The hunt for the next Twitter: all the news about alternative social media platforms

Where will we all hang out next?

It’s been more than two years since Elon Musk officially took over as the owner of Twitter — now X — and while a lot of platforms rushed in to try and be the next big microblogging service, many haven’t survived. Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky have all proven to be viable alternatives, but places like Pebble (formerly T2) and Post News didn’t make it.

Threads is perhaps the likely successor, having reached 275 million monthly users as of October 2024, and it seems committed to fediverse integration by building features around the ActivityPub protocol. Bluesky, which relies on its own decentralized AT Protocol for social networking, continues to grow and saw a surge of users after the 2024 election, though with somewhere north of 14.5 million users, it’s still well behind Threads. Mastodon, which also uses the ActivityPub protocol, was already well-established by the time Musk bought Twitter but has struggled to grow its active user base.

There still isn’t a clear successor to Twitter. X hasn’t become the massive “everything app” that Musk says he wants it to be. But despite the success of Threads, continued existence of Mastodon, and the growth of Bluesky, X is still the place where many people and companies post things before they go anywhere else — at least, for now.

Here’s our coverage of the alternatives to X.