With the commotion that still continues after the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk (founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, among other companies), it is time to remember other social platforms capable of offering an alternative -even Meta is preparing its own- such as meeting point to exchange information, opinion and content.
Beyond Twitter, various social platforms allow exchanges of opinion and information in a similar way
In the first place, there are already up to nine platforms that are active (and some with a great growth of new users, such as Mastodon) but during the year 2023 it is expected that another nine social networks will begin to be active that could be an alternative to Twitter. Those that already exist are:
-Discord: Born as a communication platform between the gamer community, in Discord the communities are centralized in this app that also allows the creation of internal channels within each community. Each of these communities works with its own rules, set by the administrator. In addition to text communication there are also Clubhouse-style audio chat rooms.
-Mastodon: It was born in 2016 but Mastodon did not begin to gain popularity until in 2018 it began to experience a massive arrival of new users as a protest from those who were not satisfied with the change in Twitter’s usage policies that took place in the fall of that year. Based on Blockchain technology and with decentralized servers, in reality, more than a social network, it is a group of nodes (Instances) that constitute the servers that host user data.
-Plurk: Born in 2008, it is the closest thing to Twitter itself. Here the publications instead of tweets are called “plurks” and their character limit is 360, there are also direct messages, group chats and emojis. Some features can be unlocked as the user acquires more karma based on their activity and interactions.
-Reddit: Tremendously popular in the United States, Reddit is segmented into thematic communities (subreddits) where users share information on a wide variety of topics. The publications receive votes from the rest of the users and can be ordered according to chronological criteria, by trends or by popularity, among others.
-Telegram: After the “t.me” address, a slash gives way to the identifier of a Telegram group that allows generating thematic and dynamic communities (for example, t.me/TreceBits), accessible as separate forums through this messaging app snapshot that over time has evolved in its functions and usefulness.
-Tumblr: After some bumpy changes of ownership (from Yahoo to WordPress.com, owned by Automattic), this platform allows users to create content, replicate other people’s content and follow other creators, being able to view the content (mostly graphic) in mosaic format or as a timeline.
-WT:Social: Jimmy Wales, creator of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, also created this platform that grew out of WikiTribune. The spirit of WT:Social is to promote conversation and try to be the complete opposite of other social networks (such as Facebook or Twitter) in terms of respect among users. Like Wikipedia, it dispenses with advertising inserts and is maintained through donations, displaying publications in a strictly chronological order. And, unlike what happens (still) with Twitter, here the contents can be edited, as is the case with Wikipedia itself.
-Facebook: The social network par excellence, not in vain is it the one with the largest number of users (2,910 million monthly active users). Although recently, and for the first time in its history, it has lost users, it continues to be the priority space for many to get in touch with a virtual community.
-Club House: When Clubhouse was born two years ago, it became a real sensation by offering live voice chat through rooms in which an administrator managed the speaking time. Its popularity was so great that different messaging platforms and social networks were quick to emulate this feature by adding it as a function to their own apps.
And throughout 2023 these other three new social platforms will be added:
-Bluesky: It was born in 2019 as a project developed under the mandate of Jack Dorsey on Twitter but it has become an independent platform. It has a decentralized protocol, as in the case of Mastodon.
-Mozilla.Social: From the creators of the Firefox browser comes this platform that announces its availability on the so-called “Fediverso”, the set of independent but interconnected servers on which Mastodon also runs.
-Spoutible: Derived from Bot Sentinel, a tool created by Christopher Bouzy that is used to identify, follow and mark Twitter bots and coordinated accounts to launch joint attacks in disinformation campaigns, it emphasizes an experience capable of dispensing with harassment and aggression by Other users.
