApp and more private than Reddit. Like on Reddit, most users are anonymous.

Tumblr is a network between Instagram and Twitter, with a lot of image but also quality fun discussion. It has hardly any information and of these three it is the least tweeting, but they are very happy not to have Musk or anything like it.

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Telegram, more private, or LinkedIn, more professional, have uses that slightly overlap with Twitter, but less than these other three.

3. The great classic: email

The newsletters like this are another alternative to time spent on Twitter. The rumor is that Musk will shut down the newsletter company that Twitter bought, Revue, and allow long posts in return. The most established alternative newsletters is Substack.

But that’s for creators. As consumers, the brand matters little. The newsletters today they are an entertaining source of information that is not a newspaper article or a tweet. Remember the old blogs, which died in part thanks to Twitter. His rebirth now is curious.

4. The network that doesn’t exist yet: BlueSky

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is behind a future social network project. It’s called BlueSky but it’s still in development and is by invitation only at the moment. Like Mastodon, it is a non-centralized protocol. It is a “federated” network or fediverse.

Like email, whoever wants can create a server and does not depend on a single authority. Gmail is one of the big ones, but your emails go to Hotmail or Protonmail with no problem. Such a network would work the same, without algorithms, without advertising. Instead of a company like Twitter at the center, each community would have its server. Another similar residual option is Cohost.

Given the problems of Twitter and Goala future of more networks and less universals is not so unimaginable today.

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Where you can go if you want to get off Twitter (although it’s not as simple as it seems)