Six new social media platforms you haven’t heard of
… yet
T2
The team for T2 came up with the name because they are trying to replicate the experience of Twitter without being Twitter. Started by two former Twitter employees — Sarah Oh and Gabor Cselle — T2 Social focuses on building simple tools for engagement and discussion.
According to Crunchbase, they have secured 1.1 million in funding and are based in Berkley California. It is one of many entries in the ex-Twitter employee marketplace of social apps trying to replace Twitter.
It certainly looks a lot like Twitter.
So far I like T2, and whether that is the name that sticks we’ll have to see down the road.
BlueSky
Is the idea of Jack Dorsey. When Twitter was sold to Musk Dorsey did not like the changes that Musk was making to his old company so he set out to build a rival to Twitter. He figures since he did it once he can do it a second time. Why not? It certainly sounds reasonable.
I do not have any experience with this app or images to show you how the app works as I have as yet to receive my invite code. I would guess it would be coming sometime soon.
According to Crunchbase, they have secured 21 million in funding which should give them an edge over others in this space.
This is also a play about decentralized social networks which means you control your own data. As it is so far BlueSky is not really decentralized, yet. It runs on just a few servers which is the definition of centralized computing.
Polywork
Think of LinkedIn with AI built in from the beginning. I have just started using the network and so far results are good for me. You build your profile not based on what your job is or what you want it to be.
When you are building your profile it is not so much about the work you have done in the past but the work you could do. You are given several selectors around things you like or what you might call yourself. For example, in my profile construction, I described myself as a Life Long Learner, Book Worm, Remote Worker, Photography, and so on.
This is more about drawing out your personality than simply a review of your work experience. So the results you may you are going to be different than using your work experience, and this gives you a broader pool of potential work situations to choose from. Some choices will be standard as you would get from LinkedIn, but some will be more alternative types of work suggestions that could be just as fruitful to pursue. This calls for people who think outside the box to use a well-worn cliche.
Mastodon
Mastodon is a decentralized network that allows users to create accounts in separate communities while still being able to access other communities. It is based on the open-source concept of “bonding”, where different servers use the same protocol to talk to each other and share content over a single stream.
These servers (also known as instances) allow users to create communities through Mastodon without having to build the entire infrastructure from scratch. Server operators monitor the activity of registered users and store it on their respective servers.
Users can choose which networks they want to join, and there are plenty of options with nearly 10,000 active communities. The default network for new users upon registration is “mastodon.social”, but you can choose any network you want.
There are no ads or ad mix plans in Mastodon. Its founder said he doesn’t mind if users post ads on their servers, but they do so at their own risk.
Lemon8
Lemon8 is a social networking app that has made waves online, especially on TikTok, where many influencers have promoted it as a cross between Instagram and Pinterest.
Lemon8 is a photo and video-sharing platform. It was launched in Japan by ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, in 2020 and later expanded to other Asian countries such as Thailand and Singapore. It launched in the US and UK in February 2023 but took off in March after media organizations and TikTok influencers began promoting it.
As described by the App Store, Lemon8 is “a place where young creators can share a variety of content, from fashion, makeup, food, and travel, to home appliances, pets, and everything else you want. Some TikTok influencers have also described the app as a cross between Instagram (beforeReels) and Pinterest.
Pleroma
Pleroma was released the following year, 2017, by another German developer named “Lain”. It comes in2nd behind Mastodon, claiming to be 10% of the Fediverse but has already earned its footing.
Pleroma is a ‘federated’ social networking platform, compatible with Mastodon and other Activity Pub implementations. It is free software licensed under the AGPLv3. It actually consists of two components: a backend, named simply Pleroma, and a user-facing frontend, named Pleroma-FE.
From a user perspective, Pleroma has many features that Mastodon does not have. Pleroma allows the uploading of many file types that are not supported in Mastodon. Pleroma allows you to create hyperlinks in your posts and fully supports Markdown and a limited set of HTML tags as well as some BBCode. It’s a little more complicated with Pleroma to get started.
Go ahead and check these out if you are tired of the usual places online. Who knows, if you start on one of these and you build a following you may become famous, or very well known. But aside from that I think at least with Polywork it will expand your reach when looking for fulfilling work. And the initial look of T2 indicates to me at least that it will work as well as Twitter did. But the success of these networks has a lot to do with who comes and who stays and the algorithms used in managing and running the individual social media platform. I think betting on decentralization to be the direction of social media still seems to me as wishful thinking because it still has to be paid for, and therefore it is a matter of attracting advertisers to the platform.
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