Twitter’s move on July 1st, to limit the number of tweets users can see in a day was the latest in a series of decisions that has spurred millions of users to sign up with alternative microblogging platforms since Elon Musk acquired Twitter last year.
In addition to a surge in numbers on Mastodon, the acquisition and subsequent changes boosted small existing platforms like Hive Social and has spawned brand new upstarts like Spoutible and Spill.
Most recently the microblogging platform backed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, Bluesky, saw a surge of sign-ups in the days following Twitter’s rate limit, and Meta launched its microblogging platform Threads on July 5. Threads claimed 30 million users on its first day. Even very different forms of social media such as TikTok are benefiting from what many see as Twitter’s imminent demise.
Regardless of how many people ultimately decide to leave Twitter, and even how many people do so around the same time, creating a community on another platform is an uphill battle.
What makes Twitter Twitter isn’t the technology, it’s the particular configuration of interactions that takes place there. And there is essentially zero chance that Twitter, as it exists now, could be reconstituted on another platform. Any migration is likely to face many of the challenges previous platform migrations have faced: content loss, fragmented communities, broken social networks and shifted community norms.
But Twitter isn’t one community, it’s a collection of many communities, each with its own norms and motivations. Some communities might be able to migrate more successfully than others. So maybe K-Pop Twitter could coordinate a move to Tumblr.
In this sense, Threads has an advantage over other Twitter alternatives because users sign up via their Instagram accounts. This means Threads’ social graph – who follows who – is bootstrapped by links among Instagram accounts. Users may not be able to easily bring over their communities from Twitter, but they can instantly pull follows and followers from Instagram.
