Twitter clones, ranked: Who’s worth the commitment?

polygon.com:

With Twitter in a constant state of flux since Elon Musk’s takeover, several other social media apps have emerged to vie for our attention and our precious personal data. Chief among these is Threads — which Meta released on Wednesday — and which is now the current frontrunner for Twitter’s heir apparent. But it’s also far from the only “Twitter killer” that has entered the scene in the last few months.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but looking over the list of Twitter’s competitors makes me feel like a newly single person getting way too many thirsty texts from numbers I don’t recognize. There are a hell of a lot of options out there — I just want to find the one that makes me feel safe, makes me laugh, but also challenges me, like in a healthy way… all the stuff you look for in a social media website.

In this list, I’ve left out the video-focused apps (e.g., TikTok, YouTube) and the apps that are super different from Twitter (e.g., Pinterest, LinkedIn), focusing instead on apps that attempt to do what Twitter did best: a text-forward feed with breaking news and shitposts side by side.

I just don’t know if any of these are “the one.” Let’s try to figure it out, shall we?

If you have an Instagram account, you’re halfway into bed with Threads, Meta’s Twitter competitor. This is a real “Hotel California” situation, though, because once you make a profile on Threads, you can’t delete it without also deleting its associated Instagram page. The app already has 30 million profiles, but who knows how many of those people thought they were just navigating to a new Instagram feature?

The appeal: Your friends (from Instagram) are already on there, probably — even if it’s too soon to say whether they’ll stick around. (It’s