The arrival of Elon Musk a Twitter has meant turbulent times for this social network and caused perplexity among users. But, Are there similar alternatives to stay connected? The answer is yes, although right now none is “so easy” and all have room to evolve.
“If right now I had to bet on the network that is going to replace Twitter, it would be Twitter itself,” he says. Cesar Corcolesprofessor of Computer Science, Multimedia and Communication Studies at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, who guides EFE through some of the alternatives and gives advice to take into account before entering any social network.
Mass layoffs, executive departures, advertiser withdrawals, erratic decisions about user verification or Musk tweets with messages like: “keep in mind that Twitter will do a lot of dumb things in the coming months. We will keep what works and change what does not work ”, are part of the chaotic landing of the owner of Tesla and Space X.
Although there are quite a few similar social media options, “none of the alternatives right now are as simple and easy as Twitter. They all have room to evolve”, considers Córcoles, who points out that one of the big problems is moving the accounts that are followed to another site, because not all of those who change will do so on the same social network.
For now, it is not easy to know if there is a loss of users or if they use it more or less. Before, Twitter was a publicly traded company, but “now all the power is basically held by Elon Musk, so there is not much need to publish this data in the open”, indicates Córcoles.
As for the alternatives, it’s all a matter of getting used to using them. “Now -he says- no one remembers that at the beginning of Twitter we were all a bit lost”. In addition, he estimates that part of the users who go to other networks may not leave the first one because “it’s where everyone is.”
Networks similar to Twitter
The “most obvious” alternative to Twitter is Mastodonwhich says it has tripled its users in recent weeks and, according to its founder, Eugen Rochko, has more than a million monthly active users.
Mastodon works in a similar way to Twitter, you can write messages, called “toots”share, answer or “like”, among other functions.
However, there is no single Mastodon, rather it is decentralized into “instances” or servers, anyone can decide to set up or rent a server and open an instance by geographic area or on a certain topic.
The new user must choose which server to register on and between these little mastodons there can be communication. These decentralization does “very powerful, but for certain people it can be complicated”as well as search for someone in particular by the type of identification used.
Each server has its own use policy, some “are extremely respectful of privacy, but you have to make sure.”
Regardless of the social network that is chosen, Córcoles reminds that the user should first do their homework and review the privacy and use requirements, as well as make a selection of who to follow and who follows you.
Created in 2007 and veteran among the networks is Tumbrl, “halfway between Twitter and a conventional blog”, that allows you to publish images, videos, audios and users can follow each other.
Diaspora, based on decentralized servers, called “pods”, emphasizes privacy, allows the user to choose the data they want to use to register and ensures on its website that it is not used to make money. Its operation is quite similar to Twitter, which includes tagging, sharing messages from others, making mentions or giving “likes”.
Another alternative proposed by Córcoles is to give a new approach to other social networks that many have, such as Facebook or Instagram, which can be used to use them like Twitter, since now they behave like Twitter in many aspects.
RSS, for its part, is a mechanism for syndication or content aggregation that allows users to subscribe to sources of interest, such as the media or bloggers, he explains. The system warns of what they publish and gathers it in a reader.
Whichever option is chosen, Córcoles draws attention to an aspect that he considers important: where does the money that costs to maintain a service of this type come from and that, among other factors, depends on the number of users.
“If it is financed with advertising, you will like it more or less but you understand the financing model” or it may be paid for some of its functions as another similar network does, the micro.blog, another option is that there may be a foundation behind it. “At least, you have to ask yourself.”