The battle has just begun: the one between unleashed fanbase of Elon Muska kind of international sect of techno-enthusiasts, and the apocalyptic who impart extreme unction to Twitter, considering it dead and buried at least as we have known it to date. The acquisition of the platform by the founder and CEO of (among others) Tesla and SpaceX, which took place very quickly for 44 billion dollars, has displaced the community, especially the historical users who for years have scientifically avoided landing on other social networks. Or if they did, they still kept Twitter as their channel of choice. And now, with the arrival of the richest man in the world whose ideas and choices they do not share, they ask themselves where to migrate.
While Musk, on his first day as owner, actually publishes one screenshot containing a statement from the official statement of the acquisition much longer than 280 characters, in which he reaffirms his position on the principle of freedom of speech and anticipates some of the innovations that we may face, the extent of this migration remains to be understood . In all likelihood it will remain limited, at least in the beginning. Difficult that decentralized platforms, and very interesting from the point of view of principle, like Mastodon – which has seen a certain amount of interest in recent weeks despite having been around for six years – can be considered viable alternatives in the short term. Even if anything can happen. The absurdity is that Mastodon, in his logic of “instances”, that is separate servers but federated between them in accordance with the logic of the Web3, would have appeared a creature more akin to the cryptocurrency lover Musk rather than the good old Twitter. But the millions of active users on Twitter, and the value of that web for the construction of the world political agenda, are not discussed. And there are no experiments that can replace them.
Real and symmetrical alternatives to Twitter for those who are not enthusiastic about the change of hands to Musk, and the next “delisting” from Wall Street that will demolish the obligations of transparency towards public opinion, in fact do not exist. And the value of this network founded in 2006 in San Francisco by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Noah Glass lies precisely in this uniqueness: over the years no completely specular competitor has emerged. Twitter has built its audience, often incompatible with that of other platforms that instead competed to copy & paste in features and news (see Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok) and of course, it got bogged down by struggling to find substantial channels profitability and growth. But it hasn’t lost its position either, despite everything remaining a square in its own right. The counter-proof can be this: when Twitter tried to launch its functionality for “stories”, The ephemeral contents that disappeared after 24 hours present practically everywhere – even on TikTok – she realized that they didn’t work and she backtracked after a few months. A unique case in the social ecosystem.
Sure there is Reddit, the well-known US platform straddling the old forums and microblogging which in 2020 traveled around 50 million active users on a daily basis but never took root in Italy, at least outside certain niches. Or social and audio and video discussion alternatives such as Discord, however, linked to the world of gaming. Perhaps the historian Tumblr, passed from Yahoo !, then from Verizon and finally from Automattic, which mixes the logic of the Web 1.0 blog with that of the social flow could resemble Twitter more than others. There, over 48% of users belong to the so-called Generation Z, that of those born from 1995 to 2010, but the background is very different and the experience for users is not so intuitive. Finally, it is amusing to report a platform as Plurk, a semi-clone of Twitter with its own peculiarities where you can publish posts of up to 360 characters (at the beginning there were 140, just like on Twitter) and which organizes the contents and the discussion according to a horizontal and not a vertical chronological line. It was launched in 2008, a couple of years after the birth of the most famous model, in Taiwan and, if desired, it is available on the Apple App Store and on the Play Store also in Italy. As you can see, there is Twitter – or was there some? – only one.