Under the "escape from Twitter" craze, there are several social network alternatives

By Jaleel, LeftOfCenter, BlockBeats

The proliferation of Web3 once made us question the significance of the existence of decentralized social platforms.

Indeed, why do we need a decentralized social platform when Web2 can meet all our daily social needs? However, when Reddit announced the closure of the free API, the fee charged since July 1st was about $1.7 per 1000 requests. And on July 2nd, Elon Musk introduced a limited traffic policy, and Twitter users were temporarily restricted from reading tweets: verified accounts can read up to 6,000 tweets per day; unverified accounts 600; 300 articles for new unverified accounts.

These initiatives and changes of Reddit and Twitter have caused dissatisfaction among a large number of users, and many sections of Reddit have announced their shutdown in protest of the high API pricing. In addition, tags and search terms such as "GoodBye Twitter" and "RIP Twitter" also appear frequently, and finding new social platform alternatives has almost become a choice we have to make.

Where else can people go when users flee Reddit and Twitter? When the Internet is no longer the best choice, what are the alternatives?

Like everyone, even Vitalik, a figure in the encryption industry, is facing this problem. At the end of last year, he said on Twitter that ** bows to Elon Musk and will still pay Twitter $8 a month for membership fees, but at the same time He's eagerly experimenting with some new social platforms and protocols: Mastodon, Farcaster, Lens, and Nostr among them. **

![Under the upsurge of "Escape from Twitter", there are several social network alternatives] (https://img-cdn.gateio.im/social/moments-40baef27dd-c190d9c02b-dd1a6f-7649e1)

In the data chart compiled by CoinGecko, we can see that according to the average number of monthly unique visitors from January to April 2023, among the top 15 most popular decentralized social media, Steemit, as an alternative to Reddit, is in independent The number of visitors has grown tremendously, and Gab, Mastodon, Bluesky, Minds, Lenster, Snort, etc. are also ranking high as Twitter alternatives. **

BlockBeats will introduce several social network alternatives in the following content. As a decentralized alternative platform for Twitter, users can try to use them according to their needs.

Bluesky ushers in "record traffic" ever

Since Elon Musk introduced the limited traffic policy on July 2, Bluesky ushered in a "record-breaking traffic" in history.

Bluesky is a decentralized social application that was originally incubated by Twitter in 2019, when Jack Dorsey was still CEO of Twitter. Bluesky has a Twitter-like user interface and algorithm selection, co-design and community-specific moderation. When Bluesky was founded, Jack Dorsey said Twitter would fund a "small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers" tasked with building a decentralized standard for social media, initially targeting Twitter itself. adopt this standard.

But what we all know since then is that Elon Musk made an extremely high-profile acquisition of Twitter, so at the end of 2022 Bluesky has completely left Twitter. Although Jack Dorsey funds Bluesky and sits on the company's board of directors, he is not involved in day-to-day development. Bluesky's CEO is Jay Graber, who previously worked as a software engineer for the cryptocurrency Zcash before also founding an event planning website called Happen.

Currently, Bluesky is still invite-only in its beta version, but its user base is still growing as more and more people come onto the site. According to figures released in late April, Bluesky has about 50,000 users. As of mid-May, a spokesperson for the Bluesky team said Bluesky had more than 66,000 users and a waiting list of more than 1.9 million. The app has been downloaded more than 375,000 times, according to data.ai estimates. The scarce invitations, sent to users every two weeks, sparked a frenzy each time, selling for as much as $200 each on eBay.

Many prominent media figures and organizations have found a new home in Bluesky, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and CNN's Jack Tapper. (Jake Tapper).

When it comes to Bluesky funded by Jack Dorsey, one cannot fail to mention Nostr. Jack Dorsey once donated 14 BTC to the social protocol.

Censorship Resistant Global Social Network Nostr

The founder of Nostr, fiatjaf, is a person with strong humanistic care. As a technical expert, the hundreds of book lists recommended by his personal website are all sociology and philosophy.

On November 20, 2019, fiatjaf began to develop the Nostr protocol, hoping to create a simple, open, global, decentralized, and censorship-resistant social protocol. He wrote in his blog that day: "Nostr is the simplest open protocol, based on encryption keys and signatures, does not depend on any trusted central server, does not depend on P2P technology, and can once and for all create a censorship-resistant global social network."

A year later, in November 2020, the first batch of participants gradually expanded, "Nostr's group changed from a basic group to a super group in Telegram, and began to discuss the possibility of a decentralized social network, for The possibility of funding such projects, the possibility of Nostr supporting smart contracts, and the name of the Nostr protocol.

Nostr is not a product and protocol of Web3, and it can even be said that Nostr has nothing to do with Web3. Jack Dorsey believes that the essence of Web3 does not escape the monopoly of capital. If this problem is to be solved at the economic level, institutional financing must be abandoned, whether it is in the form of equity or tokens. And Nostr is in line with his expectations, no institutional financing, no token model, which is why Jack Dorsey donated 14 BTC to Nostr and made the platform public.

![Under the upsurge of "Escape Twitter", there are several social network alternatives] (https://img-cdn.gateio.im/social/moments-40baef27dd-0e336eb48c-dd1a6f-7649e1)

Edward Joseph Snowden, a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who disclosed the PRISM project to the media, hated the surveillance machine secretly built by the government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and the basic freedom of people around the world, and also hoped to have a social garden without walls , so he is a "loyal" user of Nostr.

Composable social graph Lens

Before Lens went online, it was doomed to be compared with Nostr. The founder of Lens protocol is Stani Kulechov, CEO and founder of the famous Defi protocol Aave. As mentioned earlier, Jack Dorsey has always been critical of Web3, and it seems that to ridicule the concept of Web3, he even skipped Web 4 and proposed to build Web5.

Jack Dorsey's attack on Web3 has also received a lot of counterattacks, including Stani Kulechov, CEO and founder of the famous Defi protocol Aave. Stani couldn't stand Jack Dorsey's ridicule, quoted Jack Dorsey's tweet and joked: "Since Jack Dorsey will build Aave on Bitcoin, Aave should also build Twitter on Ethereum".

In February 2022, Stani publicly released the Lens protocol on Twitter by signing an open letter, and it was officially launched on the Polygon mainnet after testing in May of the same year.

The positioning of Lens is quite different from that of Nostr. Its positioning and explanation are: Lens Protocol is a composable and decentralized social graph and protocol, on which developers can easily build social media platforms and design meaningful social experiences. Instead of resorting to feedback mechanisms to lock the user's attention. The Lens protocol uses NFT technology to ensure that users fully own their own data in the process of using the Lens protocol, and creators can also open up new ways to profit.

A passage on the Lens official website for users sums up the characteristics of Lens very well, "With Lens Protocol, everything is under your control. You own your personal data, where you use it, how you use it, and even your How to monetize it. It means you have control over your content and it’s in your wallet as an NFT. Not only is it easy. That’s what digital identity should be: everything is yours.”

After Twitter users were temporarily restricted from reading tweets, the Lens protocol also issued a "No limits" tweet, and the floor price of Lens protocol profiles NFT also increased.

The biggest beneficiary of fleeing Twitter Mastodon

At the end of last year, Elon Musk acquired Twitter and launched a series of unsatisfactory moves. At that time, the biggest beneficiary was Mastodon.

Founded in 2016, Mastodon is a free and open source decentralized decentralized microblog community network composed of servers independently operated by different operators exchanging data in a federated manner. Before Elon Musk acquired Twitter, it had accumulated approximately 500,000 active users.

At the end of 2022, when Elon Musk laid off a large number of employees and modified Twitter's verification policy to cause a lot of confusion, Mastodon had an influx of users. At the peak, more than 130,000 new users were added every day. The number of active users reached 2.5 million in early December last year. Months later the number of active users dropped to 1.8 million, but still an order of magnitude higher than Lens and Nostr as protocols.

The rapid growth of Mastodon users apparently also caught the attention of Elon Musk, and Twitter banned links transferred to Mastodon and suspended users who posted Mastodon usernames, including the official Mastodon account. In a Twitter Spaces, Elon Musk directly said: "Fucking post Mastodon all goddamn day long, I don't care"

![Under the upsurge of "Escape from Twitter", there are several social network alternatives] (https://img-cdn.gateio.im/social/moments-40baef27dd-10c8fff35d-dd1a6f-7649e1)

Mastodon has a series of infrastructure around the activtypub protocol that is relatively more complete. According to the feedback of many users after personal experience, it has reached a state that is not inferior to Twitter. In this regard, it is much more mature than Lens and Nostr. The application layer Or protocol tools are also more complete.

Due to its slightly higher product maturity, Mastodon still seems to be the biggest winner in this time when users flee Twitter. The founder and CEO of Mastodon is a German programmer named Eugen Rochko. According to the data he shared, the number of active users of Mastodon increased by 294,000 during this weekend, and the amount of published activities roughly tripled.

It is worth mentioning that boffin Phil Daian, a member of the Ethereum Foundation, runs an encryption community called cryptodon.lol on Mastodon, and Vitalik has also joined it.

![Under the upsurge of "Escape Twitter", there are several social network alternatives] (https://img-cdn.gateio.im/social/moments-40baef27dd-2e8b6484f3-dd1a6f-7649e1)

P2P Network Urbit

Urbit's goal is to break the centralized "client-server" model and invent a new P2P network consisting of personal servers owned and operated by users, which means that users will not access third-party servers provided by others , instead making P2P connections directly with other people on the network - completely removing the middleman and the power that comes with it. Urbit's goal is to completely replace the existing oligopoly of the Web2 Internet with a more fair, private and open alternative.

From the very beginning, it has been favored by top venture capital and investors such as Peter Thiel, encrypted venture capital a16z, Balaji S. Srinivasan, and then attracted engineering venture capital such as Coinfund and Assembly Capital to start building communities and developing on Urbit .

The official launch of u/acc, the first Urbit accelerator program, will be launched at the Lisbon Conference on July 24th. Applications from founders, developers, etc. will be accepted at that time. And form a team of new ecosystem companies to provide pre-seed funds and address space.

Urbit is an old project with a history longer than Bitcoin. Started as a side project back in 2002, first released in 2013. From a user perspective, Urbit's growth has been steady. But Urbit’s adoption appears to be slow compared to other crypto projects.

Currently, the active userspace on Urbit is only a small fraction of its total user base. According to the data of Urbit/Network explorer, about 111,000 network items have been generated in the Urbit network, including galaxies (Galaxy), stars (Star) and planets (Planet), of which only 13,226 have network keys set, Setting a network key means they can join the Urbit network, which has about 4157 daily active users.

Compared to other crypto projects, Urbit has been slow to adopt and has not yet reached the expected level of adoption due to mysterious beginnings, controversial founders, scarcity of killer apps, unfriendly app discovery mechanisms, and most critically, difficulty onboarding. None of these problems are insurmountable, however. For example, community-backed apps have made app discovery much easier, the controversial founder quit in 2019, and even technical hurdles have been eased with the use of several third-party apps, including Planet.one or Third.earth Urbit instance hosting, Umbrel for Urbit node app, and Port, a local hosting program available for PC.

Plus, unlike other projects, Urbit’s adoption is organic. Urbit does not issue tokens and has no related token incentives. It can be said that the current users are not driven by speculation, which means that these 4157 daily active users are early core users. If any incentive mechanism is adopted in the future, this number is expected to increase significantly.

Threads: Xiao Zha and Musk are staging a "hand-to-hand" business war

In addition to the social protocols and products we introduced above, Twitter seems to have given Zuckerberg a chance to give Meta a series of eye-catching new moves.

Meta Platforms launched an attack under this wave of "exit Twitter" craze, and is planning to release a social application called Threads, which is expected to be officially launched on Thursday, July 6th. Threads was developed on the basis of Instagram users, combining elements of Instagram and Twitter.

Screenshots suggest that users will appear to be able to log into Threads using their Instagram id, which could appeal to both existing Instagram users and new users looking for a different social media experience. In a company-wide meeting last month, Meta executives shared that Instagram Threads will be integrated using ActivityPub, the decentralized social media protocol Mastodon is based on.

Threads' official and brief description on the App Store reads: Threads is where the community comes together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to tomorrow's trends. No matter what interests you, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things, or build your own loyal following and share your thoughts, opinions and creativity with the world.

Threads, named after a Twitter competitor, seems to function a lot like Twitter, and some technologists even call it a "Twitter killer." It's hard not to think of the tense fight between Musk and Zuckerberg last week. Musk and Zuckerberg have disliked each other for years. more nervous. The upcoming launch of Threads seems to let everyone understand the fuse of this fight.

Conclusion

Going back to the original topic, the stories of Reddit and Twitter tell us that only when real problems arise, as users, can we truly feel the disadvantages of centralization and the benefits of decentralization—“Open sharing + Data Availability".

At the same time, as more and more users flee from traditional social media such as Reddit and Twitter, social protocols and products such as Bluesky, Mastodon, Urbit, Lens and Nostr will also have a growing market in the future.

The entry of Threads also made the track lively. But what is the future of the social track? Is decentralization the end of social media? Who can run out in this market? The answers to these questions still need a lot of time to witness, but the only thing that is beyond doubt is that the future of social networking will definitely be chosen by users.