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- Since Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, other social sites have seen a surge in new users.
- Platforms like Cohost and Hive Social have expanded to accommodate users seeking alternatives.
- New startups by former Twitter staff, including Spill and T2, are looking to be the next big thing.
After Elon Musk's $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in November, a swath of celebrity influencers and casual users alike vowed to abandon the platform in protest of the new owner's content moderation policies and massive layoffs across the company that particularly gutted teams responsible for user trust and safety.
That exodus, which included daily users with hundreds of thousands of followers, led somewhere: to existing and brand new startup social media apps, some of which were unprepared for the influx of new activity when so-called Twitter refugees began looking for a new social media platform to keep pinned to their home screen.
Here's a look at the alternative social media platforms looking to become the next legacy app.
Insider
Launched: May 2015
Number of users: 150 million monthly active users, Discord's internal statistics indicate.
Number of staff: 2,834, according to the company's LinkedIn page.
Funding: $995.4M raised across 16 rounds of funding, with an anticipated IPO later this year, per MLQ, an AI-based investment platform.
What people are saying: Discord was originally toted as a platform for gamers to connect, but has since grown to include a wide array of servers — essentially chat rooms based on user interests — its most popular being meme channels and for players of Grand Theft Auto.
The chat-based platform, instead of offering a large "public square" feeling where users can come across a wide variety of topics like Twitter does, instead segments users into servers based on their interests where they can speak to each other directly or use text-based features.
CEO and co-founder Jason Citron told The New York Times in 2021 that Discord's rapid expansion over the years, after beginning with just a handful of users, has been "surprising and wonderful and humbling."
Euronews wrote that the app's main appeal is allowing users to communicate in real-time using text, video, and audio. TechCrunch called Discord one of the best social media apps around, though the platform's highlighting of live conversations isn't for everyone.
Representatives for Discord declined Insider's request for comment.
Insider
Launched: March 2016
Number of users: About 1.3 million monthly active users, according to Mastodon's internal statistics — a jump up from 300,000 between October and November, following Musk's takeover of Twitter.
Number of staff: 8, per the company's LinkedIn
Funding: Raised $57,000 in 2021, The Washington Post reported. The site's CEO has turned down several six-figure investment offers from venture capital firms to preserve its ad-free, nonprofit status, according to PC Mag.
What people are saying: Founder and CEO Eugen Rochko was, after years as an avid user, dissatisfied with the state and direction of Twitter when he decided to launch Mastodon.
The open-source, decentralized social network platform functions similarly to Twitter, in that it allows users to post messages up to 1500 characters that are visible by the site's users in a collection of related chatrooms.
However, "getting started with Mastodon is the hardest part because it's not always clear where to start," according to PC Mag.
Despite the sometimes unintuitive platform design, more than 130,000 people were joining Mastodon each day in November, as Musk's takeover of Twitter sent users seeking alternative sites, The Guardian reported — though that activity has dropped off, according to the outlet, suggesting users aren't sticking around.
Representatives for Mastodon did not respond to Insider's request for comment.
Since its launch, Mastodon's open-source code has been used to create additional alternative social sites, including Truth Social, Vice reported. TechCrunch noted it's among the most talked-about Twitter alternatives, while Euronews called it confusing.
Insider
Launched: October 2019
Number of users: 556,000 daily active users, CEO Raluca "Kassandra" Pop told Insider.
Number of staff: Five — and expanding, Pop said.
Funding: $290,104 raised through WeFunder, a crowdsourcing investment app.
What people are saying: Hive Social seeks to put the fun back in posting online, Pop told Insider.
The 24-year-old self-taught programmer — who maintains handwritten notes for the business in a notebook kept near her bedside — has created a space where users can redecorate their profiles with custom colors, and share video, or text-based posts with their followers, attempting to roll the best parts of multiple social platforms into one.
Notably, Pop said, the platform takes a stricter stance on content moderation than Twitter does, to maintain a platform free from harassment and hate speech — which has surged on Twitter since Musk's takeover.
"A lot of the feedback that we get is that Hive is really welcoming and relaxing and it's really inclusive, so we're just continuing to maintain that," Pop told Insider. "We've taken a really harsh stance against hateful speech, transphobia, homophobia, white supremacy, I mean, all of those things we don't tolerate that on the app are very explicit with what we allow and what we don't allow."
In the wake of Musk's takeover of Twitter, Hive Social gained a large wave of users, mostly Gen Z and younger millennials. While the platform had the advantage of being established for several years and was able to keep afloat, Hive briefly struggled with the influx of new activity as it skyrocketed server costs and staffing needs.
The growing pains, Pop told Insider, have been worth it — and her sights are aimed even higher: "We definitely want to grow and become one of those next big four apps," she said.
The Verge described Hive as "a cleaner, better version of Twitter, with an attractive app featuring a familiar interface." Mashable declared the platform Twitter's "latest rival."
Insider
Launched: May 2021
Number of users: 3.5 million active users, according to the industry news site, Business of Apps.
Number of staff: 213, per the company's LinkedIn
Funding: The pre-revenue app has raised $110 million in two funding rounds, according to Business of Apps.
What people are saying: The audio-focused app functions like live, public podcasting, with listeners and speakers joining together in topic-based rooms and either broadcasting or chatting together.
Representatives for Clubhouse did not respond to Insider's detailed request for comment.
The pandemic-era app has shifted largely to business-related chats, according to Euronews. CEO Paul Davison said the company is working toward shifting to more intimate chatrooms over the current broadcast-forward configuration, Bloomberg reported.
PC Mag said Clubhouse is "on its way out," as the app saw a nearly 60% decline in downloads over the last six months.
Insider
Launched: February 2022
Number of users: 130,000 users total. Of those, about 20,000 active users, Jae Kaplan, Cohost co-founder told Insider.
Number of staff: Four full-time, with contracted support staff, Kaplan said.
Funding: The app had under $59,000 in the bank at the end of 2022, according to a Cohost financial update, posted quarterly to the site in the interest of transparency, Kaplan said. The only revenue stream the platform relies on are optional subscription fees paid by users.
What people are saying: Cohost has a "different vision" for social media, according to The Verge. Kaplan agrees.
"I prefer the terminology of 'Twitter alternative' because we are very much trying to do something different," Kaplan told Insider. "And not something that is just 'Twitter without bad parts.'"
Posts on cohost are entirely customizable using HTML or CSS coding — to the point where screenshots shared of the site may have entirely different layouts depending on which user made the post. Especially creative users have used the platform to develop their coding skills and build simple games.
"You know, we have the benefit of over 20 years of social media existing," Kaplan told Insider. "And I think personally, that taking all of that time, all of those lessons that we've learned, all of that knowledge, and then essentially just building a straight clone of something else is kind of lazy."
TechCrunch described Cohost as "fairly new and a bit rocky," but "could be appealing to people who want a simple alternative that actually looks like Twitter in some ways."
Insider
Launched: February 2022
Number of users: 2.85 million monthly visitors as of October 2022, according to right-wing media watchdog group, TheRighting — the outlet also reported Truth Social's traffic has seen a significant drop in users over the past two months.
Number of staff: 40 full-time employees, Variety reported
Funding: An SEC filing indicated the site, owned by Trump Media & Technology Group, had $27,203 in assets as of March 2022. "TMTG may never generate any operating revenues or ever achieve profitable operations," the filing read.
What people are saying: The Trump-owned social media site skyrocketed in popularity after the former president launched the site, marketing his app as a refuge safe from censorship.
Truth Social was briefly beating Twitter in app store downloads when it launched, Newsweek reported, but the "free speech" social media platform has faced dwindling audiences, huge financial losses, and a trademark denial in the last year.
Pew Research Center noted in an analysis of the platform that, though Truth Social totes itself as a nonpartisan platform, nearly half of the site's top 200 most popular accounts "have a reference to being right-leaning or pro-Trump in their profile – higher than any other alternative social media site studied."
The most popular topics on the site, Pew found, include guns, the Capitol riot, and vaccines.
Representatives for Truth Social did not respond to Insider's request for comment.
Mastodon's open-source code was used to create Truth Social's codebase, down to copying the earlier platform's error notices, Vice reported.
Insider
Launch expected: Q1 2023
Number of staff: Fewer than 10, co-founded by Alphonzo "Phonz" Terrell and DeVaris Brown — both former Twitter employees.
Funding: The app has raised a $2.75 million pre-seed round, Spill announced last month.
What people are saying: Designed as an alternative to the bird app by two former Tweeps, Spill is catering to "culture drivers."
While everyone will be welcomed to come spill their tea when the app officially launches, co-founder and CEO Phonz imagined the app with "Black creators, Queer creators, and a variety of influential voices outside the US" in mind.
"Our goal was to just highlight the best of what was happening on Twitter, which really is about culture, you know," Phonz told Insider. "And so that really set the table for the moment that we're having now."
Spill will aim to help creators monetize their viral posts and incentivize influencers to innovate on the platform, Phonz said — as Black Twitter has been known to do. Popular cultural movements and memes like #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, as well as the Kermit the Frog drinking tea meme (among many others) either originated or were popularized by the unofficial online network.
Following the announcement of the app's planned launch, Terrell tweeted that Spill had received 20,000 reservations for handles within 12 hours.
Insider
Launch expected: 2023, TBD
Number of staff: 9 full-time and contracted staff. Gabor Cselle, co-founder & CEO is a former Group Product Manager at Twitter. Sarah Oh, Co-Founder, previously was a Human Rights Advisor at Twitter.
Funding: T2 has raised $1.1 million from angel investors, Cselle told Insider.
What people are saying: Cselle, a former product manager at Twitter, had been imagining an alternative to the bird app for a while when, on November 4, there was a massive swath of layoffs at Twitter, including co-founder Sarah Oh.
"I was like, 'maybe now's the time,'" Cselle told Insider, who reached out and partnered with Oh on their new build. "And the idea T2 is to build initially with a small community from the ground up with a familiar format that has constraints — I think constraints fuel creativity. It's short, just like the Tick Tock style video stuff is looking at."
What will differentiate the beta-testing T2 from Twitter when it officially launches is a focus on community safety that has been built into the app from its foundation, the co-founders told Insider, instead of relying on reactionary policies.
"Usually the safety has come after something bad happens," Oh told Insider. "Usually you're kind of getting what resources you can to do the most protective, safety-first thing and so when Gabor called me up, and he had been envisioning something like what we all enjoy about Twitter with trust and safety built in, it was kind of it was the easiest decision to make."
The T2 website name will change so as not to evoke Terminator associations, Cselle told Insider. The app has a waitlist over five digits long, though the co-founder did not specify how many users are waiting for their handle to be approved to start posting.
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