Nobody likes Twitter.
Not even the people who use Twitter like Twitter.
Once known as a primary space for sharing news and casually interesting events, it has since devolved into a hotspot for doom-scrolling, witch-hunting, and other sorts of depravities one can only find in the crustiest crevices of the internet — only this time, it’s mainstream!
With this backwards evolution of arguably one of the most popular social media sites in the whole world, new platforms have been coming out of the woodwork to prove they’re the better one; even dead platforms are being revitalized with several thousands of new users joining every month.
Here are just a few of the most notable sites, having features very similar to Twitter’s or just being overall enjoyable in their own rights.
- Bluesky
We can’t talk about Twitter alternatives without talking about *the* Twitter alternative.
Since the “update” of several key features on Twitter (removing likes; making the block function essentially useless), people have been craving an honest and secure platform to migrate over to, and Bluesky seems to be just the right place.
Launched in October 4th, 2021 by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Bluesky was initially invite-only, gaining a total of 64,000 users within its first two years. I was one of the lucky few who managed to get their hands on a Bluesky account during that waitlist period, and, well, it was basically Twitter… minus the toxicity and the tiny little goblin running the frontlines.
On February 6th, 2024, the platform finally went public, and within its opening day, it amassed nearly 800,000 new users. As of November of this year, it currently houses a grand total of 13.9 million registered users, 6.6 million of which are active every month.
- BeReal
Familiar to many as “that one app that blew up in the Summer of 2022 and was never heard from again,” BeReal was initially developed by Alexis Barreyat and Kévin Perreau and was released sometime in January of 2020 to minor fanfare. Two years later, however, the app gained widespread notoriety for its encouragement of users to, as its name suggests, *be real*.
The main concern with social media is that the bulk of it is inauthentic, and BeReal was made as a way to correct it. Its premise is fairly simple — the app will go off at a random time each day,
and users will have a two-minute timeframe to take a picture of whatever it is they’re currently doing regardless of how interesting it really is.
To see some mundane post of someone’s tiled bathroom floor is, for lack of better words, a breath of fresh air, but I feel as though the true beauty of this app is getting the notification when you’re actually doing something fun.
- Letterboxd
When watching any form of cinema, we, as humans, typically like to know what other people’s opinions are in order to validate our own — it’s why we read reviews, ask our friends what they thought of the movie after the theater screening ends, and watch three hour long video essays on the film we just watched a day prior.
On Letterboxd, you’re able to see what other people are thinking about your favorite films *and* your most hated ones! With the ability to catalog your most recently-watched films, review them, and respond to other reviewers, you can perpetuate the discussion without the need to be professional about it; it’s Twitter *by* cinephiles *for* cinephiles.
Described by many as “Goodreads for film,” that’s exactly what web designers Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow had in mind when developing and launching the platform some time in 2011. Slow to begin, Letterboxd ended up exploding in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic and currently sits at a userbase of over 13 million.
- Noplace
Over two decades ago, the cultural landscape of the internet was vastly different compared to how it is now, and Myspace was widely regarded to be the root of it. Being the first social media platform to reach a global audience, Myspace predates Facebook by half a year, launching on August 1st, 2003. Unfortunately, despite having a significant impact on the world wide web, it was overtaken by its successor and has since faded into relative obscurity.
That was until late 2023 when youth trends expert Tiffany Zhong sought to bring it back in the form of Noplace — the modern-day lovechild of Facebook and Tumblr (though it feels more appropriate to compare it to early Twitter and Myspace).
The goal of the app is for its users to be more social, as Zhong feels as though these days, social media has just become media: content “slop” to churn out and consume without expressing yourself or connecting to others in a meaningful way.
- Mastodon
Mastodon is the least crowded of the bunch, with only 975,000 active users monthly as of September of this year. Created in 2016 by Eugen Rochko, Mastodon was (again) designed to be a safer, more socially-connective version of Twitter. According to the official Mastodon ‘about’
page, Rochko began feeling a sense of dissatisfaction with the direction the platform was taking, having been an active user since 2008.
If he was thinking that all the way back in 2016, I’d imagine his feelings on the matter have since gotten stronger.
On the rare occasion I am on Twitter, I’ll typically find my feed cluttered with posts that are A) not of interest to me and B) from people I don’t even follow. Luckily, one of the key features of Mastodon is that, unlike Twitter, it isn’t algorithm-based, meaning your timeline will be strictly composed of the people you choose to add.