That’s why Twitter alternative Pebble is giving up

Elon Musk’s online platform X (formerly Twitter) has one challenger less. The Pebble service, initially known as T2, will be shut down on November 1.

Co-founder and boss Gabor Scelle wrote on Tuesday (local time) that they were not growing fast enough to convince investors. The fact that so many Twitter alternatives emerged also made the situation more difficult.

The technology blog ‘TechCrunch’ reported that the social media platform founded by former Twitter employees Sarah Oh and Gabor Cselle had a peak of 3,000 daily active users – and 20,000 registered users in total. After T2 recently rebranded as Pebble, the number of daily users dropped to 1,000.

After a shift to the right on Twitter

After technology billionaire Musk took over Twitter, various platforms are trying to become the new home for dissatisfied users of the best-known short-messaging service. Musk, who himself represents political views of the American right, has lifted several restrictions on speech on the platform.

Online researchers such as the CCDH organization criticized that a large proportion of racist and anti-Semitic messages remained online on X even when they were reported. X rejected this and took CCDH to court because the organization misused third-party access data for its research.

Various alternatives

The best known among the Twitter alternatives are the decentralized Mastodon and the Bluesky service. However, Bluesky only recently crossed the one million user mark and is therefore significantly smaller than X.

The Facebook company Meta launched an alternative app called Threads this summer. It reached 100 million registrations almost immediately, but user interest quickly waned. Furthermore, Threads is still not available in the European Union. And the app associated with Instagram can’t keep up with the speed of X and Twitter with software-selected posts in the user’s timeline.

(dsc/sda/dpa)