Beyond Social Media Fatigue: What Is the Next Twitter?

On Social Media Platforms.

Ever heard of Pebble? Probably not. It has just announced to shut down shortly after it was founded to be the next Twitter. Its failure might teach us something.

The problem was not the founders. Gabor Cselle spent several years at Twitter and Google. Rich Miner is one of the co-developers of Android. Employees include a former engineering director of Twitter, a former Google director, a former engineering director of Yelp, etc.

The problem was money. Or rather, the investors’ lack of believe in efficient growth.

How to build a social media platform and destroy it

Today, the software stack for a social media platform is much easier to develop than it was around 2006, when Twitter was founded. You might even want to reuse Mastodon code like Truth Social did. That is not the point. The point is that you must pay the servers and additional development. That money must come from somewhere. You have several options for this:

1. You acquire seed money and keep the service free. But only for some time until you have burned the money. Then what?

2. You could implement advertisement. You can do that and then you twist the algorithm that users stay longer, see more ads, and ultimately have the feeling they have become the product.

3. You could also offer to be ad-free and introduce a monthly subscription fee.

We have seen all three stages with Twitter and are amidst the 4th stage. This is called the enshittification stage. Cory Doctorow described how platforms die: “first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

And here we are: X.

How to build a Twitter clone and abandon it

Now let’s start all over again and make it better. Gabor Cselle developed a publicly available table of requirements for “A pretty straightforward copy of Twitter with some simplifications that are outlined below.” And then he created that Twitter clone on December 9, 2022, and consequently named it “T2”.

After rebranding to “Pebble”, they reached about 20k users (I joined on October 24 as 19356). And on October 25, 2023, after less than a year they announced they were closing the following week.

The official reason for it: “We weren’t growing fast enough justify additional investment, and we also underestimated the number of new competitors with a similar vision who would enter the field.”

Cselle had originally raised $1.1 million in funding from a group of angels that includes Bradley Horowitz and others. Given these few users (actually only about 1,000 were active daily users), investors saw no future as there are other alternatives to Twitter.

How to find a platform and hate it

Ok, there is Threads. Rather a no-brainer for Meta. Same login as Instagram and you have a few hundred million potential users. Regular users? Who knows. Subject to the European platform rules? It is not on the European market. It probably exists only to weaken Twitter and later be turned into something else, if necessary, maybe integrated in another service. Meta does not need to ask anyone for money, they form the services according to their strategically necessities.

There is Bluesky. Currently 1,735,031 registered users, linear growth due to invite only, about 15k plus per day. No ads and many other restrictions similar to Gabor Cselle list. Why are people currently flocking there? Probably due to a good and familiar experience and the myth surrounding the involvement of Jack Dorsey (the original Twitter founder).

But can Bluesky be trusted? The more register, the more attractive it is to others according to the network effect. But once it is big enough, it might follow the enshittification cycle. The very likable founders have announced a few good thoughts, but that is no reason to believe that in a few years we won’t have to migrate to the next platform again like disappointed digital nomads. Because at some point they will have to pay for their servers and then get money from somewhere. From the user or from somewhere else.

So, the idea would be that you don’t have to trust the founders at all. That it is not about the platform in the sense of server software, but just a protocol standard with which everyone can add their own instance. A bit like web servers and HTTP. So, let’s talk about the Fediverse, let’s talk about Mastodon.

How to think different but still hate it

The protocol is ActivityPub and if you like, you can set up you own open-source Mastodon server.

Hence, no one can buy the platform for billions. In addition, it already has many features due to a large developer community.

But where does the money for it come from? Well, everyone who sets up an instance and pays the server costs, it is not uncommon for these to be user communities. So, to a certain extent, users themselves are involved or are retained by well-meaning supporters (donate to your server instances!).

Insert: Why hasn’t every Twitter user bought a share of Twitter? Things might have turned out differently. Shareholder meetings would have become a governance structure for the platform.

But there are also crucial thresholds that make Mastodon’s triumph more difficult. And these lie in exactly this structure of the network: servers are slow and there is no comprehensive search, moving to another instance is difficult.

How to innovate and love it

So here we are, wondering what the future of social media will be. Maybe it is about not duplicating Twitter at all, but rather thinking again about what we actually want with social media.

Truth is, quite a few of us are tired: social media fatigue. People are withdrawing from social networks, reducing the time they spend on them or changing their usage behavior.

This is what happened to me many years ago: When I noticed that I felt worse after logging out than before logging in, I deleted my Facebook account. I had the same feeling on Twitter a few weeks ago: I actually don’t feel like it anymore.

And when I recently switched to Bluesky, I wasn’t sure if we were just starting all this nonsense all over again.

Bluesky and other platforms are nice offers that many are now migrating to in the hope that everything will be fine again. But we need to think about whether social media is fundamentally broken.

Now, we need to think again: How should a platform be structured to organize a political discourse on which democratic politics can be built? A medium that brings global society together instead of driving it apart. A marketplace of ideas, solutions, and joint action.

In this context, it is interesting what technologyreview reports: When the Internet expanded commercially in the 1990s, its culture was fundamentally anti-commercial. Many of the Internet’s leading thinkers were passionate about providing open-source software, following the mantra “information wants to be free.” The culture of freedom required a business model that could support it. That was advertising. Therefore, DoubleClick combined personal data with tracking cookies. And this targeting process is so incredibly good at figuring out what we are interested in. So finally, social platforms increased their user base and tried to attract attention for as long as possible to be able to display more and more ads.

But at some point, we must understand that we must pay for things. If you use it for free, you are the product. Instead, support the services you love. Or build it yourself. It is not about maximizing profits, it is about running something that you want to use yourself, something that enables others, something that is good for society.

“The tunnel-vision focus on growth created bad incentives in the social media age,” writes Katie Notopoulos. “We need to trust in the power of ‘1,000 true fans’ over cheaply amassed millions.”

Insert: Why didn’t Pebble ask its users for their fair share? “Hey, we need to develop a native app and need support for servers that allow hashtags, videos, and proper moderation!” Why not ask them for seed funding and set up a democratic governance structure that lets users make strategic decisions in return? Why not use it as a springboard towards a better idea of social media, especially now when everything seems lost?

So, Pebble’s failure is certainly a shame, but understandable. It shows that a social network offering can be set up quickly today. Maybe even a vibrant and engaged user base. But it is the task of the management to recognize the users themselves as an opportunity for the future and development of the endeavor. Mastodon, Wikipedia and NPR (a cooperation of non-commercial radio stations) are examples of how resources supported by small donations can work. There’s not much money to be made in Silicon Valley this way, but a working platform for all users. It is about availability for everyone, not profit for a few.

If you would like to contribute something to this topic, I would be happy if you do it right here or on the corresponding social media platforms. If you find an error, let me know. Of course, the image above was taken with Midjourney, using the promt “a democratic social media platform of the future owned by its users” (I’m not sure if it’s a good illustration of what I imagine it to be, but that’s how AI is).

Update: Gabor Cselle has written down his experiences with the development of Peppel here.