Monday 16 / September / 2024
Brasília: As of August 31, X, formerly Twitter, is down some 21.5 million users — at least on paper. In an escalation of a long dispute with X owner Elon Musk, Brazil's Supreme Court ordered the nationwide suspension of the social media platform.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes argued this was because Musk had failed to take sufficient action against the spread of hate speech and disinformation on the platform. Previously, the court had ordered Musk to block the accounts of particular users who were singled out for spreading false and misleading information, and to name a company representative for Brazil.
But Musk refused to comply, calling out efforts to "censor" political opponents. "The current Brazilian administration likes to wear the cloak of a free democracy, while crushing the people under its boot," he wrote on X after the Brazilian ban on his platform went into effect.
Before the shutdown, Brazil was the sixth-largest market for X, which according to Musk has around 600 million users per month. Now, individuals or companies in Brazil who circumvent the ban with virtual private networks, or VPNs, could face a daily fine of 50,000 reais ($8,900/ €8,007).
Many Brazilian users have already migrated to competing platforms — the decentralised platform Bluesky has seen a massive spike in popularity in Brazil since X was shut down.
Here are some of the most popular microblogging services currently online.
Bluesky
At first glance, Bluesky looks like a trimmed-down version of X — hardly surprising, considering it was launched by Jack Dorsey, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter. The social media platform has been publicly available since early 2024, after being invite-only for about a year.
Unlike X, Bluesky has a decentralised, federated design, meaning a network is able to run on many different sites instead of relying on a single one. This allows users to move their accounts from one provider to another, for example.
That includes exporting conversations and contacts, another major novelty Bluesky boasts compared to X. "Wherever you go, your friends and relationships will be there too," a Bluesky blog post explained.
Posts on Bluesky are limited to 300 characters, allowing them to be slightly longer than posts on X. The network also allows users to customise their own feeds and thereby select the algorithms that steer this content. This contrasts with standard black-box algorithms that automatically curate a users' feed without providing details on selection criteria.
Within days of X's ban in Brazil, Bluesky reported 2 million new users. That's a massive surge in popularity, especially considering it had 8.4 million users prior to this weekend's ruling.
Mastodon
Another popular decentralised network is Mastodon, created by German-Russian software developer Eugen Rochko. The platform consists of numerous independently run servers, or instances. Most servers target specific regions or topics of interest.
Anyone can set up their own server and lay out its rules of engagement. However, in order to be promoted by the Mastadon team, servers must agree to a basic set of rules, which include prohibiting hate speech, sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia.
Otherwise, Mastadon basically works like any other micro-blogging platform. Users can post toots, like X's posts, and other people can like, comment or share.
Mastadon is an open-source network, meaning that its source code is publicly available. The platform is almost exclusively financed by donations and is still fairly small, with just about a million active users per month.
Threads
Mark Zuckerberg is a household name in all things social media. The founder, chairman and CEO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, introduced his own response to X in 2023. Threads is also text-based and decentralised, and has functions that roughly mirror those of X.
But critics have said the service is overly reliant on Instagram. Users can keep the same username on both platforms, but can neither create nor delete a Threads account without first creating or deleting an account on Instagram. To make up for this, Threads users have hundreds of millions of connections between users at their disposal as soon as they sign up.
True to its parent company's legacy, Threads is also under fire for collecting sensitive personal data. In Europe, the service's launch was delayed by about half a year as regulators were unsure whether it complied with the EU's new digital market and digital service acts.
But that doesn't appear to have affected its popularity: As of August 2024, Threads boasts around 200 million active users worldwide.
Confusing market, countless providers
There are many other micro-blogging services not listed here, including Tumblr, Plurk and Identi.ca. And many social media services have also integrated micro-blogging functions on their platforms — just think of Google+, TikTok, LinkedIn or Telegram, whose founder and CEO Pavel Durov was recently charged with a wide range of alleged criminal activity on the app.
China has blocked many of these services and replaced them with similar micro-blogging platforms of its own. Weibo, akin to X, is one such global heavyweight with around 580 million active users — most of them Chinese — each month.
The Chinese government keeps a close eye on Weibo and in the past has blocked and deleted accounts because of what it deems as "harmful" content.
Even former US President Donald Trump has his own micro-blogging platform, which he announced after being banned from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter following his role in the 2021 attack on the US Capitol building. But Truth Social has not nearly enjoyed the success Trump promised: in 2023, the network cost Trump millions of dollars, and this year, it still only has about a million active users.
