After initially reneging on his offer to buy Twitter, Elon Musk finally completed the monumental purchase in October — and it's safe to say that nobody saw the blowback coming. For many users, the brash billionaire has changed Twitter for the worse, from laying off thousands of workers to charging a subscription fee for verification. If you're hoping to get away from the app (or from this year's biggest sore loser), here are a few Twitter alternatives to look into.
In theory, Hive should be the only real social media any of us need. It's almost like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter combined, sporting a similar design and equal attention to both words and photos. The feed is clean and easy to understand, but there are a few functionality issues Hive will need to address if people are to make any sort of mass migration. Lag is a major problem right now — potentially because of so many new users — and tagging/interactions with other accounts are bit buggy. I'd keep a watchful eye on this one.
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I downloaded BeReal and immediately liked it. Thinking I would be the one to put it on the map, I told a bunch of my friends to check it out, and every single one of them immediately told me that high school kids use it all the time, and as usual I am late to the game. This is like when I heard "Dancing On My Own" for the first time last year and started telling people about the new banger I discovered. My eternal late-to-the-game energy aside, BeReal is fun; it's kind of like what Instagram used to be, back when people posted in real-time. There's almost nothing instant about Instagram now, as it's essentially a collection of heavily curated "latergrams." BeReal flips it, making every user post at the exact same time with no available filters. You can't view anybody's posts until you've posted yours for the day, which is an interesting element. Scrolling through your feed, you'll see what people are actually doing in that moment.
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Mastodon is incredibly confusing to me. It's fully decentralized (meaning less censorship and the ability to own your own data) and runs off many servers rather than a single one, like most other social networks. With Mastodon, however, each server is highly specific (think "Beer and Free Software Lovers") and there really aren't that many of them. The servers function like a Twitter feed with text-forward posts, and because it's open-source, anybody can create their own.
Clubhouse is another interesting Twitter alternative, and I can see the utility in its accessibility, especially for people with visual impairments. Based entirely on audio rather than images or text, Clubhouse hosts a number of voice-based chatrooms for you to explore. As you can imagine, Clubhouse was big during the height of quarantine. Want to talk about the ending of the last Marvel movie? Wondering if you should pursue a career in dolphin training? Trying to get some feedback on a monologue you need to perform? Hop into an audio room on Clubhouse, and it might be your Twitter replacement. Maybe you'll make a new best friend.
Yeah, that's right. I'm throwing it back to Tumblr, baby. College students and Greg Berlanti-worshippers alike still flood this blog-based social network, which is based heavily in entertainment fandom. Photos, videos, long-form text, and GIFs are the lifeblood of Tumblr. I myself used to post photos of dogs in hats about six times a week. It might be time to dip some toes back in.
