Personally I don't think there's any viable alternative to Twitter.
I think most people will do their rage quit and come back once they've cooled down and the news cycle has moved on.
But what do you think? Do you think there's any realistic alternative to Twitter as the world's "town square"?
Do you think any of the alternative platforms will actually take off and gain the critical mass of users along with the needed feature set to become a second or third Twitter?
The concept of a "global town square" is entirely at odds with everything we know about how humans work, and I don't believe any sort of algorithm or content moderation or anything of the sort can make such an incredibly infeasible concept workable.
The alternative to Twitter should be building local community. Start having fire pit nights. Welcome (limited) alcohol and some pipes or cigars, and simply start talking to people, face to face, again - and then keep doing it on a weekly basis or so. Expand as needed, and when it gets too big, start another firepit.
We need to stop intermediating all human interactions through tech companies that are simply mining this data to then manipulate us as we're most susceptible to (which is what advertising is, though plenty of other things also piggyback on the data to try to manipulate us).
And turn off cell phones around the fire pit. They're actively harmful in every possible way.
Your question seems like asking for a different kind of sharp stick to poke your eyes out with. Alternatively don't poke your eyes at all.
If the world just got better about actually letting you talk to the people you want/need to (like a senator actually reading letters from his/her constituents, or a company actually providing quality customer service), twitter would become rapidly obsolete. And for good reason.
Social media fills a niche that otherwise lays unfilled. But while something like facebook can act as a "town square", twitter literally just fills in for the laziness of other platforms.
What's not fun is the sheer amount of topics on twitter I have zero interest in invading my timeline. I don't like how much marketing spam there is, since every post is secretly hoping to 'go viral', which even for the indie devs I follow makes it fairly bland sometimes. Twitter is just so huge that it's not possible to have any small communities.
For all its warts, there's a fantastic twitter community around the FGC (fighting game community) - members in the community regularly post really interesting questions or statements on fighting games and/or their design, and it usually kicks of dozens of videos from other people I follow on that topic. The FCG's usage of Twitter is probably the best I've seen.
Personally, what I would like is something more akin to a mailing list or RSS feed I suppose, but with the ability to reply to threads, a bit like a forum. I want to be able to follow people I find interesting manually, with zero discovery in the app itself. I want to hear updates from them, and without any 'retweet' functionality there's less incentive for small players to spam the ever living hell out of their account in the hope of getting lucky.
I think that would be my dream app - something that works like an RSS feed, but without the technical overhead of actually setting up and publishing to your own RSS feed, with the ability to respond with comments on the posts without having to repost it to a site which does allow it (like HN or Reddit) with one shared identity. That would be cool.
Does Mastodon fill that role? Does anything? If so I'd certainly use it.
And it appears that soon Twitter won't be Twitter, it will be a poorly thought out advertising platform (well, you could argue that it's already that, but moreso); see https://twitter.com/somebadideas/status/1588876465915166721 . I have no interest in seeing loads of stuff posted by people gullible enough to pay Twitter $8 a month; I can't see many of the people whose stuff I like doing that.
Mastodon to me goes in the completely wrong direction, as it still keeps user identities locked to a server and gives the server admins way too much control. It's a bad copy of Twitter with even more censorship.
That said, I have little hope in this ever happening. All the money is made in controlling the user, so any protocol that actively works against that is pretty much doomed to fail.
What's not trivial are the scaling and moderation and support personnel to handle millions of users. And of course, building the user-base itself for those network effects. And those are the things that are currently being lost.
But the whole thing was never good. It was just what was there. So yes, there could certainly be a (much better) alternative, a blog network for instance, or just about any other social media site.
And the idea of it as "the world's town square" is just laughable to anyone that isn't a long-term twit addict. It's never been that, and never would be.
The social network effects is just too powerful. Only a very few number of social media's broke through that and it's usually by being different from existing offerings.
Ie, tiktok with super algor feed that only shows 1 thing at a time. Fundamentally different from the rest.
The actual "town square" is the Internet itself, and every effort should be made to ensure it stays that way.
I've gone to meetups, made new friends, gone to dates, found job offers, etc. all thanks to Twitter, Twitter has probably been the biggest kickstarter to my social life since I moved to the city.
Nope.
So long as celebrities and politicians are on it the journalists will keep mining it for cheap clicks - it has replaced 'man on the street says' type of low quality reporting.
Whether at the BBC, Fox or CNN people sitting around doom scrolling in those offices are ordinary neophytes for whom FB/Twitter/Reddit essentially are the entire internet - regardless of political leanings every single news outlet weaves whatever narrative they want from it as there's always a Joe Schmoe (real or bot) with 4 followers to quote into 'people on twitter are saying X'.
It really doesn't matter if somebody builds a better twitter with more intelligent and useful discussions as that won't be useful fodder for media.
This answer is likely going to be different for different people. Some come there for hot-takes on the latest news, some to find like-minded people and communities and some, maybe most, go there to hit on the other side.
I think the answer would likely be different for each person and group. Anybody looking for a community is much, much, much better of on Reddit, but Reddit's discovery system is worse than their search.
I will also say that if you poll a random Twitter user, they are not likely to have powerful feelings about the Musk takeover. This is being blown out of proportion by a few blue checkmarks.
Blow out of proportion by a few blue checkmarks is, incidentally, peak Twitter.
The term then was real-time internet or streaming internet or something like that.
Now, again IMHO, Twitter is valuable only because of popularity (network effects), and any other app could take its place, since most people have smartphones and can share a thought immediately.
Mastodon would provide a good infra to create a platform like that but it need somewhat deep pockets (and trust on the founders) to keep it alive for the transition period. the only un-maligned patron I can think of of is craigslist guy. maybe if they can create a barebones 'chipper' that looks like CL and charges minimal fee to keep it ad free it might take off.
https://hliyan.medium.com/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-netwo...
> I think most people will do their rage quit and come back once they've cooled down and the news cycle has moved on.
The whole news on this is itself fuelling outrage and extreme emotional reactions for many to 'quit' Twitter in rage on to alternatives without closing their Twitter accounts.
They will calm down, and move back onto Twitter after the outrage is over.
I think Mastodon does 1 well, and doesn't do 2 much. I don't want 2. So it's almost a perfect platform once enough of the experts have a presence there.
It really does feel like one of the only places you can just speak without that speech being attached to another topic.
I mean that literally: "Nothing" is a better alternative than Twitter.
But now I signed up again, just because.
Elon, and possibly Trump before him, are the only people who actually reached the world on Twitter. For vast majority of people Twitter is a small, local (not necessarily geographically; it can be local to a belief, or an interest) platform, and they never break out of their small bit no matter how hard they try.
There isn't an alternative to Twitter in the sense of another platform that replicates everything Twitter does, but for any individual there are loads of ways of replicating the functionality of Twitter that you use.
When someone says they're leaving for an alternative they mean the second one.
The alternatives would depend upon what you’re trying to get from the platform, but they would include anything from other social media (for the more fun use cases) to traditional news websites (following political events) to HN/newsletters (tech news) to whatever else. Or just keep using it since the product matters more than the owner.
A more effective solution is to opt out.
Gab and Parler popped up. Predictably, they picked up some unpleasant fringe elements of the Right (just as Twitter hosts unpleasant far-Left accounts).
And then the Left went on the attack against Gab, Parler etc, cancel culture activism against advertisers, cloud hosting, payments, app store listings etc. Aside from the obvious problem of Twitter’s network effect, it seemed futile for right-of-centre people to create their own networks due to insidious attacks on those networks by the Left.
I had high hopes for decentralised social networks like Mastadon — in principle — but the user experience was 5-10 years behind Twitter, and the Mastadon founder also had some questionable leftwing/pro-censorship ideas too. I didn’t spend long there before begrudgingly returning to Twitter. I asked my wife to password-protect app limits on my iPhone to prevent me spending more than half an hour per day on Twitter. Why waste my time in a place where people with my political leanings are systematically suppressed?
Then Elon came along and I feel there are brighter days ahead. He wants to make the far left and far right equally unhappy. And he wants the limits of free speech to be dictated by law (created by democratically elected governments) rather than by opaque private companies with inevitable corporate/political bias. Good luck to him.