Because it doesn't solve a problem? That isn't just snark, but a real aspect of competing with an existing product. To compete, you need to be able to solve the same problem in a better way. Twitter didn't really grow from being a solution to anything - it grew from being unique at the dawn of social media. So it is kind of its own thing.
> why isn't there a straightforward competitor to twitter?<p>Network effects are very difficult to build and retain and take years to grow if you are starting from scratch and 95% of these competitors found this out the hard way. (Post.news, T2, Spill, Hive all failed)<p>Threads remains the most serious and viable alternative to X (They didn't start from scratch and used Instagram's network to onboard hundreds of millions).<p>Bluesky was seen as a similar alternative bringing back the old Twitter feel and millions of Brazilians chose Bluesky over the others. [0].<p>Other than those two, the rest are just too small to be taken seriously and have shutdown or have not grown in daily active users and have around <1M users using it daily.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/04/social-media-platform-bluesky-attracts-millions-in-brazil-after-judge-bans-musks-x-.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/04/social-media-platform-bluesk...</a>
Competitor as in what? What value add would a competitor have? What qualifies as a twitter competitor? There can be no straightforward competitor because it's not straightforward.<p>Allowing opinions that were at one time censored, that's Gab. Allowing one particular individual that was banned on twitter that a lot of people want to know what he is saying, that's Truth Social. Of course those aren't really considerations anymore...<p>Does it have to be a company that runs the server and builds the experience and the client? I doubt you'll find a decent one. There are, however, <i>protocols</i>, and if you think about it, twitter works better as a protocol than as an app.<p>Independent communities that can block each other? Instead of one CEO, would you like to be at the mercy of many? Mastodon is what you want.<p>Are you interested in a censorship resistant protocol where you don't really have anyone who can tell you what to do? Nostr.<p>Do we want to mention bluesky?<p>I'm personally partial to nostr, to me it's the only thing that isn't worse than twitter in some deal breaking way.
T2 did a long post-mortem on their company (ultimately failed) <a href="https://medium.com/gabor/from-t2-to-pebble-the-rise-challenges-and-lessons-of-building-a-twitter-alternative-553652f1d1e7" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/gabor/from-t2-to-pebble-the-rise-challeng...</a>
Seems that this is mostly hard because of the classical network effect and resulting monopoly.<p>The hard thing is not distribution of short text messages on the web, or even UI for that matter, it's the acquired ubiquituous adoption in news coverage and public discussion.
Nothing is going to be a 1:1 replacement because that's boring, but the unique thing about Twitter was/is that it's a place where just about every person and organization of note has an account, from your favorite niche author to your local government to A-list celebs.<p>By that metric, Threads is now a serious competitor. I don't like it, but it's the alternative that a ton of people have chosen.
I mean, Mastodon has over ten million users. That isn't Twitter scale but it isn't nothing. And 200 million people are using Threads. And Bluesky... also exists.<p>The competition is there. You have to get past the premise that a platform has to completely subsume Twitter in every metric to be a valid alternative. I feel like we're moving past the paradigm of the web centralizing around a few big silos anyway. A lot of people are moving to closed Discord communities for instance.