Since taking over, Musk has made a number of changes to the micro-blogging site. He laid off half the staff, announced plans to let a huge swath of previously suspended users return to the site, and raised fears of the site crumbling or being overrun with harassment. A lot of users have started looking for a life raft, a platform where they can continue to use the internet. There is only one problem, and that is that there isn't an alternative yet.
A lot of people are trying to build something. Changes to moderation and the tools people use to connect with one another can fix fundamental problems with the platform and hopefully give users a reason to jump over. There has been an increase in interest in those already up in running.
Nick Thompson, CEO of The Narwhal Project, says in an interview that they have had a lot of people on the wait list.
Improving the quality of conversations is at the center of some of the buzziest alternatives. Users with different viewpoints can have online discussions with the help of the Narwhal project. It has a small but noteworthy group of leaders trying to make that happen, including the CEO of The Atlantic, Thompson.
We think we can use mechanics that other people don't.
Narwhal's team is studying how conversations work on other major platforms in an attempt to come up with an amalgam of features that seem to work.
There are no firm details about how Narwhal will work. Narwhal will focus on the quality of conversations, not the speed, according to Thompson.
Thompson wants there to be a place on the internet where people have interesting conversations. We think we can use mechanics that other people don't.
A new platform called Post is letting in tens of thousands of early users. The service looks a lot like the micro-messaging site, but it intends to stand out with moderation and a focus on news.
Noam Bardin is the leader of Post and he describes the network as a social platform for real people. The platform will allow users to buy individual articles from news providers and tip creators via "integrated micro-payments."
Civil conversations are a priority for Post, which is why the site is not launching widely. Being able to moderation is one of the biggest constraints on allowing people onto the site, according to Bardin. Bardin hopes to have 50 million daily active users on the platform by the end of the year. As of Bardin's most recent update, the platform let 65,000 people on the wait list.
The service has run into a bit of hot water with some people taking issue with some decisions Bardin and Post have made. Bardin said it wouldn't be focusing on accessibility to start because the platform is funded by the same group that invested $400 million in Musk's takeover.
While Post and Narwhal are trying to change the way people communicate, other projects are trying to do the same thing. Hive, a social platform that ballooned to 1.5 million users in November 2022, was one project that a lot of people were interested in. It offers a feed of text based content, photos, and videos from the users you follow as well as an option to explore the media posted by users in various categories, like meme, pets, or gaming.
Mastodon is the largest name in the replacement game.
It is still not ready. The two-person team running the site shut down their server on Wednesday to fix security issues that affect the stability of their application and the safety of their users. It was still in early access and felt very slow and laggy. Even though they hadn't posted anything, they got a few followers even though they hadn't. Hive doesn't include any language about bots and it's unclear how well the team will be able to moderate the actual humans that use its platform
Mastodon has been building its tech and reputation for a long time. It will be familiar to anyone who has used the service. The idea behind Mastodon is to let users create their own spaces, instead of a company controlling the software and moderation, even if the CEO of that company swears up and down that he is following the will.
Mastodon is a mature platform that has been figuring out moderation and technical issues for the past two years. It could be less appealing to a general audience because of the way it is run. There is a distributed system instead of a single Mastodon site. There are dozens of Mastodon instances, each of which has their own administrators and moderation policies. Even though there is a way to talk to people and get at content on different instances, it is not as simple as having to manage a single account on the social networking site.
The admin of Mastodon.world, one of the most popular instances with over 100,000 users, hopes that Mastodon will take off and get even more users. It shouldn't be on a single server. It should be on a lot of server. It shouldn't be a server with millions of people on it.
Schilders didn't set out to be responsible for a social network with over 100,000 users. He started the server around a year and a half ago because he wanted to use Mastodon again. He only had a few people use him. After Schilders asked to be added to Mastodon.world, mastodon.world blew up. There was a bigger influx of users when all the people were fired. Over 100,000 people are on my server. Donations have kept the service going.
He says we block the entire server if there is only one Nazi person on it.
There are a lot of things to worry about when you have 100,000 people in one place. One of the volunteers that Schilders brought on helped write a new code of conduct. There were four rules when mastodon.world began. There are 16 Schilders is looking for someone who can speak other languages, because he is getting reports about posts written in Arabic.
Mastodon admins have the ability to cordon off entire parts of the network if they need to to protect their users from bad actors. We block the entire server if there is only one Nazi person on it. The people from the Nazi server can't contact their users because of that.
According to data shared by Eugen Rochko, the founder and CEO of Mastodon, the company has gotten a million new users in the last few weeks. The service is still struggling despite the fact that people are willing to try it. Members of the press have complained about the platform being slow and hard to understand, and Mastodon.social isn't accepting new signups at the moment. It is believed to be Mastodon's moment. Will they like having to figure out the rules and politics of each instance they want to join or know that the admins of those server can read their messages?
One of the biggest problems for these services is the fact that they don't have a good handle on social media. The truth is that if there were no alternative, the general public would put up with the platform's flaws, but they haven't yet. Most of your friends will still be using it. It is possible that Musk's technical and moderation decisions have made it a crappier place for you, but the alternatives will have to prove that they can be better.
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