Search still on for alternatives to Musk-owned Twitter

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter in October, users irked by the platform's new regime have vowed to move their online presence elsewhere, though this has proved harder than some had banked on.

Here is a list of some of the contenders to dethrone Twitter as the go-to website for the media, officials and celebrities.

Bluesky was created by Twitter's co-founder Jack Dorsey and is now the talk of Silicon Valley, leaving those in the know scrambling to secure an invite to join the app that is still at the testing phase.

The platform looks and feels like Twitter as its backers want users from the Elon Musk-owned site to feel at home, though posts on the app are referred to as "skeets", not tweets.

Bluesky was actually created as a Twitter side project in 2019 as a way to think about a decentralized version of the platform where users - and not the company - are more in control of personal data and content moderation.

Unknown to the general public, Mastodon saw its popularity explode when Musk took over Twitter, though still way off Twitter's roughly 200 million monthly years.

According to Wired magazine, Mastodon's active monthly user count dropped to 1.4 million in late January from a high of 2.5 million in late November and December, in the immediate aftermath of Musk's Twitter buyout.

That's when, in a pique of frustration, Musk suspended users who posted their Mastodon handles, but later backed down.

Created in 2016 by the German developer Eugen Rochko, the site is also a decentralized social network without advertising where preserving privacy is sacrosanct.

In practice, Mastodon like Twitter is based on postings of small messages, but each new user must sign up to an independently-run server and there are thousands of them. In