Where can we escape to amidst the 'Goodbye Twitter' trend?

Author: Jaleel, LeftOfCenter, BlockBeats

Editor: Jack, BlockBeats

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

Indeed, when Web2 can meet all our daily social needs, why do we need a decentralized social platform? However, when Reddit announced the closure of its free API and began charging approximately 1.7 yuan per 1000 requests from July 1st, followed by Elon Musk's limited traffic policy on July 2nd, Twitter users were temporarily restricted from reading tweets: verified accounts can read up to 6,000 tweets per day, unverified accounts 600 tweets, and new unverified accounts 300 tweets.

Reddit and Twitter's recent actions and changes have caused a lot of user dissatisfaction. Many subreddits on Reddit have announced their closure in protest of the high API pricing. In addition, tags and search terms such as "GoodBye Twitter" and "RIP Twitter" have also appeared frequently, and finding new social platforms as alternatives has become a choice we almost have to make.

Like everyone else, even the legendary figure in the encryption industry, Vitalik, faces this problem. At the end of last year, he tweeted that he bowed to Elon Musk and would still pay Twitter a monthly membership fee of $8, but at the same time, he was eagerly trying out some new social platforms and protocols, including Mastodon, Farcaster, Lens, and Nostr.

According to the data chart compiled by CoinGecko, we can see that based on the average number of monthly unique visitors from January to April 2023, Steemit, as a substitute for Reddit, has experienced significant growth in the number of unique visitors. Gab, Mastodon, Bluesky, Minds, Lenster, Snort, and other substitutes for Twitter also rank high on the list of the 15 most popular decentralized social media platforms.

BlockBeats will introduce several social network platforms in the following content, as decentralized alternatives to Twitter. Users can try them out according to their needs.

Bluesky welcomes "record-breaking traffic" in its history

Since July 2nd, Bluesky has experienced "record-breaking traffic" ever since Elon Musk launched a limited traffic policy.

Bluesky is a decentralized social application that was originally incubated by Twitter in 2019 when Jack Dorsey was still the CEO of Twitter. Bluesky has a user interface and algorithm selection similar to Twitter, as well as collaborative design and community-specific review. At the founding of Bluesky, Jack Dorsey stated that Twitter would fund a "small independent team of up to five open-source architects, engineers, and designers" to establish a decentralized standard for social media, with the initial goal being for Twitter to adopt this standard.

But what we all know now is that Elon Musk made a very high-profile move to acquire Twitter, and by the end of 2022, Bluesky had completely separated from Twitter. Although Jack Dorsey funded Bluesky and served on the company's board of directors, he was not involved in day-to-day development. Jay Graber, who previously served as a software engineer for the cryptocurrency Zcash and also founded an event planning website called Happen, is the CEO of Bluesky.

Currently, Bluesky is still limited to invitation-only in its beta version, but as more and more people enter the website, its user base is still growing. According to data released at the end of April, Bluesky has approximately 50,000 users. As of mid-May, a Bluesky spokesperson said that Bluesky has over 66,000 users and the waiting list has exceeded 1.9 million. According to data.ai's estimate, the app has been downloaded over 375,000 times. These scarce invitations are sent to users every two weeks and each time they cause a frenzy, with prices on eBay reaching up to $200 per invitation.

Currently, many famous media personalities and organizations have found their "new home" on Bluesky, including Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and CNN's Jake Tapper.

Speaking of Bluesky, which is funded by Jack Dorsey, we cannot ignore Nostr. Jack Dorsey donated 14 BTC to this social protocol.

Anti-censorship global social network Nostr

Nostr's founder fiatjaf is a person with a strong humanistic concern. As a technical expert, the hundreds of book lists recommended on his personal website are all in the field of sociology and philosophy.

On November 20, 2019, fiatjaf began developing the Nostr protocol, hoping to create a simple, open, globally supported, decentralized, and censorship-resistant social protocol. That day, he wrote in his own blog: "Nostr is the simplest open protocol based on encryption keys and signatures, independent of any trusted central server, independent of P2P technology, and can create a censorship-resistant global social network once and for all."

After a year, in November 2020, the first batch of participants gradually expanded. Nostr's group on Telegram transformed from a basic group to a supergroup, and began discussing the possibility of decentralized social networks, the possibility of providing funding for such projects, the possibility of Nostr supporting smart contracts, and the name of the Nostr protocol.

Nostr is not a product or 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 has not escaped the monopoly of capital. If we want to solve this problem at the economic level, we must give up institutional financing, whether in the form of equity or tokens. Nostr meets his expectations, with no institutional financing and no token model, which is why Jack Dorsey donated 14 BTC to Nostr and publicly supported it.

Edward Joseph Snowden, a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who revealed the Prism program to the media, hates the government's secret surveillance machine and wants to destroy privacy, internet freedom, and the basic freedoms of people around the world. He also hopes to have a social garden without walls, which is why he is a "loyal" user of Nostr.

可组合社交图谱 Lens

translates to

Composable Social Graph Lens

in English.

Before the launch of Lens, it was destined to be compared with Nostr, and the founder of the Lens protocol is Stani Kulechov, the CEO and founder of the famous Defi protocol Aave. As mentioned earlier, Jack Dorsey has always been critical of Web3 and seems to be mocking the concept of Web3 by skipping Web4 and proposing to build Web5.

Jack Dorsey's criticism of Web3 has also received a lot of backlash, including from Stani Kulechov, the CEO and founder of the famous Defi protocol Aave. Stani couldn't stand Jack Dorsey's mockery and quoted his tweet, jokingly saying, "Since Jack Dorsey will be building Aave on Bitcoin, Aave should also build Twitter on Ethereum."

Related reading: "Lens or Nostr? Find the ultimate solution for future social media."

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

The positioning and interpretation of Lens is very different from 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 without relying on feedback mechanisms to lock in users' attention. The Lens protocol uses NFT technology to ensure that users fully own their data when using the Lens protocol, and creators can also explore new ways to profit.

The official website of Lens provides users with a concise summary of Lens' features: "With the Lens Protocol, everything is under your control. You have your own personal profile, where you use it, how you use it, and even how you profit from it. This means that you have control over your content, and it exists as an NFT in your wallet. This is not only easy, but it is what digital identity should do: everything is yours."

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

Escape Twitter's biggest beneficiary Mastodon

Last year, at the end of the year, Elon Musk acquired Twitter and launched a series of unsatisfactory measures, with Mastodon being the biggest beneficiary at the time.

Established in 2016, Mastodon is a free and open-source decentralized distributed microblogging social network. It is composed of servers operated independently by different operators that exchange data in a federated manner. Prior to Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, Mastodon had accumulated approximately 500,000 active users.

By the end of 2022, when Elon Musk laid off a large number of employees and modified Twitter's verification policy, causing a lot of confusion, Mastodon attracted a large number of users. At its peak, it added more than 130,000 users per day. In early December last year, the number of active users reached 2.5 million, and after January this year, the number of active users dropped to 1.8 million, still an order of magnitude higher than the protocols Lens and Nostr.

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

The infrastructure around the activtypub protocol that Mastodon has is relatively more complete. According to feedback from many users who have personally experienced it, they believe that it has reached a state that is not inferior to Twitter. In this regard, it is much more mature than Lens and Nostr, and the tools at the application layer or protocol are also more complete.

Due to slightly higher product maturity, Mastodon seems to be the biggest winner in the recent user exodus from Twitter. Mastodon's founder and CEO, a German programmer named Eugen Rochko, shared data showing that the number of active users on Mastodon increased by 294,000 over the weekend, and the amount of activity posted approximately doubled.

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

Urbit aims to break the centralized "client-server" model and has invented a brand new P2P network. This network is composed of personal servers owned and operated by users, which means that users will not access third-party servers provided by others, but directly connect with other people on the network through P2P connections - completely eliminating intermediaries and the power that comes with them. Urbit's goal is to completely replace the existing oligopoly of Web2 internet with a fairer, more private, and open alternative.

From the very beginning, it has received recognition from top venture capitalists and investors such as Peter Thiel, crypto venture capital firm a16z, and Balaji S. Srinivasan. Later on, it attracted engineering-focused venture capitalists such as Coinfund and Assembly Capital to build communities and develop on Urbit.

The official launch of the first Urbit accelerator program, u/acc, will be announced at the Lisbon conference on July 24th. Applications from founders, developers, and others will be accepted. The goal of u/acc is to provide pre-seed funding and address space for teams who want to push the limits of Urbit and build new ecosystem companies.

Urbit is an old project with a history longer than Bitcoin. It started as a hobby project as early as 2002 and was first released in 2013. From a user's perspective, Urbit's growth has been steady. However, compared to other cryptocurrency projects, Urbit's adoption seems to be progressing slowly.

Related reading: "If the Internet is no longer the best choice, what are the alternatives?"

Currently, only a small portion of Urbit's total user base is active on the platform. According to data from the Urbit/Network explorer, there are approximately 111,000 network projects on the Urbit network, including galaxies, stars, and planets. However, only 13,226 of these have set network keys, which means they are able to join the Urbit network. The number of daily active users is around 4157.

Compared with other encryption projects, Urbit has been slow to reach the expected adoption level due to its mysterious beginnings, controversial founder, scarce killer applications, unfriendly application discovery mechanism, and most importantly, difficulty in getting started. However, these problems are not insurmountable. For example, community-supported applications have made application discovery easier, the controversial founder left in 2019, and even technical obstacles have been alleviated by using multiple third-party applications, including Planet.one or Third.earth for Urbit instance hosting, Urbit node application Umbrel, and the locally hosted program Port for PC.

Additionally, unlike other projects, Urbit's adoption is organic. Urbit does not have a cryptocurrency and there are no related token incentives. Currently, users are not driven by speculation, which means that the 4157 daily active users are early adopters. If any incentive mechanisms are adopted in the future, it is expected that this number will increase significantly.

Threads: Zuckerberg and Musk are engaged in a "melee" of business warfare

除了我们上面所介绍的社交协议和产品以外，Twitter 最近似乎也给了扎克伯格一个机会让 Meta 进行了一系列动作。

In addition to the social protocols and products we introduced above, Twitter seems to have recently given Zuckerberg an opportunity to take a series of actions for Meta.

Meta Platforms is launching an attack amid the current "exit Twitter" trend, and is planning to release a social app called Threads, which is expected to be officially launched on Thursday, July 6th. Threads is developed based on Instagram's user base and combines elements of both Instagram and Twitter.

A screenshot indicates that users may be able to log in to Threads using their Instagram ID, which could attract existing Instagram users as well as new users seeking a different social media experience. During a company-wide meeting last month, Meta executives shared that Instagram Threads will integrate with the decentralized social media protocol ActivityPub, based on Mastodon.

Threads' official and brief description on the App Store is: Threads is the place where communities gather to discuss all content from topics that matter to you today to trends of tomorrow. No matter what you're interested in, you can follow and directly connect with your favorite creators and other people who share the same interests, or build your own loyal followers and share your ideas, perspectives, and creativity with the world.

The name of Threads is named after Twitter's competitor, and its functionality seems very similar to Twitter. Some technicians even call it the "Twitter killer." This makes it hard not to think of the tense showdown between Musk and Zuckerberg last week. Musk and Zuckerberg have been at odds with each other for years, and Musk's acquisition of Twitter at the end of last year has only heightened tensions between the two. The upcoming launch of Threads seems to have made everyone understand the trigger for this showdown.

Conclusion

Returning 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 drawbacks of centralization and the benefits of decentralization - "open sharing + data availability".

At the same time, as more and more users flee traditional social media platforms such as Reddit and Twitter, social protocols and products such as Bluesky, Mastodon, Urbit, Lens, and Nostr will have a growing market in the future. The entry of Threads has also made this field more lively. However, what is the future of the social media industry? Is decentralization the ultimate goal of social media? Who will emerge as the leader in this market? The answers to these questions will require a lot of time to witness, but one thing that is certain is that the future of social media will be determined by user choice.

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