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Spoutible, another Twitter alternative, launched today

PaulLFC

PaulLFC

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,188
Since Twitter got taken over and run into the ground by Musk, there have been a few attempts to launch an alternative to it.

Another one launched today - Spoutible, founded by Christopher Bouzy's company Bot Sentinel.

It apparently uses Bot Sentinel's tech to attempt to reduce harassment and combat disinformation. It has some settings that seem like they could help - every account has a "bot rating", you can set it to an account has to have been created over X days ago to interact with you, or disallow accounts with a high "bot rating" from seeing or replying to your posts. Your also have the standard block, private profile, approved followers only, and controlling who can reply to your posts.

In general the interface seems to be the closest to Twitter out of the competitors I've tried so far. There's no app at the moment, so it's mobile site or desktop only for now. Also no video uploads, and no lists as far as I can see.

The site seems to be getting a lot of traffic at the moment, but looks like it's back up and running for now, albeit slowly. You might want to claim your username. Somehow I was early enough to get just my first name!

Feel free to follow me: https://spoutible.com/paul

Post your usernames too if you do join, I'm looking for more people to follow!
 
Coolduderedux

Coolduderedux

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,555
I was all in on Hive when it was announced and it seems like gaming Twitter was headed that way too, but it turns out they never left Twitter. All these alternatives are nice and all but if the community you follow isn't there, it's not going to work.
 
OP
OP
PaulLFC

PaulLFC

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,188
Whoops, didn't realise it was still limited sign up at the moment, I thought this was the full launch. Sorry everyone.
 
Listai

Listai

50¢ - "This guy are sick"
Member
Oct 27, 2017
5,745
Freezasaurus said:
Bruh I'm not joining 75 social networks. If Twitter dies, it dies.
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Yeah, if there was a viable alternative when Musk took over it probably would have gained a bit of traction by now but they're either undercooked or are some programmer's wet dream that is pretty much inscrutable to everyone else.
 
Poyunch

Poyunch

The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
2,422
I never got the invite to register even though I preregistered but I was still able to make an account using the email I used to reserve. So it worked out, I guess.
 
Psamtik

Psamtik

Member
Oct 27, 2017
6,994
Just using Twitter less often has done wonders for my mental health. Makes me think that drifting away from social media altogether might be the smart choice.
 
Magneto

Magneto

Prophet of Truth
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
14,449
Nah we good, thanks tho'. Don't expect people to go all in on something that has been active for... 24 hours ?

At this point just let Twitter die, and then try to see what's up, rather than hyping competitor n°82
 
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Nax

Nax

Hero of Bowerstone
Member
Oct 10, 2018
6,742
Coolduderedux said:
I was all in on Hive when it was announced and it seems like gaming Twitter was headed that way too, but it turns out they never left Twitter. All these alternatives are nice and all but if the community you follow isn't there, it's not going to work.
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It's been a very odd phenomenon. I never used Twitter (besides Wario64), so didn't have anything to move on from. But it seems to take so much more effort to influence change now. Twitter is certainly a habit for a lot of people.
 
MykonosFan

MykonosFan

Member
Oct 25, 2017
844
Coolduderedux said:
I was all in on Hive when it was announced and it seems like gaming Twitter was headed that way too, but it turns out they never left Twitter. All these alternatives are nice and all but if the community you follow isn't there, it's not going to work.
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I was so ready to hop over, but yeah. My Hive feed is zilch already. A few people I followed keep posting on cohost, which is nice, but I can't help but think the next big social media isn't going to be an intentional expy of an existing one. Having now clicked into spoutible after typing that...yeah...hopefully it goes well for the folk running it and those trying it out, though.
 
super-famicom

super-famicom

Avenger
Oct 26, 2017
25,552
Nax said:
It's been a very odd phenomenon. I never used Twitter (besides Wario64), so didn't have anything to move on from. But it seems to take so much more effort to influence change now. Twitter is certainly a habit for a lot of people.
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Are you aware of Wario 64's Discord channel? He pretty much posts the same deals as on Twitter. If you wanted to get off Twitter completely, you can just join his channel.
 
Connope

Connope

Member
Mar 6, 2022
1,536
This "looks" like the best one so far to me from a quick browse of some profiles (can't access the actual feed!). It looks nice and intuitive. But yeah, same problem as them all. No point without the people.
 
beat

beat

Member
Oct 28, 2017
2,802
Even Mastodon's growing pains last November were nothing compared to how badly the Spoutible servers have been performing. Post has managed to just work too. I'm really bummed how badly Spoutible is performing right now and I can only imagine opening up to the general public on Feb 6 will be at least as bad.
 
two_headed_boy

two_headed_boy

Member
Jun 6, 2020
721
If Twitter dies, great. But not if there's another one to take it's place. Social media in general is the problem.
 
Dracil

Dracil

Member
Oct 30, 2017
2,451
beat said:
Even Mastodon's growing pains last November were nothing compared to how badly the Spoutible servers have been performing. Post has managed to just work too. I'm really bummed how badly Spoutible is performing right now and I can only imagine opening up to the general public on Feb 6 will be at least as bad.
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To be fair, I think Post worked because of how slowly they let people in from their waitlist. Spoutible opened the floodgates for everyone who pre-regged.

I got a ton of random followers on Spoutible, which is kinda weird, since I just made one kinda nothing post.

As far as social media goes, most of my IRL people are on Discord. Some are on Mastodon. Rando news people/orgs are on Post and Mastodon.

Discord/Reddit fill in for random communities of people I don't care about but care about news on the interests.
 
msdstc

msdstc

Banned
Nov 6, 2017
6,925
Yeah unfortunately Twitter is here to stay. I unfortunately bought into the the hype on here and other places that it would quickly crash and burn but it's not going anywhere. It sucks because it's an absolute shit show now with the recommended tweets and stuff I'm seeing. It's all antivax, maga stuff and I don't follow a single person who is into that stuff at all.
 
Dodongo

Dodongo

Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,494
Doesn't matter if Twitter is run by someone who caters to white nationalists. People have already retreated into learned helplessness.

They'll just say something like "the name is dumb", and continue using Twitter with zero effort to explore alternatives.
 
Servbot24

Servbot24

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
43,539
I think I'm just over this format of social media. I need something more than teenagers writing random 10-word thoughts they spent 10 seconds thinking through.
 
Cerulean_skylark

Cerulean_skylark

Attempted to circumvent ban with alt account.
Banned
Oct 31, 2017
6,408
The entire hypothetical migration to another platform is peak collective action problem.

I assume eventually Twitter will just fade away as companies struggle with daily policy and pricing changes and eventually maybe people slowly migrate to another platform. But it's a long-game and not the miracle single day solution people want.
 
Embiid

Embiid

Member
Feb 20, 2021
6,227
Feels like there was a small window of opportunity there where a competitor could've made a dent but that ship has since sailed. The only way another viable option gets really popular is if Twitter shuts down. Musk is losing billions on interest so that's not totally outta the realm of possibility but it's unlikely.
 
OrangeNova

OrangeNova

Member
Oct 30, 2017
12,851
Canada
I was ready for Hive, but that 2 week downtime to fix the security issues(Valid and needed), really killed that hype train.

I would like something twitter like without the obstacles that mastodon has(and please do not tell me it's easy, it's not, and I've heard it a million times already.)... But until one really just shows up with what Twitter can do or what twitter did before muskrat, then I'm probably just drifting away entirely.
 
Alent

Alent

"This guy are sick"
Member
Oct 28, 2017
2,800
I want Spoutable to do well as it seems to be the closest alternative. I might actually join it sometime. I never got into Hive, Post, Cohost etc. I just went back to Insta (🤢) and continued using tumblr for my art posting needs.
 
Dabanton

Dabanton

Member
Oct 27, 2017
4,989
Yeah other alternatives are at this point not even viable for most people.

On some level I think a lot of people love the normalized 'toxicity' of places like Twitter they get to stay in their bubbles and also 'compete' against others who don't share their opinions and clash occasionally.
 
The Albatross

The Albatross

Member
Oct 25, 2017
39,483
I don't know if the clones are going to gain ground. If I go to a site and it looks like Twitter for the most part but has 1/1,000,000 the activity, then I'm not very likely to use it much. I like what Post is doing because it's trying to do something different than Twitter, while appealing to a lot of the types of users that like Twitter for contemporary commentary/news. Still, I use post about 1/10th of the time I'd use twitter, even while I've felt like twitter has gotten worse in the last 3 months.

I'm monitoring T2 (A twitter alternative founded by some former Google engineers with some good engineering talent) but I think the ship has sailed. If they weren't ready for action in the first month of Elon's takeover at Twitter it's tough to gain ground, and T2 isn't close. Following one of the founders on Twitter it's just very obvious that they don't have their shit together and they're focusing entirely on the wrong stuff.

abby autopsy said:
Do they allow NSFW? Or is this another anti sex worker platform?
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For startups, I don't think it's really around being anti-sex work, but rather the liability and cost of launching a platform on day one that doesn't restrict NSFW content, while not having any automated moderation or workforce to filter content. If you're a Twitter alternative trying to raise funding, and there's even a rumor of illegal content/abuse content on your network, you're dead, and automated filtering is difficult to develop for an MVP when you have a really small development team.
 
Jill Sandwich

Jill Sandwich

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,963
Im fully on Masto now, pretty much all of Apple twitter has switched, and Stephen Fry is on there, which is nice. There was a lull after the great migration, but it's growing again now, and with better clients like Tapbots Ivory, switching from the birdsite got easier.
 
chrominance

chrominance

Sky Van Gogh
Member
Oct 25, 2017
14,041
None of these alternatives are going to seem viable until suddenly one or two of them seem viable, whether it's because Twitter has finally degraded below your minimum standards or because one of the other places has enough appeal for you to switch. That line is going to be different for everyone and short of a cataclysmic failure on the Twitter side, it was always going to be like this. As long as Twitter's bleeding out I'm not worried.

As for Spoutible, uh, it's going to have to actually work first before I can possibly assess it. Servers seem extremely dead right now, assuming signups have even opened properly yet.
 
beat

beat

Member
Oct 28, 2017
2,802
Twitter:
* constantly breaking
* new features generally make the whole thing worse, sometimes in new and exciting ways
* but it's where terminally online people go, still
* killing the free API and third party clients is a terrible idea with a lot of bad consequences but one goal here is probably to wall up and make it harder for users to leave.
* the suggested pricing for the new basic tier API makes no business sense. The suggested pricing for Twitter gold (verified status for businesses) is unlikely to bring in the level of revenue that Elon needs.
* there are so many shoes waiting to drop (debt servicing, rent, EU labor laws protecting the people he fired over there, EU's Digital Services Act, FTC consent decree) that it's almost impossible to think they survive in the long run.

Mastodon:
* federated system limits visibility into what's going on in other instances outside of who you specifically follow and hashtags, but longtime Twitter users don't really run on hashtags that much. (I've seen some political stuff on Twitter like #tcot or Canadian politics hashtags, but it's just not how Twitter works.)
* to be fair, federation does mean it'll be practically impossible for someone to just take over the system or even a major instance the way Elon bought Twitter.
* lots more engagement than anywhere else besides Twitter
* established Mastodon culture has developed as a response to things they didn't like on Twitter, but this has been alienating to newer refugees fleeing Twitter who basically want Twitter-without-Elon.
* has apps, both first party and third party

Spoutible:
* non-federated
* Bouzy seems like a bit of a hothead, but OTOH lunatics hate him and right now I don't have the bandwidth to evaluate this.
* the service was kind of a dead zone right now even in the last few days before the servers collapsed.
* servers are overwhelmed a lot, which hurts engagement and is worrying considering this is just with the pre-reg cohort of 200K users.
* the BotSentinel indicators that a user is genuine and not from a troll farm or whatever are off-putting ("Normal 0%" is the default label and it's 100% confusing.)
* proposal to give verified status to people with (real, not Blue) Twitter verified or IG verified status is a genuine cutthroat move to steal users from Twitter and I approve.
* no app yet

Hive: (this one I haven't used, so this is just my view from outside)
* admirable spirit, but not remotely staffed enough to scale up
* still no website; app only.

Post:
* very corporate
* replies are comment threads, not first-class posts of their own. (So you can't natively re-post or quote-post a comment)
* fairly active, though
* no app, website only. Probably will never have an app because their business model can't afford to pay app store cuts.

T2:
* still in development, dark horse

Honestly, no clone was ready for prime time when Elon first started causing chaos from the last week of October. The plan now should be to build up a parallel system that can accommodate a move when enough users lose trust in Twitter. The same thing happened with Facebook, which chugged along for a few years before suddenly stealing all of MySpace's users one year. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the non-Mastodon competitors try to merge at some point to accelerate getting to critical mass.

I'm also a little surprised none of these clones have offered to let you upload your Twitter archive and duplicate your old posts on their service.
 
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