I find it hilarious that the Silicon Valley Apparatik thinks that NOW an alternate is needed. Gab, GTTR, Parler, Frank Speech, Truth Social have all existed for some time. And with the exception of Gab, the others have almost identical TOS agreements to Twitter.
It's not the ToS that people don't like about those services. What makes social media sticky is the culture. If people like the culture of a social media platform then they stay. Very few people like the culture of Gab, Parler, Truth, etc...
All of these stats are somewhat meaningless without common definitions. Number of users is not the same as active users.
If we compare similarweb’s estimates visits it’s 10.6 million for Gab and 7 billion for Twitter. Maybe it’s just my personal definition but these site were set up as direct competitors to Twitter and getting 0.1% of your main competitor’s traffic is definitely “very few people”.
There was one huge part of twitters culture that I liked. It was a place where I could I read less filtered thoughts of influential people and get news that hadn't quiet met the standard to publish in reputable newspapers. It's a fine line. I just like the bar lowered slightly, not all the way so it is mental diarrhea or completely unsubstantiated rumors. I had to be careful about who I followed and keep a critical mind about what they posted.
I think a big part of what "Twitter culture" is it was many things for many people. Some people use as a place for weird shit posting, some use it for porn, some enjoy bias confirmation, some enjoy the drama and beef. I guess some people enjoy anime avatar reply-guys since some of the new offshoots seem to be catering to maximize them.
For me Twitter would have been better if it didn't have any of that but I get that using it as basically a shitty, short-form substack isn't the most popular usecase. So what I liked about "twitter culture" is that all of these things could co-exist on one site and just curating who you followed could dramatically change that experience.
With a lot of the current drama some of the more serious people are leaving. I'm not sure how it will all shake out in the end, but I don't expect my use case to stay intact.
I enjoyed Twitter for these same reasons. I have to be honest though that it took time & effort to cultivate it to do what I wanted, as it didn't do that straight away without effort. I'm disappointed that all that work will come to nothing and I'll have to start over at square one with a new service, whatever it turns out to be.
In the meantime, Twitter is still running and will continue to soar triumphantly in a straight line on autopilot, until its fuel runs dry and its wreckage comes to a gentle landing at the bottom of a deep dark abyss.
I wouldn't say I like the culture because I don't actively participate in Twitter. What I do like is the curated list of folks I've built up over the last 15 years.
Twitter allows me to keep up with Technologists, comedians, journalists in one location which has made it very useful to me. That made Twitter sticky for me personally.
Unfortunately, Elon has probably pissed off enough people that I'm going to have to branch out to other services anyway so that immediately reduces the value of Twitter.
Those networks were all marketed to Twitter cast-offs, specifically those people who were cast-off for the content they were producing. When your site is "The Alternative to Platform X" and consists of only users who got kicked off of X for bad behavior, the content is just going to be radioactive.
The only hope an alternative to Platform X has lies in its ability to migrate and capture the mainstream.
