Since Twitter, now called X, became mainstream, multiple competitor websites have sprung up, threatening to outcompete the company. Several defining events have triggered trends that have initially appeared to switch the advantage from X to its competitors. The launch of the Threads app after Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform is a recent example. However, these Twitter competitors have not gained any ground over the social platform.
Over the years, X, formerly called Twitter, has seen different competitors come and go. The most recent rival, Threads, drew millions of users in its first week before its popularity dwindled slowly. Before that, competitors like Mastodon and Bluesky came into the picture, not getting the overall reception they expected. This article discusses the most current rivals of X, formerly Twitter, and mentions the platform’s most popular alternatives.
Who Are Twitter’s Competitors? Which Platforms Have Tackled X in the Market?
The social media industry has experienced some dramatic growth in recent times. The monopoly that once characterized the landscape has dwindled, creating space for newer alternatives. For example, X, aka Twitter, has faced serious competition over the past decade. Most of this competition has tried to key into the platform’s inadequacies, enjoying slimmer degrees of success over time. The recent rebranding from Twitter to X triggered a new wave of competition. But who are Twitter’s competitors?
Mastodon Is Twitter’s Big Competitor
Mastodon, a decentralized social media platform, allows users to create accounts in different communities while still interacting with others. These communities or servers usually center around unique interests, themes, or topics. This social media platform’s popularity soared when Elon Musk began the process of taking over Twitter, now X.
The platform’s popularity grew because people mentioned it as the next stop if Twitter’s takeover went through. Although it has been public since 2016, most people had no idea what it was or how it worked. Its decentralized nature made it an attractive alternative, boosting its rank as a competitor for Twitter.
Mastodon bases itself on an open-source and federated core, allowing the different services to communicate through one protocol. This way, they can share information and transmit the user content to one unified feed. These servers, called “Instances,” permit users to form communities through the main platform without building.
Different operators oversee the activities on their respective servers. These include the user registration and the subsequent interactions that occur. When signing up, users pick the specific network they’d prefer. There are over 100,000 active communities to pick from. By default, when you sign up, it places you at Mastodon.social. However, you can toggle the options as you like.
Unlike other social media platforms, Mastodon does not publish ads on its platform. Instead, it permits users to share adverts on their servers when they want. Besides interacting with users within your server, you can also access posts from other servers.
Regarding posts, the platform allows users to publish 500-character posts, images, and videos. You can also create instances for yourself or your business to share specialized content with your audience. The platform is available through its iOS, Android, and web versions.
Bluesky Social Is Also a Competitor to Twitter
Bluesky Social, an American social media platform, emerged from an idea within Twitter. The platform’s initial design came from the decentralized social network protocol on which its founders eventually built it. The app’s popularity stems from the influence of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who has backed the app.
Unlike other social networks, the social media platform is decentralized, allowing users to send updates through different servers. In this aspect, it is quite similar to Mastodon, which does not use a central provider to transmit updates from users. The app’s base is on a federated system, allowing users to join through different servers.
By default, the app places users on the “bsky.social” server. That notwithstanding, users can always access content from users on other servers. If users decide to switch servers, they can always move their data.
One peculiar thing about Bluesky is its invite-only mode of sign-up, which uses an invite code system. According to the social media platform, its invite codes help control growth as it builds moderation and curation tools. The platform also insists that this system provides insight into the budding social graph. Bluesky has mentioned that it’ll continue using the system but may increase the number of codes it hands out.
Users on this social platform can publish posts with up to 300 characters. These posts also support the addition of links and images. As expected, the app pays much attention to content moderation. It also allows users to block others, mute other accounts, and filter content. Users can access this social platform from its Android and iOS apps.
Meta’s Threads App Is Another Twitter Competitor
In early 2023, rumors of a new meta app were in the works. By May, the news was certain, and it was clear that the company was working on the project. Meta released the Threads app on July 6, 2023, with the platform enjoying over 22 million users within 12 hours.
Meta, the parent company, relayed that Threads was a new social media platform. It also stated that the Instagram team built the website to support text-based updates and host public conversations. After its release, the social media platform aimed at competing with Twitter to host discussions and conversations.
The parent company also integrated the app with user information from Instagram. The company insisted that the Threads app targeted ease of usage, safety, and reliability. It also mentioned that it aimed at providing creators with a spot to grow and build a stable audience. Overall, Meta built the app with its base on Instagram.
This way, users can sign into the app with their Instagram credentials and synchronize their followers. Users can also maintain a specific handle and bio on both platforms while retaining their verification. Of course, all these features targeted the augmentation of Instagram’s role as a proponent of visual content. Instead, Threads aimed at fostering conversation just as X, aka Twitter, does.
A user’s feed on this social media platform comprises threads that people you follow have shared. You’ll also access recommended posts from creators you haven’t interacted with. The app allows users to make posts with up to 500 characters. It also supports links, pictures, and videos that span up to five minutes.
The platform has maintained Instagram’s rules, policies, and guidelines. However, it seeks to utilize the ActivityPub protocol to create a decentralized system.
T2 Social or Pebble Is Also a Competitor
Pebble, formerly called T2 Social, is one of the closest Twitter competitors regarding user interface. Its post style and the general feel of the social media platform are quite similar to X, formerly Twitter. This similarity stems from one of the co-founders, Sarah Oh’s time at Twitter before she went on to work on this platform.
Among the social media services people consider X’s rivals, Pebble has one of the smallest users. By June 2023, Pebble had a little over 7500 active users. According to the platform’s website, it aims to provide a safer, kinder, and more fun area for public discourse.
Pebble supports posts of 280 characters or less. It also allows users to publish photos, share other posts, publish replies, and like posts. The app also allows users to link their accounts to the X profiles. The platform also offers verification for specific users who have verified their identities.
Experts have not gotten a hold of the platform’s algorithm yet. However, they noticed that their feed contained different content, sometimes in multiple languages. Unlike Twitter’s other competitors, Pebble is a centralized platform.
Engagement is low compared to other platforms since it only has a few users. Overall, growing an audience and connecting with people here is quite simple. Well, Pebble is only available on desktops and the web.
TRUTH Social Is Another Competitor to X
TRUTH Social emerged as a Twitter competitor in October 2021 after Twitter banned former United States president Donald Trump. The app, which loomed under the Trump Media and Technology Group, has gathered over two million active users. It also garnered over 500,000 active daily users.
TRUTH Social is available on the web, iOS, and Android apps. Posts on this platform are “Truths,” which users can “ReTruth,” similar to a retweet or repost on X. These posts support a maximum of 500 characters, and users can also share images and videos. The platform majorly functions like X, allowing users to send DMs, view their feeds, and create posts for free.
Spill Is Another Competitor
Spill is another app from a former Twitter or X employee. It is also a freshly launched platform whose iOS app only became publicly available in June 2023. Though considered a competitor, it differs from X because of its visual first design. This design makes it more similar to Tumblr based on looks and experience.
When you first launch the app, it places you on a feed that contains images from users you’re “sipping.” In this case, “Sipping” is its version of the following feature. You’ll also access posts that the platform recommends via its algorithm. As users can see what’s trending on X, users can also draw a top menu displaying trending hashtags and posts. On the other hand, the bottom menu allows users to share text, photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and links.
The company asserts that its unique selling point is its attractiveness to multiple and different classes of users. Well, the app is still in beta and is invite-only. However, the platform has some usual characteristics of modern social platforms. For instance, it has a feed where people can share “spills” or posts.
Also, it is obtaining its extensive language learning mode to help moderate content better. The app also has plans to include blockchain-based attributes that would facilitate the process of rewarding users. The platform also offers a “rep score” that rewards good behavior even if the user has only a few followers.
Spill is also reportedly creating a feature called “tea parties,” where users can create online and offline occasions. These parties would offer bonuses that they can use to pay for in-app purchases. The social media service is only available on iOS, and it’s currently in beta stage.
The Post News App Is Also One To Watch
In line with its name, the Post News app is one social media platform that supports news. This platform has been one of Twitter’s biggest competitors, aimed at replacing the trusted news resources that Twitter allegedly lost. The social network also targeted changes to how the verification feature worked.
Post News has gathered over 440,000 users since it came out in November 2022. At that point, it was only in its beta stage. The platform fully opened to the public in February 2023 and has drawn a mirage of influential organizations and individuals. For instance, journalists, experts on different subjects, academics, and premium publishers have found their way to the app.
Although the platform plays a similar role to Twitter, it aims to grow into an income-generating platform for creators. Here, it helps publishers generate revenue from small payments from users who wish to access their posts. Overall, the platform allows users to choose specific pieces they wish to access instead of buying several subscriptions.
The social media network does not place a limit on post length. Instead, it permits longer articles, allowing people to like, reply, and repost. It also requires that users pay in “points” before accessing articles. Reading a single article costs about one to 50 points. While the platform offers 50 free points when a user signs up, users must purchase them afterward.
One point costs $0.01. However, you can purchase point bundles, which offer a flat fee of 300 to 100,000 points. The social media platform retains a portion of revenue from selling points. While users use these points to access posts, they can also tip creators. For now, the app is available on the web and iOS.
What Is the Best Twitter Alternative? Which Competitors Function Closest to X?
Due to recent events surrounding Twitter, many users have threatened to exit the platform. These events have ranged from Elon Musk’s takeover to the different changes that have characterized the microblogging platform since then. As a result, multiple competitor websites have emerged, each promising specific features to capture a chunk of X’s user base. Despite the flurry of multiple competitors, there are questions about the best Twitter alternative.
Despite the close-knit designs between most of these recently launched apps, Twitter remains very different from these competitor websites. Thus, migrating to these apps will mean losing some of the features you initially enjoyed on X. Of course, all of these have different selling points and strengths, which you must consider. But overall, only a few can function similarly to Twitter’s.
The Threads App Can Be an Alternative to Twitter
Besides the design, one important characteristic of a social platform is the crop of users it attracts. While many considered Threads the final mail to Twitter or X’s coffin, it lacked one thing. The type of users it attracted did not align with the service it tried to serve.
The Threads app’s design allowed Instagram users to duplicate their information directly to the platform to ease the sign-up process. This factor accounted for the massive number of users it accrued within the few days of its launch. However, since Threads sought to be a conversational platform, Instagram’s visually inclined users could not maintain their presence.
Despite this, the Threads app remains a major Twitter alternative due to Meta’s influence in the industry. Overall, it failed to attract a considerable number of users from Twitter. Thus, Threads’ usage and popularity dwindled quickly with no rise in sight. Well, this app is yet to attract the people and activities that foster the maximal use of X.
The Post News App Is One of the Twitter Alternatives
Post News has made itself one of the biggest alternatives to Twitter by niching down and exploiting a sensitive area. This company offers a significant incentive for independent creators, premium publishers, and journalists to use the app. Despite the introduction of Twitter or X subscriptions and ads revenue payouts, Post News has remained a valid alternative.
However, this platform mainly attracts users to create content and generate revenue. Its usage has grown steadily since its release, and its reward system appears enticing enough to draw the attention of potentially massive users. Despite this, the best Twitter accounts have remained.
Although multiple Twitter competitors are now live, most existing users have remained on the familiar platform. While the platform has recently added several new features, users cannot remove their posts in bulk. Luckily, several third-party services like TweetEraser have made this activity much easier.
TweetEraser, a third-party application, offers a simple and efficient way of deleting your Twitter posts in large numbers. It allows users to import their archives, performing highly specific tasks in a few clicks. It is ideal since it does not spread promotions on users’ timelines. Start filtering and cleaning your Twitter timeline today!
