Four Twitter Replacements, One Year In
Where, oh where, should you microblog?
It’s been one year since Elon Musk surprised the world, and maybe himself, by buying Twitter for $44 billion.
Since then, the social network (now officially called X) has gone through a rapid series of transformations, few of them good. Musk fired most of his staff, messed with the verification system that allowed people to find trusted sources of information, boosted his own signal, limited the reach of sites he considers rivals or critics, and boosted misinformation. The company’s metrics are terrible — users, revenue, and advertising have been in freefall since Musk took over.
Twitter is very bad now, and it will likely only get worse. Are you still on it? You should probably not be on it. But where should you go? Over the past year, a number of microblogging platforms have emerged. There now seem to be three serious alternative platforms, along with a fourth very tempting choice. So what are the pros and cons of each?
If you want to talk: Bluesky
Bluesky emerged from a project involving Twitter’s old CEO, Jack Dorsey, who envisioned a social network that looked like Twitter but was open and decentralized. The platform is run by a “public benefit corporation” that, at least on paper, exists…
