HACKER Q&A
📣 CM30

What's Going to Replace Twitter?


When Musk first bought Twitter, I basically joined every single alternative that popped up. Mastodon, Hive, Post, Cohost, etc... if they exist, I've probably got an account on them now.

And I kinda expected people to move over after that. People were all making a big deal out of it, and there was a lot of interest in leaving the site after whatever questionable decision was made that week (Twitter Blue, the timeline kerfuffle, controversial accounts being unbanned, mentions of Mastodon and co being banned, etc).

Yet for whatever reason, no one seems to have stuck to that. Most of these places have communities, but the vast majority of people are either still on Twitter or keep posting there as their primary social media service.

So what will it take to actually replace it outright? To kill it in the same way Reddit killed Digg or Facebook killed Myspace?


  👤 nh23423fefe Accepted Answer ✓
Those other places need to be better than Twitter.

> I kinda expected people to move

Why did you have this expectation? If you are big on Twitter why move and lose your audience? To "punish" Musk? That's absurd echo chamber, wishful thinking. If you are just a regular Twitter addict with no following why leave? To be alone and feel superior on weak clone?

There's nothing wrong with Twitter run by Musk. It's just as shitty as it always was. The UI was always shit, the 37/N threads were always full of trash and should probably just be a blog anyway. But people want the comment section dopamine rush of twitter.


👤 jpamata
None. The era of 1-1 social media is gone, it's now 1-many.

Especially for the younger generations, they dont tend to stay and invest their time building profiles in just one or two social media, they use it all. There's no such dedicated efforts to "move." Only what is popular and trendy.


👤 hitpointdrew
I find it hilarious that people are leaving Twitter because Musk is allowing speech they find offensive and going to things like Mastodon, which has WAY LESS moderation.

Nothing, is going to replace Twitter, Twitter is not doomed. Moving off of Twitter because you don't like the owner is fools errand. You are either looking for an echo chamber that is tightly censored like twitter used to be (congrats on keeping your ignorance and refusing to listen to the other side all while virtue signaling how open and tolerant you are, when really you are just blowing smoke up your own ass), or you are going to end up a platform that has hardly any censorship at all and allows all the shit you are so mad about that is now back on Twitter.

>To kill it in the same way Reddit killed Digg

Reddit didn't kill Digg, Digg shot themselves in the head.


👤 dahdum
Headliners like to play to the big crowds and Twitter is by far the biggest stage. Unless you can attract celebrities, politicians, heads of state, athletes, musicians, and others with large audiences the platforms will stay niche.

I'm highly doubtful any Twitter-like platform could succeed in the next 5-10 years. You need entirely new experiences to attract people.


👤 throwayyy479087
Nothing - the staying power of Twitter is that public figures/celebrities/politicians use it. They use it because that's where the audience is. It's the definition of a path dependent product, and probably can't be recreated in a similar form.

For messagebus style social media? TikTok.


👤 tomjen3
Nobody wants to use a site that does not have a big audience.

All the ones I have seen are not even 1/10 of Twitter size so your potential reach is tiny.

Not to mention mastodon is too complicated to sign up for.


👤 smoldesu
Nothing, ostensibly. Do you think all the hot-ticket celebrities, brand accounts, political figures and self-made Twitter moguls are ever going to leave Twitter? If they do, it's because they're taking back that publishing power for themselves. If they don't... it's tacit recognition that Twitter "won". You want a TikTok-style microblog feed that nobody wants to offer.

People won't ever "move over". You can either use the protocol you like with the people that interest you, or use the platform that people are on. I say this harshly because I like Mastodon and I'm tired of people assuming that things will ever 'go back to normal'. Your idea of 'normal' is giving one party universal power over everyone, and if we make that same mistake again then we deserve another Elon Musk situation.


👤 hpen
Bro are you sure musk is so much worse as a human than whoever was running twitter before? I bet he's just more popular

👤 celtoid
Nostr is waiting in the wings. It will be a real threat to Twitter, FB and all of the SV social apps in a year or two, imo. Development is increasing by the week. Nostr clients also have something that Twitter, FB and other SV platforms lack: a built in payment system.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr


👤 rcarr
If they hurry up and release a microblogging feature, then I think it will be Substack.

👤 learningstud
GitHub issues