Despite fears to the contrary, it would seem that Twitter is still standing. This has come as a shock to those who were paying attention just a week ago when all signs were pointing to the website’s impending crash. And yet, there it is.
I talked last week about how Twitter’s demise is more likely to be a slow burn, but I can’t blame anyone for looking at the erratic (and advertiser deterring) behavior of the company’s new CEO and being skeptical about the site’s long-term prognosis.
There’s blood in the water and a variety of potential Twitter successors have arrived to feast. The only question on everyone’s mind is, “which one is the cool one?”
Well my friends, I’ve done the work for you. Once I had a critical mass of friends deactivate their accounts, I started sampling the alternatives myself and now I’m a proud connoisseur of all things New Twitter. Like so many aspiring stepdads, these websites are vying for your attention knowing that they simply cannot marry Mom if you’re not on board.
Mastodon
This has been the mainstay of the “Twitter is dying!” panic for years now. Mastodon is sold as a more ethical alternative to Twitter, a network of individual servers that all cater to a different niche.
In theory, this added layer of focus makes for more productive and thoughtful conversations. In practice, Mastodon is an inscrutable puzzle box. Each server has its own URL, and even after several exploratory missions over the last handful of years, I still have no idea if I actually have my username or if I just have that username on one server. And ultimately, these servers are run by individuals, and as anyone who ever spent time on a forum in the 00s knows, Mod’s Law dictates that all forum mods either go mad with power or completely abandon their duties.
Stepdad Rating: Mastodon is a guy who Mom tells me is great if you get to know him. Everyone says that if I just took the time to understand which servers to join and how to navigate between them, he and I would really start to get along. But why is that my job, Mastodon? Why aren’t you more user friendly? If I’m the one who’s supposed to sink a bunch of my time into this website, why aren’t you meeting me halfway?
Post
Post doesn’t take Mastodon’s multi-server approach but instead functions as one large niche server focused on, as the site’s dot news URL would tell you, news. And like Mastodon, the team behind Post seems similarly convinced that the path to a less toxic Twitter involves more specificity and focus.
My theory is that this is wrong. I think when people are shopping through Twitter alternatives, they’re not shopping for niche spaces. If they were, everyone would’ve just joined a series of Discord servers. I think people are looking for a new digital town square, and the thing about the town square is that it’s supposed to be a little annoying. The human experience is made up of minutiae and small feats of endurance. If we didn’t encounter weird people out in the world, what would we talk about when I got wherever I was going? In my mind, the ideal Twitter replacement finds a way to leave Twitter’s chaotic aspects intact while being more proactive about stomping out hateful communities before they grow.
But that’s not to say that niche spaces don’t have their use. Unfortunately, Post’s niche space (at least for now) seems to be “self congratulatory political posters.” At the moment, Post is overrun with that post-2016 era centrist back-patting best summed up by that great Kylie Brakeman video. As soon as I got into the (currently pretty easy to enter) Beta, I saw the Krassenstein Brothers (sharing an account like a married couple in 2004) and a reposted Horse Whisperer tweet. Sure, these people aren’t hurting anyone, I just don’t want to throw my lot in on a social network that’s giving them a head start to regain a following. And I especially don’t want to throw it in on a network that put “don’t be mean to rich people” in their mission statement.
Even with the Krassenstein of it all aside, the UI makes it tough to explore outside your existing circle and it’s hard to make jokes for jokes’ sake when every other post has the “I’m currently locked in a basement” quality typically only seen on LinkedIn.
Stepdad Rating: This is not the step dad you want. Not only does he seem annoying to be around but he seems to contain the capacity to make everything he touches a bit more annoying as well. Maybe there’s some part of him you’re not getting but you don’t care to find out. Jesus Christ, Mom. Dad’s barely in the ground.
CoHost
CoHost seemed promising! Good UI, a lack of algorithm, and no ethically dubious mission statements all put points in its favor. Unfortunately when you join you aren’t allowed to post for a few days and their search function currently makes it very difficult to find other people you know. I logged in and then forgot I had it. It could be cool down the line!
Stepdad Rating: This is a guy our mom exchanged a long glance with at the grocery store, I guess?
Hive
Hive is interesting because I would never have bet on it being the frontrunner here, but as far as mass adoption goes, it’s taken a seemingly strong lead. People, particularly people in the comedy and podcasting space, have flocked to hive attempting to rebuild the followings that they have on Twitter.
The app has dealt with some early controversy largely due to its incredibly small team of (originally) two people. They’ve since expanded but the app is still crash prone and slow moving. On top of this, Hive conspicuously lacks a desktop app. This means you must post entirely from your phone which neuters one of Twitter’s greatest joys: scrolling it alongside work you should be doing.
Hive feels like it would’ve been a shoe-in successor if Twitter’s fall from grace had happened two or three years from now. But as it stands, it feels undercooked and appears to be constantly experiencing various security issues. I have since closed my account.
Stepdad Rating: He’s too young for her. It’s clear that he’s got something and he’s trying but he doesn’t even understand the importance of the role he’s trying to fill. If he does the work, he could be a great dad down the line but who has time to wait?
That’s the landscape as it stands and let me tell you I do not envy this hypothetical mother we all share. Each option has its own set of flaws, but one they all share is that mass adoption on the same scale as the original is extremely unlikely. I try not to pay attention to my follower count beyond my rube’s love of big, round, numbers. But the number of people I follow has been something I’ve been keenly aware of as Twitter has started to lose its step. Seeing nearly ten percent of the people I follow deactivate their accounts over the span of a couple days is what originally convinced me that it was time to check out these alternatives. But having checked again today I noticed that over half of them had returned.
There’s a chance that Twitter was lightning in a bottle and that recreating it is impossible. But I like to believe there’s hope yet for the perfect social network/metaphorical step dad. Something that brings us all together but doesn’t allow hate to fester. Something that preserves the inherent chaos of human communication but makes it easier to decipher. A stepdad that lets us call him by his first name and understands the importance of the dad that came before.
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