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Elon Musk, the eccentric billionaire, founder of SpaceX and the CEO of Tesla has officially bought and taken over Twitter for USD 44 billion.
Over the past few weeks since the takeover, Musk and Twitter have been hitting the headlines for all reasons including Musk bringing a literal sink to the Twitter headquarter stating ‘Let that sink in!’, implementing massive layoffs and new USD 8 per month payment for the verified blue tick.
Another noteworthy incident happened right outside the Twitter headquarter where a person impersonated to be a Twitter employee and gave an interview to the media outside evoking mixed reactions from the people after the impersonation was found out.
Since taking over Twitter, concerns have been raised over what ‘free speech’ would be on the platform, to what extent tweets would be termed as ‘free speech’, content moderation, and privacy and security risks posed by the new management forcing many to leave or consider leaving the platform.
While no app comes close to the utility that Twitter has, here are some alternatives that have been gaining traction and that you can also try out,
Mastodon
Mastodon, an open-source project launched by Eugen Rochko in 2016, is fast emerging as ‘The microblogging alternate' to Twitter.
Mastodon is decentralised unlike Twitter. The app uses a network of servers called “instances” and who sign up to the app are asked to choose a server by searching through topics, language and preferences.
Similar to Twitter, Mastodon has a timeline with “toots”, similar to tweets and “boosted”, as opposed to retweet. Toots can be bookmarked and users can be added to lists.
There are a ton of servers such as gaming, music, technology, art, food, LGBT etc. and one can connect with anyone and everyone regardless of server. These servers are also themed according to city, location or interest. Posts show up in a news feed, and people can boost posts, like and use hashtags.
The app allows three options to users when they tweet – private, public, and direct. Private toots are only for followers, while public toots are for anyone to see and direct toots are only sent to the users mentioned in the toot. Moderation on it is done by moderators of the server.
Google News/Apple News
More often than not, Twitter has been the ‘de facto’ site for all the breaking news from organisations to high profile personalities worldwide. And while the takeover may or may not change that, an alternative for news, if you are moving from Twitter, is Google News and Apple News. Both are standalone apps on their respective platforms including iOS for Google News, which aggregate news and articles into a single continuous flow for easier read and find.
The apps aggregate news from various sites and portals into a single tap. But mention may be made that Apple News boosts paid-only articles to lure users to pay for their premium service, while Google News primarily focuses on free content for the personal news feed, including free articles from subscription-based sources.
Most internet users will know about Reddit or might have heard or seen about it. While the functionality and UI of Reddit is nothing remotely close to Twitter, it is a popular site/app for those who want to interact with people on a specific interest, niche or topic.
It has subreddits, similar to a Mastodon server, for various things ranging from hobbies to news subreddits to memes and more. Like Mastodon, moderation is done by the moderators with each subreddit having its own rules which one must follow or risk being kicked out of the subreddit.
Reddit also has a functionality where users can reward other users for their contributions with special icons.
However, one must also exercise caution when jumping to a new platform. Whether Twitter users jump boat to other platforms or not remains to be seen.