Twitter’s Rivals are Beefing Up
Musk’s Twitter doings are driving away some users from the platform. The competitors are ready to capitalize on that.
The recent announcement by Elon Musk where he limited the number of tweets daily for different groups of users has sparked a community backlash. As a result, people launched different campaigns on Twitter with hashtags such as “Twitter is dead” or “#Ratelimitexceeded.”
This scandal, in spite of its magnitude, is just one of the latest in the series of Twitter-related backlashes. With multiple users unhappy with Musk’s policies, and decisions that have been dubbed “erratic”, including the blue check saga with its many twists and turns, many are turning to other platforms.
Such as Mastodon, Twitter’s decentralized German competitor, which has reported an increase in usership following Musk’s latest decision.
On Sunday, Eugen Rochko, the creator and chief executive of Mastodon, wrote "looks like Mastodon's active user base has increased by 110K (110,000) over the last day. Not bad”, adding cheekily later, "I would prefer it if Elon Musk was destroying his site during the work week. This isn't the first time.”
His latest post is written in a positive sentiment too. It reads, “So, weekend tally: The number of active users across Mastodon rose by 294K, and posting activity roughly triples. Lots of new sign-ups, but also many returning users. Fun times!”
Eugen Rochko’s post. Source: Eugen Rochko’s Mastodon
While Mastodon despite gaining users is still nowhere near Twitter’s audience, it looks like the latter is about to counter another potential behemoth: Threads by Mark Zuckerberg.
Slated to be out this week, the app initially wanted to compete with Snapchat before shelving the plans and reinventing its purpose. The interface of its latest version is akin to Twitter’s “where you can find your followers, connect over a conversation, and share your point of view.”
Threads’s interface. Source: Threads
However, the story does not stop there as there is another emerging competitor in the market that is already benefitting from the discontent in the twitter-verse: BlueSky.
Created by former CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey and led by Jay Graber, it claims to be building a social internet. Even though its story is closely connected to Twitter as it “paid Bluesky services income to build an open social protocol for public conversation that it could someday become a client on”, the connection has been, arguably, severed after Musk’s takeover and the cancellation of the service agreement with Bluesky.
Bluesky logo. Source: Bluesky’s site
While Mastodon is an operating service, and Threads seems to have a highly-developed product ready, Bluesky is still in the beta testing phase with its usership base in April standing at over 50k users. Although the company hasn’t revealed the exact number of users who joined Bluesky as a result of the latest move by Musk, it had to temporarily halt new signups.
You can join the waitlist to try the beta testing via the link on the site. Or wait for an invite from the existing users.
Which platform is your favorite? Let us know on Twitter.
Previously, Gagarin News reported that Twitter suspended a meme coin bot.
