ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS: TWITTER, THREADS, MASTODON?

This article was featured on Duke University’s Career Hub website. Click here to view it there.

I originally wrote this article on and posted it to LinkedIn. If you would like to view it there, please click here.

A New Challenger Approaches

If you haven’t seen the words of Zuckerberg himself, you may have read it in the news: Meta’s new microblogging social network platform, Threads, clocked 10 million sign-ups in its first 7 hours. With some social media personalities having over 10 million followers alone, this number may not seem all that impressive. However, what truly stands out about that statistic is not the number of sign-ups, but the time period in which it was done—just seven hours. Zuckerberg, or as he goes by on Threads, "zuck", is on a mission to take down Elon and Twitter, not just potentially inside the literal ring but evidently outside the ring as well. The infantile momentum seems to be there, but can Threads truly provide disgruntled Twitter and Instagram users what they want? Who else is in this short-form, multimedia platform game that could stand in Meta and Threads’ way?

The Vision for Threads

According to the July 5, 2023, press release from Meta, Threads was built by the Instagram team with the intention of providing a distinct space to facilitate conversations and updates. The primary medium is text—of which, users are limited to 500 characters, but users can also, " . . .include links, photos, and videos up to 5 minutes in length.", making this a multimedia platform much like Twitter or Tumblr. And as the name suggests, these multimedia posts, occur in threads: ones you have created or existing ones you choose to see and interact with. Perhaps the most exciting news about Threads is the team’s plans to make the app compatible with ActivityPub, an open social networking protocol. This protocol, in short, will allow Threads to be "interoperable" with other platforms utilizing the ActivityPub protocol, creating a social network landscape where users can interact on and across platforms as they wish. A similar, but older platform, Mastodon, was built upon this idea of a decentralized social network and already supports ActivityPub. This leads us to question: Why would a user not choose Mastodon over Threads or Twitter? Does Mastodon have the potential to be the preference over Threads or Twitter?

Mastodon: An Early, Decentralized Competitor

Mastodon, originally released in 2016, is an open-source software that allows for the creation of decentralized social networks. Here, "social networks" is plural because users have the ability to create and join different Mastodon servers—or social networks, each with its own set of privacy policies, terms of service, etc. Like where Threads hopes to reach, there exists interoperability between Mastodon instances and any other servers operating under the same federated universe of servers (known as the 'fediverse') using the ActivityHub protocol. Along with being able to choose which Mastodon server you're a part of, users can also choose different third-party clients to access these servers. The combination of existing support for fediverse protocols, the ability to choose your social networks, and the option to personalize your user experience through the choice of clients makes for an attractive but potentially overwhelming offering. One starts to see how Mastodon users surged in late 2022 when Elon Musk acquired Twitter.

The Influence of Twitter’s Acquisition by Elon Musk

Elon Musk has been busy since his acquisition of Twitter, looking at a timeline compiled by Yahoo! Finance: a restructuring of the C-suite and Board of Directors, introduction of subscription models, layoffs, and reversing bans on controversial figures--all in 2022 alone. This move has not been without pushback from users in the form of less or targeted, negative content--reports the Pew Research Center, as well as from employees, in the form of resignations. These changes resulted in many disgruntled users of Twitter flocking to Mastodon servers following Musk’s acquisition, leading to a nearly 2 million increase in users according to 2022 statistics from the Mastodon API pulled by WIRED.

Evaluating the Current Landscape

As we are now halfway through 2023, Mastodon’s surge has certainly cooled off, losing around 1 million active users from just December 2022 to February 2023. Some returned to previous platforms, finding Mastodon and others too difficult to configure or not active enough for them. That doesn’t mean Mastodon or other existing, decentralized social network platforms are out of the game yet.

The Rise and Fall . . . and Rise Again?

In a July 3, 2023 toot (Mastodon’s version of a tweet) from Mastodon creator, Eugen Rochko, Mastodon has seen an exponential resurgence in activity, with active users rising by 294k. Around the same time of the toot, Cryptopolitan reported a total active user count of 324k for Mastodon. This suggests that Mastodon lost much of the growth it saw following Musk’s acquisition, but it also demonstrates the platform's potential to generate steam. Furthermore, the recently updated UI, now more similar to Twitter, exhibits a commitment to lowering the barrier of entry for new users and streamlining the UX for everybody. Mastodon’s improvements coupled with the rapid success and mixed-reviews of Threads may prompt even more users to give Mastodon a try or to revisit it.

The Ultimate Showdown

The way I see things now, it seems like we have a game of rock, paper, scissors on our hands when it comes to microblogging social network platforms: Twitter, Threads, and Mastodon. The right platform is going to depend on the user’s history with previous platforms, their desire for decentralization, and willingness to experiment.

Twitter’s competitive advantages lie in its sizable user base, familiar UI, long-standing history as the de facto microblogging platform, and notably, its distinctive culture. This culture, characterized by its real-time discussions, trending topics, and unique balance of professional and informal interactions, sets Twitter apart from other microblogging platforms like Reddit or Tumblr. Threads, leveraging ethos as a Meta—specifically Instagram— product, offers a sleek UI and the inherent backing of an established platform, with a culture that is yet to be shaped and understood. Mastodon, on the other hand, appeals to those who value decentralization and user control inherent to its architecture. Depending on the person and use case, these advantages may be disadvantages. For example, Twitter's size might be an advantage for someone looking for a broad audience, but a disadvantage for someone seeking a more intimate, controlled network.

Final Thoughts

With the growing shift towards decentralized networks and interoperability, choosing a microblogging platform could become as casual as a game of rock, paper, scissors . . . or perhaps rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock? We cannot say for certain what the future landscape will look like, but it's evident that things could get interesting.