Opinion: What Happened to the Twitter Alternatives?

In July 2023, Elon Musk rebranded Twitter as ‘X’,  – because why settle for a bird when you can have the entire alphabet? This was also an attempt to make it a one-app solution for various services, including payments. Has Musk achieved it? Not yet.

But it surely stirred up the social media cosmos takeover and gave fame – although shortlived– to plenty of existing Twitter alternatives and even gave birth to a few new ones. 

From Open-source Mastadon to Jack Dorsey's Blue Sky, many of these apps were contending to be the top choice for people who were once loyal "Twitteratis." 

Social media apps serve as digital homes for our digital lives. Creating a community on any platform is strenuous and time-consuming. That means, it's not easy to become lovable and or even likeable until a new social media app fully understands why people even use it and why they want to move to another one.   

Mastodon was launched back in 2016. However, it was Musk's Twitter takeover, which increased the user base from 300,000 to 2.5 million in just two months in 2022. The platform currently supports 93 languages. The popularity was brief. Mastodon experienced a significant drop of 1.4 million users in February 2023, raising questions about user loyalty and ownership changes. 

In the race to compete with Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg launched Thread, adding to the line of Meta’s social media app, Instagram. The app managed to get a record 100 million sign-ups in just five days. This initial surge was partly due to Meta's existing Instagram user base and partly because of Twitter's disgruntled denizens. Despite an impressive start, with around 95 million posts just one day after its launch, Thread currently has only 576,000 daily active users, a sharp decline from 49.3 million in July 2023. 

Twitter’s former CEO, Jack Dorsey launched Bluesky in October 2021. Bluesky gained attention during Twitter's turbulent period as an alternative platform. Offering the ability to transfer data and followers from other apps, it still only attracted 2 million users compared to Thread's 100 million. Despite this, Bluesky currently boasts over 3 million users, offering selective post viewing from different categories like sports, astronomy, music, books, etc.

Often dubbed the 'Twitter of India,' Koo has over 50 million users across 200 countries. Its main difference from Twitter is its yellow and white theme, as opposed to Twitter's blue. Just like other alternatives, Koo experienced a significant decrease in users, dropping from 9.4 million in 2022 to 3.1 million in 2023. 

What is the reason behind the failures of all these applications?

I guess that is "user's familiarity with the interface," "first-come benefits," “ease of access,” and “features of the application."
It is true that most of the time, users don't want to switch applications after becoming habitual to one application, and more than that, social media is like a small digital house for users; their followers, following, and types of posts are also important. After some time, it's not easy to transfer all your people to different platforms without any major reason.

Some applications, like "Bluesky,” never updated their app for full public access; users were using the app's beta version for a very long time. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are some of the first popular applications with elegant marketing strategies.

Twitter faced backlash in the past because of politics, and when it comes to the personal benefits of people, most people ignore this part even if they care about the CEO and founders, but even then, they want to fix things rather than ditch the platform.

I feel it's not easy to beat old giants if they are in “working mode," unless they don’t face any restrictions or legal issues. People are hooked, and even these apps have started adding new features.