The hunt for the next Twitter: all the news about alternative social media platforms

It is fair to say that Substack has had a dramatic week and a half or so, and I talked to their CEO Chris Best about it. The company announced a new feature called Substack Notes, which looks quite a bit like Twitter — Substack authors can post short bits of text to share links and kick off discussions, and people can reply to them, like the posts, the whole thing. Like I said, Twitter.

Twitter, under the direction of Elon Musk, did not like the prospect of this competition, and for several days last week, Twitter was taking aggressive actions against Substack. At one point you couldn’t even like tweets with Substack links in them. At another point, clicking on a Substack link resulted in a warning message about the platform being unsafe. And finally, Twitter redirected all searches for the word Substack to “newsletter.” Musk claimed Substack was somehow downloading the Twitter database to bootstrap Substack Notes, which, well, I’m still not sure what that means, but I at least asked Chris what he thought that meant and whether he was doing it. 

Twitter users (and ex-users) are still watching to see what the next chapter will be in the soap opera called “What Elon Musk will do with Twitter next.” Start a small war with Substack? Temporarily replace its bird logo with a Doge? The possibilities seem endless.

If you’re becoming bored with the whole thing, and you want to continue following social networking without having to deal with Twitter, where do you go? We’ve looked around and found several possible alternatives. Most don’t have the size and scale of Twitter, and it’s hard to say if any of them will attract enough followers to give it a run for its money. Some of them ape the real-time feed of Twitter, but most provide a different take on what a social network can look like. Depending on what you get out of Twitter — perhaps you use it to broadcast your work, or maybe you use it to keep up with news events, or maybe you use it to connect with other Twitter users — you might prefer some of these options over others. But take a look and see if any of these seem worth checking out.

Substack’s Twitter-like feature for shorter posts, called Notes, is launching for everyone on Tuesday. Notes could prove to be a worthy Twitter alternative for some, especially for Substack writers who have already built audiences on the platform and are looking for a new place to post after Twitter throttled Substack links and marked them as unsafe.

Substack’s Notes will appear in their own separate tab, meaning they’ll be separate from the full newsletters you can read in the Inbox tab or the threads you can read in the Chat tab, where you can read newsletters. In a blog post, Substack suggests using Notes to share things like “posts, quotes, comments, images, and links,” and there is no character limit, Substack spokesperson Helen Tobin tells The Verge.

Mastodon has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of Twitter’s ongoing meltdown, and since I started seriously using it late last year, it’s won me over. While I still use Twitter for monitoring news and talking to the occasional source, Mastodon is my new home for shortform posting. But Mastodon has one significant problem: it’s very annoying to find things I like.

I’m not talking about “discoverability” in the sense of some tailored suggestion algorithm. I mean that by design, information on Mastodon’s many servers is diffuse and relatively obscure. Back on Twitter, I kept several columns of search terms open — some for serious topics I was covering, some for personal interests like my favorite games, all of them a potential gateway to an interesting new corner of the service. Mastodon deliberately disallows plaintext search, and despite some attempts to devise an opt-in system for it, the main alternative so far is hashtags.

I had a corpse on my phone, and I kept checking in on it. Ever since January 12th, my preferred iOS Twitter app had been locked in stasis, frozen on an error modal informing me that “there was a problem authenticating with Twitter,” and wow, was there ever. Without any notice, Twitter had revoked the mainline access credentials for Tweetbot and every other third-party client not operated by Twitter itself. 

Unlike many decisions made during Twitter’s “vox populi” Roman cosplay era, there had never been a poll about this. Elon Musk had never appeared deep in a thread with Kevin Sorbo and a spartan avatar burner account to say, “Yikes, third-party apps should go.” Instead, Twitter took several days to communicate with its users or commercial partners and admit that the move was deliberate, eventually releasing a “your fault”-style official tweet gnomically explaining that “Twitter is enforcing its long-standing API rules.” 

Substack is getting a new tweet-like feature called “Notes,” the company announced on Wednesday. The feature will let users publish small posts about things like “posts, quotes, comments, images, and links,” according to a blog post from Substack co-founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi.

Notesappear in their own dedicated tab, and the feed looks pretty similar to what you might see on Twitter or other social media platforms. On individual posts, for example, you can see familiar icons for likes, replies, and reshares (which Substack will be calling “restacks”). We asked if there is a character limit for Notes, but Substack spokesperson Helen Tobin declined to share details about that.

Eugen Rochko is the CEO of Mastodon — the open-source decentralized competitor to Twitter. It’s where a lot of Twitter users have gone in our post-Elon Musk era.

The idea of Mastodon is that you don’t join a single platform that one company controls. You join a server, and that server can show you content from users across the entire network. If you decide you don’t like the people who run your server or you think they’re moderating content too strictly, you can leave and take your followers and social graph with you. Think about it like email, and you’ll get it. If you don’t like Gmail, you can switch to something else, but you don’t have to quit email entirely as a concept.

Popular publishing platform Medium is now fully embracing the Twitter alternative Mastodon by opening up its new me.dm instance to paying Medium community members. Joining the Mastodon server requires a subscription to Medium for $5 per month (or $50 per year) which enables perks on the site like ad-free browsing and offline reading. Mastodon instances are generally free to join.

Medium is one of the first notable tech companies to utilize Mastodon as a premium social media experience, which is interesting given the publishing company’s historic connections with Twitter. Medium co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone also co-founded Twitter back in 2007. A great deal of Mastodon’s recent success was born out of ongoing turmoil with Twitter following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform.

Bluesky, the decentralized project that originated within Twitter, has arrived on the Apple App Store as an invite-only social network, as first reported by TechCrunch. The listing also gives us one of our very first glimpses at the app, which closely resembles Twitter down to the timeline and profile pages.

The project’s backed by Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, and has been working on an app powered by its open-source social protocol for months now, called the Authenticated Transfer Protocol, or “AT Protocol” for short. Bluesky describes it as a “federated social network” where separate networks exist within a single hub.

The developers who created the now-discontinued Tweetbot client have added an edit button to Ivory, their app for Mastodon. This comes bundled with a couple of other updates for Ivory’s iOS app, including the ability to report users and posts, as well as support for Mastodon’s server language translation services.

Tapbots, the company behind both apps, has been gradually bringing new features to its new Mastodon client after Twitter unceremoniously stopped supporting third-party apps last month and later announced new rules that require developers to pay for access to Twitter’s application programming interface (API).

Wildebeest is a new project from Cloudflare that’s designed to make it easier for individuals to set up and run their own Mastodon-compatible servers. It highlights one of the key strengths of Mastodon over centralized competitors like Twitter, which is that anyone can host an instance of the microblogging service that’s connected it to the wider network (aka Fediverse).

“You can quickly deploy your Mastodon-compatible server on top of Cloudflare and connect it to the Fediverse in minutes,” Cloudflare’s Celso Martinho and Sven Sauleau write in a co-authored blog post. “You don’t need to worry about maintaining or protecting it from abuse or attacks; Cloudflare will do it for you automatically.”

Recently, I started looking for an alternative to Twitter (somehow, I suspect I’m not the only one) and landed on Mastodon. I like it there: most of the residents seem smart, friendly, and less likely to blow up than on Twitter. But after I started getting used to the interface, I realized that the mobile app, while usable, left something to be desired. So when I heard that there was a new one in beta called Ivory that, according to several accounts, provided a much better experience, I was eager to try it out.

And then I hit a familiar problem: Ivory is only available for iOS devices. I use Android.

Ivory, a Mastodon client from the company behind the beloved and departed Tweetbot, has just launched on the iOS App Store. While it’s still in early access, many people (myself included) have been impressed with the alpha version that had a very limited number of slots; now, anyone on iOS can use it to cruise the fediverse, aka Mastodon’s network.

The app comes from Tapbots, a company that recently had the rug pulled out from under it when Twitter banned third-party clients. Because Tapbots basically had to ship Ivory with very little warning, there are still a lot of missing features that may be available in more mature Mastodon clients or on the web. According to the company’s road map, it still has to add the ability to edit your profile, edit posts (no, Mastodon doesn’t require a paid subscription for that), read alt text, and more. There’s also no Ivory app for the Mac yet.

The torrent of former tweeters streaming toward alternative social networks seems to be ongoing, and the social network that is probably gaining the most attention is Mastodon. This open-source network of independent servers (called “instances”) had jumped to 2.5 million users between October and November — and is continuing its ascent.

Admittedly, there has been a bit of confusion among the new members of the Masto-set as to how it resembles Twitter and how it differs. To go through all the various permutations of how to really use Mastodon to its full capabilities would take more than a single article, and as a matter of fact, there are a variety of resources available (a few of which I’ll list at the end of this article). So, since the beginning of any social network is finding other accounts to follow — and to hope they want to follow you back — here I’m going to simply explain how you follow (or unfollow) somebody and how to manage your own follows.

Twitter has gotten just a little chaotic lately, and several of us here at The Verge are exploring the alternatives. One of the more popular options so far is Mastodon, a decentralized microblogging (yes, I will call the Twitter format “microblogging” till my dying day) network that’s exploded since November. It’s a service with lots of rough edges, but it’s gotten more useful as some of my favorite Twitter accounts have jumped ship.

The Verge doesn’t have an official Mastodon presence right now, but we’ve gotten requests for a list of individual members to follow on the platform. So here’s a collection of Verge staff active to varying degrees on Mastodon; we’ll update it periodically as people join.

Mastodon, a decentralized social media platform that many are turning to as a Twitter alternative, saw its userbase skyrocket from about 300,000 monthly active users to 2.5 million between October and November, Mastodon’s CEO, founder, and lead developer Eugen Rochko said in a new blog post. Elon Musk officially took over Twitter in late October, meaning Mastodon’s huge jump in users almost directly followed Musk’s new ownership.

Rochko’s post also addressed Twitter’s now-reversed bans on sharing links to Mastodon, many journalists, and the @joinmastodon account itself following the still-in-place ban on @ElonJet. “This is a stark reminder that centralized platforms can impose arbitrary and unfair limits on what you can and can’t say while holding your social graph hostage,” Rochko said. “At Mastodon, we believe that there doesn’t have to be a middleman between you and your audience and that journalists and government institutions especially should not have to rely on a private platform to reach the public.”

Update December 19th, 2:45AM ET: Twitter has deleted @TwitterSafety’s tweets and a webpage detailing its new policy after Elon Musk apologized and said major policy changes would be put to a vote. The story that follows reflects the policy as of Sunday evening.

Twitter will no longer allow users to promote their presence on certain social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr, and Post. In a post outlining these changes, Twitter says it will take action against users that violate this policy “at both the Tweet level and the account level.”

Elon Musk has made sweeping changes to Twitter since taking over in late October. He’s laid off over half the staff, announced plans to let a huge swath of previously suspended users return to the site, and sparked fears of the site crumbling or being overrun with harassment. As a result, a lot of users have started looking for a life raft, another platform where they can continue tweeting without all of the chaos. There’s just one problem: there really isn’t a viable alternative to Twitter yet.

With the moment ripe, a lot of people are trying to build one. Small companies and developers are racing to put their own twist on the Twitter formula, hoping tweaks to moderation and the tools people use to connect with one another can fix fundamental problems with the platform and, hopefully, give users a reason to jump over. Those already up in running in some capacity have quickly seen an influx of interest.

Bluesky, the project started within Twitter to create a decentralized social network, announced it’s getting closer to actually shipping an app. “Closer” is the operative word here, though. Bluesky only announced that it is building an app, that it’ll be called Bluesky, and that it will “be a portal to the world of possibility on top of the AT Protocol.” We still don’t have a release date, a feature list, or much of anything else.

The AT Protocol is the real news for Bluesky. The whole idea behind the project was to separate social apps and social networks — to let people use the same back end and data but build and use their own apps on top of it. “It will allow [Twitter] to access and contribute to a much larger corpus of public conversation, focus our efforts on building open recommendation algorithms which promote healthy conversation, and will force us to be far more innovative than in the past,” Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey said in 2019 when Bluesky was first announced. The AT Protocol, it appears, will be the underlying technology that powers all these apps in the future.

Bluesky, Twitter’s open-source offshoot, has released early code for a decentralized social network protocol. The system is dubbed the Authenticated Data Experiment (or ADX) and is available on GitHub for developers to test, although Bluesky emphasizes that it’s incomplete. It’s one of the most substantive windows into Bluesky’s workings since the project was conceived in 2019 and formally incorporated in early 2022.

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber writes that ADX will be the start of a semi-public development process. “We’re going to take a middle path of releasing work before it’s complete, but also giving ourselves time to workshop new directions at early stages,” Graber says. The GitHub repository includes an overview of ADX’s goals and design as well as some experimental code. “Feel free to play around, but don’t try to build your next big social app on this yet. Things are missing, and things are going to change,” Graber says. The code is available under an open-source MIT License.

Mastodon has sent former President Donald Trump’s company a formal notification that it’s breaking the rules by using Mastodon’s open-source code to build its social network, named Truth. This news comes from a blog post by Mastodon’s founder Eugen Rochko, but others have previously pointed out that the organization behind Truth, the Trump Media and Technology Group (or TMTG), was violating Mastodon’s software license by not providing the source code for the site built on top of it. Trump’s group has 30 days from when the letter was sent to comply with the license or stop using the software, or it could lose the right to do so.

While Truth hasn’t officially launched yet, internet users discovered that a test version basically had the same interface as Mastodon, and that some of the code for the site was unchanged from the other social network’s code. By itself, that’s actually the intended use of open-source software — but as the Software Freedom Conservancy pointed out last week, apps or websites based on software that uses the AGPLv3 license have to in turn provide their own source code. According to the foundation that wrote AGPL, it’s meant to make the community’s software better: if you improve on something that someone else made, they should be able to benefit from your work like you did theirs.

Decentralized social network Mastodon now has an official iPhone app. The nonprofit behind Mastodon launched the app on iOS today, supplementing an existing web version and several third-party apps for iOS, Android, and other platforms. The app is free and offers a similar feature set to Mastodon’s core service, although it doesn’t include Mastodon’s broad local and federated timelines.

Mastodon describes the app as particularly geared toward getting new users on board the nontraditional social platform. As we’ve outlined before, Mastodon looks similar to Twitter but is built around independently run communities (and the ActivityPub protocol) rather than a single central network. You can create your account on a community of your choice while following and messaging people in other communities as well. It’s an unusual design among modern social platforms, and offering an official iOS entry point could help ease people into it more smoothly. CEO Eugen Rochko confirmed plans for a comparable Android app, but there’s no timeline for releasing it.

Bluesky, Twitter’s decentralized social networking effort, has announced its first major update since 2019. The Bluesky team released a review of the decentralized web ecosystem and said it’s hoping to find a team lead in the coming months. The review follows Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey discussing Bluesky earlier this month, when he called it a “standard for the public conversation layer of the internet.”

The review outlines a variety of known decentralized systems. It includes ActivityPub, known for powering the social network Mastodon; the messaging standard XMPP, which powers WhatsApp and the now-defunct Google Talk; and Solid, a decentralization project led by World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The report covers how these systems handle key social network elements like discoverability, moderation, and privacy, as well as how services based on them can scale up, interoperate, and make money.