Chaos in the Microblogging Space

and to be using any of these social platforms right now. Personally, I had scaled way back on my social network presence until fairly recently I kind of dipped my toe back in and then everything went banana. And that's why it has convinced me that maybe I should have just, you know,

kept kind of at a distance. But anyway, today I thought I would give an overview about what's going on with the microblogging landscape, which for the longest time was dominated by Twitter, and then the various attempts of different social networks to compete with Twitter. So, first of let's just talk about Twitter. And I've done episodes about the company's history before, so instead of going through an exhaustive history,

we're going to do a recap. So Once upon a time there was a company that was trying to launch a podcasting service, and this was called Odio. But then Apple's cannonball into podcasting would drink Odeo's milkshake to mix metaphors and references. A few folks at Odeo were also working on kind of a spinoff project, and it was a tool that would let one person post a text message to a whole audience of people all at the

same time. And the idea was that through this service, people could connect with one another or follow other people, and then you could blast out quick messages. Maybe you would do something like I'm going to go see the Struts at Variety Playhouse. Who else is going now? The service originally depended upon SMS texting technology that had a real limit to the number of characters you could send

in a message. So this new service, which would eventually be called Twitter, originally had a cap of one hundred and forty characters per message. It reserved some characters so that you could have a username for example, but one hundred and forty characters was as long as you could post. In two thousand and seven, Twitter would get a big boost, so they launch in like the summer of two thousand

and six. But in two thousand and seven, that's where it landed on people's radars because they went to south By Southwest, the big conference that's a music conference, a movie conference, and you know interactive. So Twitter had this bright idea. The people there had this great idea really to set up television screens that would display posted Twitter messages to people who were just at the conference, so

they could actually see these messages pop up. And y'all, folks love to see their stuff go up on a big screen. So suddenly you had a ton of people signing up for Twitter and tweeting all over the place and keeping an eye out to see if maybe they would pop up on screen. So the strategy drove enrollment and buzz. And because you had so many influential people at stuff By Southwest, including a lot of you know, tech journals and stuff, it really made Twitter's relevance climb significantly. Now,

there were a couple of big draws to Twitter. Over the years, you could gather a fairly large following, and so celebrities and brands found Twitter useful. Some famous folks used it to promote their work or sometimes they were doing it so that they could land sponsorships and that kind of thing. Others used it just to kind of goof around or to tackle causes that they believed in. Some did a combination of these things. It wasn't like

you could do just one or the other. And the presence of these famous people on Twitter meant that it was possible that you could have an interaction with a famous person. That got a lot of regular old Twitter users like me really excited. I mean, I still think about the time when Neil Gaman retweeted one of my posts. It got me more visibility than anything else I'd ever done anyway. Another big draw was that news organizations and

the folks staffing those organizations were flocking to Twitter. The platform became a way for journalists to rapidly disseminate big stories, and Twitter became associated with breaking news. Folks in the news business also built out their networks with each other. Peer's got a chance to communicate directly with their colleagues working for other publications, and Twitter also would serve as

a way to gather leads to unfolding stories. You know, journalists would open up their dms and that way, if you happened to know of this firecracker of a story that wasn't in the public yet, you could send it to one of these journalists. So it was a really useful tool for writers and journalists and reporters and that school.

Now other important uses of Twitter emerged as well. Agencies in charge of sending out emergency messages would use Twitter to help spread word about everything from traffic conditions to wildfires.

Anyone who was on Twitter for any length of time also knows that Twitter would become something of an earthquake tracker, because you would see messages pop up that would say something like quake, and there'd be a ripple effect as the quake moved outward from its source, and you would actually be able to track that on Twitter in real time. If you were following people who were say in California,

for example, you'd see it all the time. Twitter would also become a tool for activists and protesters around the world, which also meant that more authoritarian governments around the world started to try and block Twitter within their borders. In the spring of twenty twenty two, rumor first spread about Elon Musk setting his sights on buying Twitter, and that whole saga was filled with drama and theatrics, mostly coming

from Elie Musk himself. There were times when he antagonistically pursued the purchase of Twitter, at other times when he tried to back out of it, which led to Twitter suing Elon Musk for trying to get out of a deal that was pretty clear on the no backseis clause. Ultimately, Musk did buy Twitter, and it happened just a short time before the matter was supposed to be decided in court. No big surprise there. He took possession of Twitter in

early October twenty twenty two. Then Musk began to gut Twitter of employees, so as a company that once had around eight thousand staff and it ended up being closer to fifteen hundred. Entire departments were eliminated, and we started seeing lots of predictions about how Twitter's days were numbered

unless things would change dramatically. Former Twitter developers warned that there weren't enough people at the company to continue developing the platform while also making sure that everything else just kept on running in the process, and the general consensus was that Twitter was on borrowed time barring a massive change, and by borrowed time. I mean that there would come a point where Twitter would no longer reliably be active, and that it would have lots of interruptions in service now.

During the same time, Musk's behavior encouraged certain populations on Twitter and antagonized others. He claimed to be a proponent of free speech, but it quickly became clear that what he really meant was he favored his own speech being free. There were numerous cases in which people said things Musk didn't like and found themselves banned or their messages censored.

Today Twitter is a weird and chaotic mess The company has eased off on bands and restrictions that previously cracked down on stuff like hate speech and misinformation, so a lot of those parties are back at Twitter now. Musk himself has tweeted out messages that some have said are anti Semitic. I should add that others debate whether or not the messages are actually anti Semitics, but that's in

the conversation now. A lot of the reports about hate speech on Twitter end up being anecdotal, and that's not really evidence. You can't really rely on that, you know, just because one person may have seen something truly awful on Twitter doesn't mean that that's, you know, indicative of a bigger problem. However, some agencies have conducted various analyzes and surveys to kind of get a better handle on this.

The Institute of Strategic Dialogue conducted such a survey and found or a study rather and found a quantifiable increase in the amount of hate speech, specifically anti Semitic hate speech on Twitter. Other studies have shown that the company has been slow to respond to this problem. The people who used to be in charge of that kind of content moderation stuff no longer with the company. Now coupled

with this is something that Twitter really can't ignore. They might ignore the rise of hate speech, or it may not even be ignoring. It may just be that they literally don't have the manpower to do enough about it. But one thing they can ignore is how advertisers are viewing Twitter these days. According to The New York Times, ad dollars make up ninety percent of Twitter's overall revenue, so ninety percent of the money coming into Twitter depends

upon advertising. Twitter literally cannot afford to lose advertisers, but the company has seen a sharp decline in advertising revenue over the last several months since Musk took control again.

According to The New York Times, and this was in an article that posted back in June of twenty twenty three, revenues were down fifty nine percent year over year of the April to May period, so one month period, So in twenty twenty three April to May, Twitter made fifty nine percent less revenue than it had April to May in twenty On top of that, the Times reported that Twitter was falling well short of its sales projections, up

to thirty percent short in some cases. Meanwhile, shareholders of a different Musk owned company, Tesla, were or i should say Musk operated company, because while he is a majority owner of Tesla, he's not the only one. But shareholders were concerned that Elon was spending a bit too much time with his new company of Twitter, and not enough

tending to matters of concern back at Tesla. So Musk faced pressure from Tesla's shareholders to name a new Twitter CEO, and at the same time, he recognized that advertisers were not eager to sign on to the new face of Twitter, so he needed to do something, and he named Linda Yakerino, a former executive with NBC Universal, as Twitter's new CEO. Now, she has led sales teams at big companies, and she's known for her relationships with advertisers, So this move made

a lot of sense. A lot of people said, Okay, maybe we're going to see some stuff turn around here, because she clearly is going to mend fences between Twitter and advertisers. But Musk didn't actually walk away from Twitter. He's still very much a presence there, and based on recent moves, it's very hard to believe he's not, at least on some level, calling most of the shots. If he's not, then Yakarino really needs to rein him in because he's been doing more harm to the company recently.

And then, on top of all of this other mess we've been talking about, we've got Twitter the company's financial woes. That drop in revenue has meant that Twitter has been in a real tough place financially, and a lot of reporting has been about how Twitter has failed to pay its bills, like all sorts of bills, bills ranging from promised payouts to current and former employees who were guaranteed a bonus payout that was at fifty percent of goal and then never got them. They have now created a

class action lawsuit against Twitter to seek those payments. Then you have the former CEO and leaders of Twitter who are suing the company because they say they are owed fees to cover legal expenses that they incurred as a result of this whole process, and that Twitter owes them

that money and hasn't paid them. Then you also have the owners of cloud services who have said that Twitter has failed to pay its bills for the hosting services these cloud companies give Twitter, not give sell to Twitter. And then you have landlords who are saying that Twitter has failed to pay rent on office spaces in various cities.

And considering Elon Musk's push to have folks come back to the office, it does seem odd that he and wouldn't make sure that rent was paid up so that there would be an office to come into in the first place. The negligence has led to one landlord to actually evict Twitter from its office space. This would be

in an office space in Boulder, Colorado. So there had been at one time around three hundred Twitter employees who worked out of that office, although around a third of them were either fired or left when Elon Musk took over Twitter. So I guess that means around two hundred of them don't have an office to go to considering this eviction. Other landlords have filed lawsuits against Twitter, also seeking out past rent because they say they haven't received

payment from the company recently. Then there's this music trade group that has sued Twitter over copyright infringement issues. They're looking for like more than a quarter of a billion dollars in damages. The list of aggrieved people and entities seeking payment from Twitter is a long and exhaustive one. All this and more prompted a lot of folks to ask the question, is there anywhere else to go? Is

there any alternative to Twitter? And I would say the answer to that is yeah, but you're probably not gonna like it. I'll explain more, but before we dive into the next chapter of the micro blogging drama Saga, let's take a break to thank our sponsors. We're back, and before I dive into this next section two, deeply, I do want to say there have been lots of alternatives to Twitter over the years. We are talking about a couple of recent examples in today's episode, but some of

them have been around for ages. In fact, some of them date all the way back to when Twitter itself was first coalescing as part of odio. For example, there was jai Ku Jaiku that launched a full month before Twitter did. A pair of finish developed created Jaiku, and Google purchased Jaiku in the fall of two thousand and seven, and well, you can probably guess Jaiku's fate from there.

Like so many other Google projects and acquisitions, it languished without real direction or support for a while until Google ultimately shut it down. That has happened way too frequently. In two thousand and eight, a service called Plerk debuted. Also shared some similarities with Twitter, but with a different user interface and layout an approach to microblogging. Clerk kept a fairly low profile. It's still around today, but it never really got the traction of Twitter. And that's just

two examples. There are many more, including a couple that I will talk about later in this episode that debuted a few years ago but really didn't get much attention until late last year after Musk purchased Twitter. The one that has the most buzz right now is clear. It is from a goliath of a company, and I'm talking about Meta, formerly known as Facebook and the service that some have called the Twitter killer that has the actual

name of Threads. And while most of us became aware of Threads just last week when Meta surprisingly launched the service a little early, this wasn't the first Meta product to actually be called Threads. Meta had previously pushed out Threads in twenty nineteen, but at that time, Meta, which at that point was still just Facebook, wasn't really taking aim at Twitter. Now they had a different target and

rival in mind. It was Snapchat. So the original Threads, which like the current version was also tied to Instagram, was an app that combined photo and video sharing capabilities with quick messaging. Just as Instagram's Reels product was trying to undermine TikTok, the Threads app, the original thread app was intended to take a big old bite out a Snapchat.

And why Well, the big reason is that Meta slash Facebook has a pretty big challenge facing it, which is attracting new, younger users to its various platforms, or at least there's a perception problem there. So the perception is that, for example, Facebook is for old people. It's where your parents are. That's the narrative anyway, though the company Oberlough cites a study that suggests the largest age demographic on Facebook right now is the twenty five to thirty four crowd,

followed closely by the eighteen to twenty four demographic. Now, since I'm closer to fifty than i am to forty five, those sound young to me. But I guess if you're looking long term and you want to make sure your company can continue to grow, which is a really big challenge when you hit the size of a company like Meta, then worrying about younger folks is a big deal. You want to make sure you have an avenue to bring

new users into your ecosystem. Meanwhile, apps like Snapchat and to a greater extent, TikTok have had lots of engagement among young people, and so Meta, doing what Meta does, look to find ways to either acquire competitors, or, if that doesn't work, to replicate what they do in the hopes that this would move more young folks to their platforms and be able to kind of, you know, get the other competitors to go out of business just by virtue of the fact that you're already huge anyway, Meta

pushed threads this other version of threads, the Snapchat version of threads, for a while, but not that many people actually jumped on board, And in twenty twenty one, Meta pulled the thread on threads and the whole thing unraveled. Meta kept trying to find ways to mimic its competitors in the meantime. Then we get to Musk acquiring Twitter in late twenty twenty two and how the shift on

the platform upset a lot of users as well as advertisers. Plus, Twitter was shedding talent in waves of layoffs, and this situation spelled out an opportunity to Meta. There was a clear space for the services that Twitter provided. People recognized that what Twitter did was at least on some level valuable, which meant there was potential money to be made with advertisers who were concerned about associating their brand with Twitter

itself because it was such a volatile platform. So a Twitter rival could help bring more folks into the meta landscape and also bring potentially more advertising money into the company. And as a bonus, it would allow one billionaire in the form of Mark Zuckerberg to splatter mud on another that of Elon Musk. By late twenty twenty two, Meta started work on this project, which was top secret at the time. Early rumors outside the company started to really

get buzzing in the spring of twenty twenty three. Zuckerberg also played a on the negative reputation of Musk's Twitter, saying that there needed to be an alternative that was less hateful and chaotic and mercurial. I think he at one point used the phrase a sane platform. He also indicated that one thing he thought Twitter always needed was a billion users, which seemed to be shot spired at the fact that Meta has so many active users across

its platforms. So earlier this year, word got out that Meta was in fact working on its own take on Twitter's approach, and Elon Musk responded to the news in his mature way by challenging Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match. Zuckerberg, who famously has been spending a lot of time working out and training in martial arts, eagerly accepted the challenge.

At one point, Elon Musk's mom stepped in to say the whole fight had been called off, But even since then there have been more rumblings as Musk has grown increasingly upset about Meta's launch of Threads version two point zero.

So in the first week of July this year, which is last week as a record, this Meta launched Threads, and like the previous incarnation, it's tied to Instagram, so users need to have an Instagram account in order to create a Threads account, and as of the recording of this podcast, that connection between the two is such that if you wanted to subsequently delete your Threads account, you would first have to also nuke your Instagram account, so you know you can't jump on threads, decide it's not

for you, and then say I want to wipe all that off. I don't want it sitting there without also killing off your Instagram account, and if you're a big Instagram user, that's a non starter. I think. Now one of my friends said this isn't really that big of a deal because you could always just not use threads and just let it lie dormant, and that is true, you could

do that. My concern is, let's say you've posted some stuff on threads in the past that could potentially bite you in the butt later on, because we've seen this happen with Twitter over and over again. Right, Maybe you criticized a company and now maybe you're interviewing with that company, and so they do a deep dive in your social and they're like, huh, we don't want to hire you because five years ago you said that we are stinky poop poopy pants and that we don't like that. Well,

you don't want that sticking around, Right. Maybe you said some rude things about someone who now is an authoritarian dictator of a country and you'd rather they not notice you. Or maybe you have grown as a person, but perhaps in your younger days you posted stuff that at the time you were thinking was really edgy, but really it was just poorly thought out quote unquote jokes. We've seen that come back to haunt people. You might want to

eliminate your thread's account, right. You might just say like, oh, I don't want to hunt through everything and take out anything that could potentially be harmful to me. I just want to get rid of the whole thing. But then you would have to kill your Instagram account too, and that could be a bridge too far, depending upon how active you are on Instagram. Anyway, Meta claims that it will change this further down the road, So that you

can eliminate your Thread's account without touching Instagram. But for the moment, tying Threads to Instagram makes a whole lot of sense. And why is that, Well, it's because Instagram boasts more than a billion active users. In fact, depending upon who's doing the reporting, it can go all the way up to more than two billion users. By the way, that is a heck of a discrepancy. A discrepancy of

a billion plus users is ridiculous. But you know, it's one thing to go with the official statement and another thing to go with the estimations that analts make. If I'm going with the official statement, we just say more than a billion, which is a whole bunch, right, So it makes sense to tap into that already existing user base of Instagram users rather than just build out a brand new user base from scratch. And it is working, as I record this, Threads as see more than one

hundred million people establish a Threads account. It took Twitter five years to hit one hundred million users. Threads did it in five days. Now, you could argue that Threads is cheating because it's tied to an already insanely popular app, and that's you know, a fair point, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter how Meta got there, at least not to Twitter. It doesn't really matter.

It's that here they are and they are getting wildly popular. Moreover, Instagram has one of the features that made Twitter so enticing to large numbers of people, and that is celebrities. Celebrities who are on Instagram now a lot of celebrities have established a threads account as well. They can achieve through threads what they were doing on Twitter, and they don't have to go to Twitter to do it, and

so that's a huge blow to Twitter. Celebrities have an alternative, and because they are one of the big draws on any social networking platform, that's a big problem. If Twitter sees celebrities jump ship for threads, then that's also going to affect all the people who follow those celebrities. And you know, there might be people who are only there on Twitter to follow celebrities, so they'll also jump ship. I'm not sure that news organizations are going to see

the same sort of success on threads. Not to say that they won't be there. They will, I just don't know if it will work as well as it had on Twitter. We'll talk about a different Twitter alternative when I where I think news agencies are seeing a bit more comfort level with the way that the platform works. But I don't think it's going to be the solution to the issue of losing Twitter, So we'll talk about that later. Though Musk has hurled some accusations at Meta.

He has said that that Meta is copying Twitter, and that in fact it's not just copying, but it's making use of Twitter's trade secrets. That He's also accused Meta of hiring up former Twitter employees, who in turn had possession of Twitter's devices and documents. So these traders who got fired by Elon Musk ran to Zuckerberg and gave them all the precious secrets. Meta, by the way, denies

all these allegations. He then has said that no one at Twitter was part of the team that actually built Threads, that Threads was built entirely independently of the people who

were let go from Twitter. We should also remember that during the same time, Meta was famously holding huge rounds of layoffs and firing thousands of employees, tens of thousands of employees, so it's not like Meta was in the mood to do a lot of hiring at the same time, So I'm inclined to at least believe Meta on this point that no one from Twitter was instrumental in the

building of Threads. Now, according to Reuter's, if Twitter does in fact sue Meta for this kind of theft of trade secrets, the burden of proof on Twitter is going to be really high. Twitter would have to prove that Meta took information that was both important economically to Twitter and that Twitter had taken quote unquote reasonable efforts to keep that information secret. That bit can be very difficult to prove. Did Twitter actually use reasonable efforts to keep

these alleged trade secrets really secret? Or did Musk fire a whole bunch of people who then subsequently helped Meta build a service that can do much of what Twitter does, or even did Meta just do this completely independently, And because Twitter's been around forever and Elon Musk made some

of the code open source, they just built their own version. Now, before we go to break, I do want to say a few things about Threads that aren't positive right because threads is incredibly popular right now, it's growing dramatically, but that doesn't mean that Threads is necessarily good. It doesn't even really mean that Threads is necessarily better than Twitter. It is different, but it's also not. It's got its

own issues. So one of the big ones here is that meta wants as much of your data as it can possibly get. So if you look at the user permissions for an app like Instagram, which you obviously have to have if you want to have a Threads account, you will see that meta pretty much wants to know

everything you do on that device. It wants to know how frequently you use the app, It wants to know how much time you spend there on average, what other services you use, what your online shopping habits are, you know, and more like. It can include things like location data. Like it's so much about you that that meta wants to scoop up whenever you're using these apps, or even

if you just install them on your device. So if you are at all concerned with how large companies gather and exploit your personal information, you need to understand that Meta may well be the leader in gulping up user info, though I don't know because Google is really really good at doing that too. Also, Threads lacks some basic functionality

that Twitter has. Plus users on Threads see a real fire hose of content, not just from the Instagram accounts they already follow or the Threads accounts that they have chosen to follow. I assume Meta chose to populate the Threads feed with as much stuff as possible to make Threads appear more like an active, vibrant community with early

sign ons, and to get enthusiasm from users. But this also means that logging into Threads shows you tons of stuff from accounts you don't necessarily know or follow, and it makes it challenging to see the stuff from the

people you actually are interested in. And I imagine that will change, and probably pretty quickly, because it feels like the original intent was just to try and convince more people to join the service, and now that there are more than one hundred million users on Threads, there's less of a need for that, so maybe they can pivot. We'll see. Threads is also somewhat limited in its rollout. It will need to meet some strict requirements before it

can deploy in the European Union. The deep integration with Instagram and the data collection policies mean that Meta's going to need to make some significant operational changes before it can receive approval for use in the EU. So in some ways, Meta's Threads has a growth cap on it right because until it does meet the requirements of the EU, it can't launch there. So that does mean that there's a whole audience that will be untapped until Meda can figure out a way to present Threads so that it

meets EU regulations. Threads also has some strict rules about what you can cannot post. That includes stuff like profanity, for example, or other elements like misinformation things like that. Also, some of those rules have rubbed certain populations the wrong way. There are some conservatives already accusing Threads of being anti conservative and that it is a quote unquote woke service.

Now I'm not going to dive into that because y'all likely know how I feel about it already, and you probably have your own opinions one way or the other. So I'm just adding that in as another reason why Threads is somewhat controversial at the moment. Now we're overdue for another break. When we come back, I'm going to talk about a couple of other Twitter alternatives that have gained attention but not necessarily a ton of new users and explain why that is. But first let's take another

break to thank our sponsors. So when it comes to existing Twitter alternatives, there's more than just threads or even the aforementioned Clerk, which is still around. Of course, jaiqu is long gone. One of these alternatives is called blue Sky, but I should add blue Sky is currently in an invitation only beta. As I record this, it's a beta that I only just recently joined after another tech podcaster

kindly extended one of the invites he had to me. Now, I was not given any invites on my own to hand out, So I think blue Sky is being very methodical with how it adds users. So people who were given a beta invitation when they applied for it, they must have had invites of their own they could have extended, Which makes sense, right. Your social network is not going to be useful if all the people who join it don't have any connections social connections with one another. Right,

There's no connective tissue there. You can't really expect conversations to really bloom. So it makes sense to give the early invites their own invitation so they can help populate blue Sky with people who are likely to chat with one another, but they didn't extend that another degree of separation. I don't have any invites, I was never given any.

Blue Sky shares something in common with another alternative to Twitter that we'll chat about that's called Mastodon, and that both of these take a decentralized approach to social networks, or a federated approach, is the way it's been described. So blue Sky actually traces its history back to Twitter. It is a Twitter offshoot. It started as a side project at Twitter, just as Twitter started as a side project of Odio, and it's spun off of Twitter a

few years ago. Now, I think back in twenty nineteen and Twitter co founder Jack Dorsey is actually on Blue Sky's board of directors. The vision of blue Sky is to have a collection of social networks, each with its own policies and approaches to moderation and such. And you probably know that all the big social platforms out there rely on algorithms to serve content up to users, and

they have their own content moderation policies. And maybe you want for a pure chronological approach where you only see the stuff you're interested in and it's presented in a timeline that's linear, so that way you can easily follow the people who you're interested in and the topics you're interested in. But the reality is most of the platforms out there serve up a collection of stuff to you

that the platform has chosen via algorithm. Some of that's going to include the things that you're actively following, and some will be outside of that group, and it's all in an effort to drive engagement, which when you really really really boil it down, just means keeping you on the platform for as long as possible, typically to maximize

revenue opportunities. Blue Sky is meant to allow for the growth of lots of different social platforms that all share the same basic bone structure but have different features, so users can opt to join whichever one of those communities they like, and these social network communities will be able to interconnect through a common set of standards, so that we don't end up with a bunch of social network silos or you know, sequestered islands where you can only

chat with the people who are in your silo, or you know, on your island, you can actually chat with

other users who are on other islands. It's just your island has its own culture and its own set of rules that it follows, and you've joined that island because you like that culture and you like those rules, and maybe the other island over you're like, those people are cool, but I don't like the way they run things, So I don't want to belong to that community, but I do want to still be able to chat with them.

That's what blue Sky and Masadon both try to do by using this common set of standards but individual instances of these social platforms. So you have one smaller kind of local community, and then you have the larger global community of all the other communities that interconnect with each other. Now I've only been on blue Sky for a short while, and I don't really have a very strong opinion one

way or the other about it. In some ways, it reminds me a little bit of the beta days of Google Plus, because I was fortunate in that I got an invite to participate in that beta. And a lot of the people I see on blue Sky are either in the tech sector, or more specifically, they're in the tech news sector. But there's a trend in the folks that I keep seeing on blue Sky that I do find tiresome. I'll talk about that at the very end of this episode, because it's a trend I'm seeing on

numerous platforms and I'm just so tired of it. But that's some foreshadowing anyway. Blue Sky's features are very similar to what you would see on Twitter. Like you would look at Blue Sky and say, yes, I get this, because it is so similar to the way Twitter works. There's a web based version of blue Sky. There are also apps for Android and iOS. You can follow folks, can post public messages to your followers. You can do

most of the stuff you can do on Twitter. But because we're talking about a beta program here, the population at blue Sky is pretty darn small. Reportedly, around April of this year, it had hit around fifty thousand users. That is a drop in the bucket compared to the one hundred million people who joined Threads as of the day I'm recording and publishing this episode. The current Blue Sky social app is really just a preview of what Blue Sky is meant to become. Now, whether it actually

becomes anything at all remains to be seen. It has received a lot of funding, but Threads could serve as a fairly significant threat to blue Sky because it could discourage people from adopting yet another social network. Once blue Sky is finally ready to come out of beta, we'll have to see because maybe by that time people will say, no, I'm good, I'm on threads already, why would I join

another one. Another alternative to Twitter is Masedon. Like I just mentioned this, this is another approach to decentralized social networking. It actually predates blue Sky by several years. I think it launched in twenty sixteen. Twitter is a centralized service, right, so you log into Twitter. Everybody logs into Twitter. It's all on this collection of servers that are centralized, but Mastedon consists of different instances or servers of social networks.

And you choose a home server to belong to that's kind of your home base, and you still, just like with blue Sky, you can still communicate with users who have chosen a different home base. But this way, users can select a server that aligns with their own personal values or preferences while still interacting with people who are from the larger Mastdon community. And again, think of it

as like a series of islands. You join the island that is run the way you like but you can still send messages to people who are on different islands. It does take a little bit more work to talk to the larger community and follow people from the larger community who are not on your server. That's really the tricky part is if you're on one server and your friend is on a different server, finding them takes a little bit more work so that you can follow their messages.

It is built into the system, but it's a bit of a barrier to entry. So one challenge with mastdon is that it's just not as intuitive as something like Twitter. The concept of a federated social network is also a little tricky to explain to someone who's more of a casual user. It's not as slick or as user friendly as the corporate offerings that you'll find with Twitter or with Threads. But on the other hand, it's also crowdfunded,

which means there's no advertising over at Masdon. It's more about creating the means of communication, and you could argue that Threads, for example, doesn't exist to give users the chance to express themselves or to follow others. Instead, Threads exists as another means to gather information about users, which then can be sold in ad deals. That's the reason threads exist, and the way exists is because Twitter is

failing so spectacularly. Without the failure of Twitter, there probably wouldn't have been as big of a push for threads, just because there would have been less of an opportunity there. But with Twitter kind of going up in flames, at least from the perspective of advertisers, there is an opportunity there. If you can lure the advertisers who would have spent money on Twitter to spend money with you instead, that's a huge win for Meta. Macedon doesn't deal with that.

It leans on crowdfunding. Now, Macedon did experience growth as a result of Musk taking ownership of Twitter. There are a lot of people who jumped ship and decided they would make an account over at Mastadon instead. This was a big enough concern that briefly Twitter actually censored tweets that included Mastodon links in them, because, as I mentioned before, free speech means something quite peculiar to Elon Musk, and it doesn't necessarily include you in that definition. I think

Mastodon is a noble cause. I think it's also a bit clunky to use, and as such may discourage a lot of casual users. I have to admit I haven't actually really checked on my own mastadon account in more than a month, so I'm part of the problem here. Then we've got another alternative. This one's hive Social. Now I have to tell y'all, I have never used hive Social. I do not have a hive Social account. I've never downloaded the app. I'm only tangentially aware of this one.

I heard about it when everyone was talking about jumping ship off Twitter back at the end of twenty twenty two. This app was initially released in twenty nineteen for iOS. The Android version would wait until late twenty twenty two, when again Musk had taken over Twitter and hive Social is another micro blogging service, so it does make it an alternative to Twitter. Like Mastadon, they saw a growth

spurt as a result of elon musk take over. Unlike Macedon, it is not a federated social network, so it is not taking that decentralized approach. It is more similar to Twitter in that way, and that's a centralized social network. From what I've read, Hivesocial allows stuff on the platform that is against the policies at other places, like you can post images of an explicit nature on Hive Social. To put it delicately, it is meant for users who

are above the age of seventeen. I think there is a filter you can select about whether you want in SFW material to show up or not. Also, I mean it all depends on the accounts you're following. It is also taking a strict chronological order to displaying messages, so you see the most recent posts and then you can go back in time, but it's not like served up by an algorithm, which is a huge departure from the

way Twitter does things. So you know, you would be able to more quickly catch with the accounts you follow just by scrolling down a bit and reading on the last one that you had not read and then working your way up to the most recent, which I think is a huge thing. It's something that a lot of

people have been asking about. You hear about all the time with Facebook as well, where you try to sort things by most recent, but even that is algorithmically driven, so it's not really most recent, it's just slightly more than the other alternative view, and this is really frustrating for a lot of people, so Hive Social took that to heart and they went with the strict chronological approach

to displaying messages. Hive Social did run into a massive security issue just a couple of months ago, when security researchers found that flaws would make it possible for a bad actor to potentially access a person's Hive information, which would include being able to read any private messages they had and even potentially overwrite messages that they had written, which is kind of crazy. So Hive Social shut down

temporarily in order to address these security problems. It did relaunch, but now some of the features that had been present in the earlier version of Hive Social are no longer on the current Hive Social, and probably that has to do with the issues with security. Whether those will come

back or not, I don't know. I think Threads remains a huge threat to these smaller social networks which don't have the benefit of this enormous established user base in the form of Instagram users to give them a leg up. I would actually love to see mast On and probably blue Sky in particular, evolve, but at the moment, I don't know how much they'll grow due to Threads dominating this conversation. Twitter is likely very concerned about threads, but

I think these smaller social networks also are in that camp. Now, speaking of all that, I you want to finally address what my biggest pet peeve on these platforms is right now, and that's most of the posts I'm seeing are complaining

about micro blogging services in general. Sometimes it's a complaint that's about the platform I'm currently on, Like if I'm on Twitter, people are complaining about Twitter, which I mean, I get it, But more often than not, I see people complaining about one of the other micro blogging platforms. So it's usually either Twitter or Threads. That's usually the

two that are really being called out. But even on blue Sky people will complain about blue Sky occasionally, and it all feels really insular and self referential and ridiculous that really it starts to feel like the only thing people are talking about on these micro blogging sites is about how terrible micro blogging sites are, which makes you wonder why are you even on them? Then, But on Threads,

I would say there is a difference. About half of the posts I see are not complaining about Twitter or even complaining about Threads. There instead a blatant grab for engagement. You might see something like I always thought cartoon hot dogs looked amazing. What cartoon food would you most want

to eat? Which is not saying anything interesting. It's obviously just trying to get a lot of folks to chime in on the topic and to quote unquote engage with it, which boosts the visibility of that post and potentially brings more people in to become followers. It's just a very strategic approach to getting more clout by getting that follower

count to grow. I mean, on the very first day of Threads, I saw people talking about they wanted to become the first person to hit a million followers, which, by the way, that didn't take long at all for

that record to get broken. And it just made me tired, y'all, Like, once upon a time, I was really eager to see my numbers grow for my Twitter audience, for example, and now I just find it exhausting and kind of discouraging, like there's more to life than just building your following and trading upon clout is so exhausting and it's discouraging, I think, because I think it discourages actual good material, whether you want to call it content or writing or

videos or whatever. When you're spending so much time just trying to get that number to go up, you're not spending as much time working on the actual quality or art of the thing you're doing. And I've been just as guilty about that as anyone else. I'm not here to say that I'm better than anyone at that regard. I'm just tired of it. Anyway. That's kind of the

current state of microblogging. It will be interesting to see what the long term effects of threads is on this sector, whether it will be like the doom of Twitter or of any of these other smaller platforms, or if it will just bring more issues to Meta itself. Like I still think a lot of ugly stuff is gonna unfold as a result of Meta getting into this space, and a lot of that's gonna reflect poorly on Meta. But

then like that, that's not a really dramatic prediction. Meta has a very long history of digging a hole for itself, so if threads were any different, it would shock me. That is it for this episode. I hope you are all well. If for some reason you want to follow me and you're on Threads or Blue Sky. Just look for John Strickland. That's Joen Strickland, and you'll find me there.

I don't post very much, but I do check the platforms, you know, at least once a day, so that is a possible way to get in touch with me, and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.