With the commotion that has been organized these days with the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk (founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, among other companies), it is time to remember other social platforms capable of offering an alternative as a meeting point to exchange information, opinion and content.
Beyond Twitter, various social platforms allow exchanges of opinion and information in a similar way
It remains to be seen if Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter can produce a remarkable exodus to other platforms. Some of these platforms are well-established social networks, others emerged with the promise of becoming an alternative when privacy policies changed, and others take up, in a renewed way, the spirit of thematic forums and channels. They are the following:
-Discord: Born as a communication platform between the gamer community, in Discord the communities are centralized in this app that also allows the creation of internal channels within each community. Each of these communities works with its own rules, established by the administrator. In addition to text communication, there are also Clubhouse-style audio chat rooms.
-Mastodon: It was born in 2016 but Mastodon did not begin to gain popularity until 2018 when it began to experience a massive influx of new users as a protest from those who were not satisfied with the change in Twitter’s use policies that took place in the fall of that anus. Based on Blockchain technology and with decentralized servers, in reality, more than a social network, it is a group of nodes (Instances) that constitute the servers that host user data.
-Plurk: Born in 2008, it is the closest thing to Twitter itself. Here the publications instead of tweets are called “plurks” and their character limit is 360, there are also direct messages, group chats and emojis. Some features can be unlocked as the user acquires more karma based on your activity and interactions.
-Reddit: Tremendously popular in the United States, Reddit is segmented into thematic communities (subreddits) where users share information on a wide variety of topics. The publications receive votes from the rest of the users and can be ordered according to chronological criteria, by trends or by popularity, among others.
-Telegram: After the address «t.me» a forward slash gives way to the identifier of a Telegram group that allows the generation of thematic and dynamic communities (for example, t.me/TreceBits), accessible as separate forums through this instant messaging app that over time has evolved into its functions and utility.
-Tumblr: After some uneventful changes of ownership (from Yahoo to WordPress.com, owned by Automattic), this platform allows users to create content, replicate the content of others and follow other creators, being able to view the content (mostly graphic) in a mosaic format or as a temporary line.
-WT:Social: Jimmy Wales, creator of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, also created this platform that emerged from WikiTribune. In the spirit of WT:Social is to promote conversation and try to be the opposite of other social networks (such as Facebook or Twitter) in terms of respect between users. Like Wikipedia, it dispenses with advertising inserts and is maintained through donations, showing publications in a strictly chronological order. And, unlike what is (still) happening with Twitter, content can be edited here, as is the case with Wikipedia itself.
-Facebook: The social network par excellence, not in vain is it the one with the largest number of users (2,910 million monthly active users). Although recently, and for the first time in its history, it has lost users, it continues to be the priority space for many to get in touch with a virtual community.
-Club House: When Clubhouse was born two years ago, it became a real sensation by offering live voice chat through rooms in which an administrator managed the speaking turns. Its popularity was so great that different messaging platforms and social networks soon emulated this feature by adding it as a function to their own apps.
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