Where's everyone going?
It's been a week over in Twitter-land. Thousands of people were laid off (some were asked to come back), previously banned accounts have been reactivated, and Elon issued a "hardcore" challenge to all staff that caused thousands more to walk away from their jobs.
Some speculations have the total number of staff operating Twitter today at just a few hundred people, down from roughly 7,500 less than a month ago.
Those, and so many other issues over at Twitter have caused a lot of users to loudly discuss where they're going to spend their time next, given that their social media channel of choice appears to be imploding. At the same time, total usage of Twitter is apparently at an all-time high, because everyone loves a bit of drama.
Who knows what, if anything, will actually happen to the mess that is Twitter these days, but the conversation about where people are planning to take their attention has made for a fascinating study in how people are thinking about their social media options, and it may even be a predictor of trends to come. The numbers also suggest that this is not a zero-sum game, given that there are massive increases in usage across both Twitter and the Twitter-alternatives.
To pull out the lessons that can be learned from all of this movement, we took a look at the top social channels being mentioned in the escape-from-Twitter conversation to break down where everyone's headed, and what exactly these channels are all about.
MASTODON
The most commonly-mentioned Twitter-alternative is a decentralized network called Mastodon. It's not new — it first launched in 2016 — but it is getting a massive spike in attention and traffic lately.
Rather than being a single social network with a common newsfeed, Mastodon is a series of social networks, each with its own community, administrators, and rules. When you create a Mastodon account you're forced to select which "instance" you'd like to join, and your account then lives within the people and posts that exist in that network. You can choose to move your account to a different instance whenever you like, but you can only ever exist within one at a time.
If you're a Reddit user, it will resemble how SubReddits operate, except that if you decide to join r/Politics, for example, you could not easily hop over to r/Sports.
You can read more about getting started here, and sign up for an account here.
DISCORD
Originally a place for gamers to connect and keep the conversation going after they had logged off their game of choice, Discord is like the non-work version of Slack or Teams.
Any individual can create a Discord server, create their own house rules, and invite whomever they'd like to join them. The platform's user interface leaves a lot to be desired, and even the most active users typically complain about the way that it handles notifications. The magic of Discord, however, is the way it assembles a group of people around a similar interest and allows for channel-based conversations where everyone knows your (screen)name.
Rather than posting Tweets in hopes (or fear) of going viral, the highest ambition of a Discord post is a series of reactions and replies from fellow community members. For some, that is the draw, but it certainly means that there is no clear replacement for the broad-based content sharing that Twitter has created.
You can read more about getting started here, and sign up for an account here.
HIVE SOCIAL
You may have heard of Hive at the height of the pandemic, when we were all rushing to find places online to connect with people like Clubhouse and House Party. Hive claims to be the anti-Facebook and had huge peaks of new sign ups both in 2020 and right now.
The app will look very familiar to most Instagram users, and its posts operate in much the same way. The profiles, however, are reminiscent of MySpace, with interests and your favourite songs displayed to anyone who visits. There are posts, DMs, comments, and shares, and you add friends as connections – all the regular stuff.
The two major points of differentiation are that 1) The news feed is always chronological, and 2) It's not owned by Mark Zuckerberg. There are also more subtle differences, like the way it organizes posts and people by interest category, so you can curate your experience.
Hive has appeared to attract a younger audience than the two above, but despite the influx, it is still quite small compared to the incumbent networks.
You can read more about getting started here, and sign up for an account here.
There are some notable omissions from that list, and their absence is perhaps the most interesting part.
First, none of the "free-speech" platforms that launched over the last several years have seen an influx of new users. Platforms like Gab, Parler, and Rumble are all flat, or down, recently.
And the silence around any Meta-related property is deafening. No one appears to be talking about taking their Twitter-habit and moving it over to Instagram, Facebook, or WhatsApp. And there certainly hasn't been any mention of Zuckerberg's multi-billion dollar bet on the metaverse known as Horizons.
SO WHAT?
It's entirely possible that this is all a lot of noise about nothing, and people are going to stick around despite the chaos, but the overwhelming sentiment being a preference towards semi-private social media is telling. It's a trend that has been building for the past few years and will most likely result in a growing amount of social media sharing happening not on public timelines, but in loosely affiliated community channels.
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Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting