The post-Twitter era has spurred the development and further growth of numerous social networks that prioritize short posts, from open sources like Mastodon to new decentralized concepts like Bluesky, and those from smaller startups like Post, Spill and Spoutible to those of technological giants like Meta, which launched the Twitter-like system Threads. While this is great news for those looking for a new place to land after Twitter's demise (the network under Elon Musk is now called X and going in a different direction), it's a challenge for early adopters who want to experiment. with new applications and services. .
Not everyone is happy with the current direction of X. While it's a top-notch app today, it's not the Twitter of years past. X takes a lax approach to content moderation, leaving advertisers and some users searching for new options. Even its owner dabbles in anti-Semitism and general offenses, causing more of the same from the user base. As major advertisers flee, X's ads get worse and more spam is produced.
The changes to X have been rapid and problematic, causing a flurry of activity in the social sphere as alternatives to X emerged.
The Twitter diaspora, so to speak, is hungry for a solution that saves them from having to search for content in half a dozen applications, in addition to the news websites, blogs and other sources of information they already consume while online.
That problem is now being addressed by another group of developers: those who are not trying to recreate Twitter or improve it, but rather solve the problem that there are "too many Twitters" to keep up with.
Tapestry, a new project from The Iconfactory, the app development shop best known for its work on Twitter's first client, Twitterrific, is working on it. Freshly funded on Kickstarter after showing only its prototype, Tapestry aims to offer a unified app for tracking social media, news and RSS feeds in one place. That includes posts from X, Bluesky, Mastodon, Tumblr, and others in the future, like perhaps Threads.
Iconfactory was only looking to raise $100.000 to start development of the new application. Was fully funded starting February 5 and has since surpassed that, allowing it to now pursue ambitious goals of $150,000 or more which would fund additional features for the app, such as mute, filter, search, and flag among others.
Image credits: The Iconfactory,
Iconfactory is not the only developer that has taken advantage of this moment to develop a new social application multiservice.
The developer behind the popular news reading app for Mac and iOS Reeder, Silvio Rizzi, is now working on a sort of replacement for Reeder. Although Rizzi says Reeder will continue to receive support, the new project aims to offer more than just news. in a announcement about Mastodon last week The developer advanced plans for an app that is "not just an RSS reader," but a tool that would allow you to access content from various sources, such as "podcasts, YouTube, Mastodon and others."
The app is expected to launch in public beta later this spring on Mac, iPhone, and iPad. (A screenshot of the app concept that Rizzi posted offered a nod to Tapestry, as both projects emerged around the same time.)
Image credits: Silvio Rizzi
Meanwhile, Tapbots, the creators of the Mastodon Ivory client (and previously the Twitter app Tweetbot on which it is based), is considering how to address the growing number of social networks available to users. There is no single alternative to Twitter, so deciding where to focus developers' limited resources is key.
According to Tapbots co-founder Paul Haddad, the company has not yet decided whether it will support Bluesky, but says they are thinking about it.
“We have our next few months pretty booked up with Ivory/Mastodon features and of course we are committed to Fediverse for the long term,” he said, referring to the decentralized social website powered by the ActivityPub protocol. "We plan to take a look at Bluesky sometime after that."
However, if Tapbots chooses to support Bluesky, it may or may not be part of the Ivory app, he added.
Other services focus on the needs of power users and creators to cross-post to multiple networks at once. This includes programming tools such as those from Fedica y Postpone, as well as consumer apps like Yup. The latter offers a solution for publishing to X, Bluesky, Farcaster, Lens and Threads, although it lacks access to a Threads developer API, requiring users to disable Instagram two factor authentication (2FA) for it to work (DO NOT we recommend that you do so).
Image credits: Yup
Similarly, an app from a Japanese developer, Sora offers access to Mastodon, Bluesky and federated networks misskey y Firefish.
Then there are the various blockchain-based web3 protocols and networks, such as Farcaster y Lens as well as other decentralized protocols that are fostering their own networks, such as Nostr (supported by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey). There is also the decentralized network. Matrix which offers multiple cross-platform clients.
Even Reddit has inspired decentralized alternatives, such as Lemmy, /kbin and other minor projects.
As not all decentralized networks communicate with each other, bridges are also being built between protocols, such as those They connect Matrix to Nostr o Mastodoe to Bluesky among others.
Mathew Ingram, Columbia Journalism Review's wisecracking journalist and longtime technology pioneer said in a post on Threads "We need a FriendFeed for the 2000s."
Your reference recalls an earlier era of social media abundance, Web2.0 when users turned to a social media aggregator co-founded by former Google employees Bret taylor (former co-CEO of Salesforce), Gmail creator Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh. FriendFeed brought together social media websites, bookmarking sites, websites, blogs and microblogs in one place, something that is in demand again today following the explosion of Twitter alternatives and decentralized services.
Of course, Facebook eventually acquired FriendFeed and began dominating social media, shutting out even well-resourced competitors like Google+. Now known as Meta, the social media giant remains undefeated, with almost 3.200 billion users across its entire family of applications. But in its rush to adopt the ActivityPub protocol in its new Threads app, also used by Mastodon, there is a hint of concern. It suggests that even Meta believes the tide could turn against them, as users adopt these social platforms alternatives.
For some smaller applications, the decision is whether to try to compete with or join the growing number of alternatives. For example, Twitter competitor Spoutible, founded by Christopher Bouzy The former developer of a Twitter analytics service, announced in December that its network would “soon” integrate with Mastodon for cross-posting and, later, Threads.
"The fact that users can post on multiple platforms positions Spoutible not only as a social media platform but as a versatile tool designed to streamline your digital communication," he wrote, after it became clear that Spoutible was not among the favorites. to win the war to be the new Twitter.
Unfortunately for people hoping for a simple cross-posting solution, this month Spoutible ran into security issues when The API was revealed to have a serious vulnerability. which could allow hackers to take control of user accounts. The API even returned users' 2FA (two-factor authentication) code and reset tokens that helped users change passwords. That leaves Spoutible's cross-publishing plans on the back burner for the moment, if not its future entirely.
Another survivor of Web 2.0, Flipboard, also recently decided that integration was the best way forward. She left Twitter and integrated with Mastodon while rebuilding its backend to join fediverse: the decentralized social network. The social magazine app also became the first app to support Bluesky, Mastodon, and Pixelfed (a decentralized Instagram alternative) last May, allowing users to track updates on these social networks as well as on YouTube, all in one place.
Image credits: Flipboard
Another platform, micro.blog, seeks to address cross-posting needs from a different angle: as hosting of the user's blog. Instead of creating content directly on social platforms, users could post to micro.blog, follow other bloggers and participate in conversations, while still cross-posting to more popular platforms, including Mastodon, Medium, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Flickr, Bluesky, Nostr and Pixelfed. Iconfactory said its upcoming Tapestry app would also support micro.blog.
Separately, publishing giant WordPress acquired an ActivityPub plugin to allow WordPress blogs to join the fediverse. Newsletter platform Substack created a short-form “Notes” feed that looked like Twitter. Artifact, the Instagram co-founders' aggregator, ultimately opted to clone Twitter before shutting down.
In short, there is a lot happening on the social web today. And this is by no means a definitive list of those companies and developers attacking the problem or aggravating it. Nameless are, of course, a wide variety of projects open source y minor projects in process, as is common when open APIs are available.
It remains to be seen whether this explosion of new social networks It is a temporary problem or a new state of mind. Some of the smaller “Twitter alternatives” will likely eventually disappear, after failing to gain traction, or join the broader fediversity, as would-be Twitter rival Pebble (formerly T2) did last year.
But it is also possible that we are witnessing the reconstruction of the web in real time. One in which there are many protocols, many platforms and many ways to connect not only people, but also their media and their ideas, along with links to websites, news and blogs.
Aggregators like Tapestry may be an initial step in figuring out how to navigate this new web, but they also require a way to search it: a kind of new Google that connects with all the activity that now takes place beyond the websites , including the information that is shared through these new social networks through new protocols. Who is building that?
