Elon Musk's disruption of the microblogging service once known as Twitter has triggered a huge shift in the broader social media landscape. Many users who spent years building their online presence through the platform feel alienated by Musk's changes to the app, including changing its name to X, and his various personal stances and statements.

This has left various solutions in attempts to fill the space that Twitter moved. However, none has done this particularly well; they are difficult to overcome while also being ingrained behavior. At present, the best way to keep abreast of events live as they occur is currently still through X.

And now the final question: what of the future of the sub-niche in social media?

Will it be that kind of service anew—more in the spirit of what Twitter was like a few years back? Or has the chance to have another microblogging service achieve critical mass finally passed into the realm of lost causes? Can X continue long enough to truly be Elon's "everything app," even if, say, ad revenue will be scarce at the end of the tunnel? Is Meta's Threads ready for that next billion-user gig that Zuck and Co. dream up?

Here are some of the big players in the evolving microblogging space.

X

The incumbent in the space, X remains the real-time social network to beat, especially, as noted, around live sports, TV show chatter, and, for better or worse, political debate.

While Elon's notorious changes within the platform have led many others away, so far from what has since happened there, most of these have ultimately failed to locate an appropriate alternative, finding themselves having to return back to it, while yet others inside more niche communities now ignore Musk's excesses on a dissociative level altogether, and carry on going about their own business quite normally in it.

In short, it is merely what they're used to, within their communities - which they developed over a period of time.

Essentially, Elon has changed the user experience enough to break the app but remains functionally serviceable in most respects.

Which means X has already beaten the odds, given that many had projected that the platform would collapse in on itself after Musk culled 80% of its staff.

Improbably enough, that hasn't been the case, and if anything, X arguably only grown more toxic in every way imaginable, save in the area of key content like sports discussion that helps keep its numbers healthy and well.
For example, X reports that Super Bowl talk was up 26% from last year. Of course, the Taylor Swift aspect would have certainly been a big part of this too, but still, X is the place to be for the biggest, most lively public group chat around major events.

Nothing has compared to it, and even as Musk is working on other ways of pushing X users towards paying to access the app, it is apparently still doing great, having more than 500 million monthly active users.

While that's just one issue, X is also struggling to find its way again in ad sales, following Elon's message to ad partners of where to go if they do not like him or his updates. X ad revenue is reportedly still down by around 50% from the pre-Musk period, and with increasing debt, X may still be heading out, even if it can hold onto its usage levels.

What becomes of X next?

Not a thing. Not that everything app plan. None of that.

Elon's greatest strength is in optimism, and in presenting large-scale future tech development, which he is able to keep as a focus, despite all logic and evidence suggesting that such goals will not be met.

Within this, his everything app plan, which he originally hatched in the early 2000's, is outdated, unviable, unworkable, and unwanted in many respects. It's hard to see Elon making payments and banking both foundational elements of a new X app, while doing so with far fewer resources also seems unrealistic.

In one respect, X has given up this fight already, as it settled on video content to start with, though the debut lineup of exclusive video content is hardly likely to bring a giant surge in use. Good signs: MrBeast posts on the app and Tucker Carlson's show gets tens of millions of views. Still, X's total user count has been at 500 million for a year now, and if it can't grow significantly, it's hard to see why ad partners would be overly keen to return to even their past spending levels, let alone give the platform more emphasis. Basically, X needs to get its ad business back on track. Subscriptions won't offset its losses, and while Elon remains hopeful that the platform will eventually grow its user base so significantly that it'll become too big to ignore, whether you agree with his stances or not, I don't see that happening either.

But X's opening is left open despite all these controversies, or precisely because of them to the extent. All things considered, many communities are pretty well rooted on X and are going to take stiff incentives to get them moving at all.

That's going to give Elon time, though a cash squeeze is in the offing that's likely to supplant everything else.

Threads

The most probable of the X competitors, Threads has continued with its gradual growth as the alternative of Musk's application, where many Twitter outcasts now plant their flags in trying to rebuild in-app communities.

Though resistance to its transformation into an exact replica of Twitter seems to be quite evident and most notably done through not adopting real-time trends and related discoveries.

Threads has repeatedly said it won't add chronological Search tools, even though it already has a working model of such, while it's also now looking to demote political constant entirely, in favor of more light, positive posts.

As such, it is not really a Twitter alternative at all but more of an add-on app to the other tools Meta offers. Which could be enough and could still see strong adoption. Though it's also worth noting that Threads' overall growth hasn't been as significant as the raw numbers might suggest.

Last October, Zuckerberg said Threads was getting close to 100 million active users just three months after launch. That is pretty impressive, although the appetite for a Twitter alternative, along with cross-promotion through IG, certainly helped inflate those early figures.

Which brings us to Meta's news: This month the company said the app now has 130 million monthly actives, implying that Threads is growing at about 10 million news users per month on average.
Which is pretty good and would be a stronger growth rate than most other social apps.

But Threads was also released within the same time in the EU. When you put into account the users active on IG that would similarly sign up for Threads too, using this figure, 30 million users really is not so extraordinary when one takes into consideration and tries to interpret whether the figures indicated or implied meteoric growth. On balance, Threads might actually be struggling to get much traction, and as it refuses to align with more common X usage behaviors, it's getting harder to see how the app will maintain its growth.

Also, as noted, X usage seems not to have been impacted in any significant way as a result of Threads.

That is, in brief, the most viable among the bunch: a Twitter alternative that is still far away from becoming an alternative for real.

Which, in turn, is something that Meta repeatedly says it doesn't want it to become.

Bluesky

Next in line is likely Bluesky, the decentralized social platform originally formulated by Jack Dorsey, whose wide-eyed optimism matches Elon's and often fails to deliver in just the same way.

Opened the platform up to the public last week, and that did help create a big sign-up surge, so it is now around 4.6 million users. This is also showing the value of its algorithmic control options, one of several control options within the app, and alternatives like this really could help drive more take-up and make it a much more viable consideration.

But 4.6 million users is still minuscule in comparison to the majors, and so far, Bluesky hasn't delivered on the promise of a plausible Twitter alternative in terms of actual engagement around big events.

Almost assuredly, most users are going to be drawn in toward the crowd, and to where they can participate with key discussions, and Bluesky may offer some advantage in niches here; however, it's miles away from being a sensible consideration in the microblog race.

Mastodon

It's the same, though, on Mastodon, which is still simply too small, and a bit too niche, in order to appeal to many people.

But no evidence that the push of decentralized platforms will ever appeal to a critical mass for either.

Perhaps decentralization will eventually matter, at a 2 million-user threshold. But at that, with a hard-to-navigate UI, Mastodon doesn't look quite big enough to grow into any kind of viable alternative for Twitter.

Post, T2, Spill

In contrast, the other contestants reach even fewer members of the audience, and they each fight to keep activity and interest levels up.

T2, the company started by former Twitter employees, shut down last November after it didn't grow enough. And even though Post and Spill are still low on usage, they continue to build up their appeal in certain niche communities.

The question for all of these apps now is time, and how long they can continue to run, without burning through their available cash. Each platform has a level of investment to keep them moving, but as that well dries up, they'll all be forced to re-assess their operations, and whether they can remain viable moving forward.

Hopes remain that a real Twitter alternative will emerge from this cluster of challenger apps, but right now it is Meta that holds the cards as the best secondary prospect. And even its hand is not as strong as it may have looked at first.

Essentially, X is still an important service for hundreds of millions of users, and engagement outside the U.S., where Elon's political views probably aren't as much of a focus, remains robust, helping to prop up its business.

It means that each of the platforms is facing enormous challenges for the future regarding how to further accelerate growth, but for now, it at least seems that X will be the major real-time discussion app, whether one likes it or not.

And unless Meta can figure out a way to shift some of the most embedded X communities, it is difficult to see Threads as a significant threat.

Although it is then again, maybe it's just a matter of time until Elon pushes more of them away through his changes or comments or until X falls apart because of lack of ad dollars.