From tweeting to tooting: Two front runners emerge as Twitter alternatives

Two front runners have emerged as alternatives to Twitter in the aftermath of Musk's chaotic takeover, but they're some distance from viably competing with the microblogging site

The takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk and his attempts at reorganisation have caused chaos and uncertainty. As a result, there’s been a jump in interest in alternative microblogging platforms.

We know from patterns on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok — and Twitter itself — that social media users tend to be “sticky” and rarely change platforms though they may use several platforms with different functionalities. There is usually room for just one player in a given social media segment — one Facebook, one Insta, one Twitter, one TikTok. However, we’ve also seen the examples of MySpace and Orkut. Those platforms boasted user bases upwards of nine digits before they collapsed and Facebook took over that space. So change, when it comes, can be catastrophic.

In the microblogging space, Twitter has 238 million active daily users. It has far more global reach than the weibos, Chinese microblogging platforms with larger user-bases. (Weibo is the generic Chinese word for microblog and the most popular Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo have over 500 million regular users in aggregate).

If we assume Twitter users will not consider weibos a serious alternative, Twitter has an enormous lead over any potential rival. Mastodon and Bluesky Social seem to be the front runners as Twitter rivals.

Mastodon is the best known of the Twitter wannabes and it has just over one million active users — so yes, the gap is truly wide. Mastodon also has a radically different architecture and back end though it offers users much the same functionalities. Bluesky is another social network. This was recently launched by Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey. It has a similar architectural philosophy to Mastodon.

The first crucial difference vis-à-vis Twitter is that Mastodon and Bluesky are federated, open-source set-ups. They are decentralised with no single server, or central node controlling flows. Anybody who’s interested can set up a server and host users by downloading the software. Since the software is open-source, geeks can tweak it as well. These are peer-to-peer networks. Any node on the network can speak to every other node on the network and no node has extra privileges. There is no “boss server”, or single-network administrator.

As far as users are concerned, they can choose a server and set up an account. Bluesky is still in beta so you may have to wait to set up a Bluesky account. Many Mastodon servers are also experiencing overloads at the moment due to the sudden influx of new accounts, as Twitter users migrate or set up secondary accounts of alternative platforms.

But let’s say you set up an account on Mastodon. You can now post the same sort of content (it’s called tooting) you would on Twitter. Mastodon servers allow longer toots (minimum 500 characters) than tweets. Video and audio can also be posted, with size limits. People can find and follow you, and you can find and follow others including accounts on different servers. Finding somebody is a tricky process, by the way, and more difficult than the Twitter search equivalent. It is likely to remain more cumbersome, since there is no central directory of accounts.

The moderation process is seriously different, though these federated networks also ask users to stay away from fake news, hate speech and so on. Every server has its own list of policies and while the freedom of expression standards may largely overlap, there are differences due to the idiosyncratic preferences of individual hosts. German servers (Mastodon has German origins so there are a lot of German and other European Union servers) tend to be hypersensitive to content on fascism. There are religious sensitivities on some servers, etc.

Unlike Twitter with its global moderation team (which has reportedly been largely laid off), the owner of a Mastodon server is responsible for moderating content on that server. If a host persistently allows objectionable content to be tooted, other servers can block access or even take concerted action to cut that server out of the network. So you could, for instance, have a host who enjoys conspiracy theories and allows accounts to generate such content. But if other server hosts don’t like this content, it would be isolated to one small poisonous bubble. That’s how this type of federated network is supposed to work in theory. Frankly, we don’t know how this will pan out at scale, in practice.

The biggest issue for the federated rival networks is monetary compensation. Twitter finds it hard enough to generate revenue. Mastodon has a no-ads policy, and hosts must undertake not to “sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties, any personally identifiable information”. Trusted third parties who assist in operations must agree to keep personal data confidential. This data may only be released to comply with legal requests.

One possible revenue stream is sending promotional emails to the email id account you signed up with, but spamming users is unlikely to make Mastodon hosts popular. Bluesky has similar question marks about revenue models.

On Mastodon, your public content may be downloaded and an authorised application may access your public profile information, your following list, your followers, your lists, all your posts, and your favourites. Applications can never access your e-mail address or password. This severely restricts monetising the network and in the long run, that could be a deal breaker.

Birds of a feather

• Twitter has 238 mn active daily users. It has far more global reach than the Chinese weibos (Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo have over 500 mn regular users in aggregate)
• Mastodon has just over 1 mn active users; Bluesky Social is another rival, recently launched by Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey
• Mastodon and Bluesky are federated, open-source set-ups. They are decentralised with no single server or central node controlling flows; anyone can set up a server and host users by downloading software
• Mastodon servers allow longer toots (minimum 500 characters) than tweets; video and audio can also be posted with size limits
• Finding somebody on Mastodon is tricky, more difficult than the Twitter search equivalent
• Unlike Twitter, the owner of a Mastodon server is responsible for moderating content on it; if a host persistently allows objectionable content to be tooted, other servers can block access or even act to cut the server out of the network
• The biggest issue for the federated rival networks is monetary compensation; Mastodon has a no-ads policy, Bluesky also has question marks about revenue models