Where do we go from Twitter?

“Wasn’t Twitter supposed to die now by now or something…” quipped Elon Musk.

He was responding to conjecture from critics that the site would soon begin breaking down after laying off roughly half of the company (and counting). And also to the celebrities and regular folk who have threatened to leave the platform.

But according to Elon, everything is going great, with Twitter usage at an all-time high. Whether Twitter’s surge will survive when the World Cup is over remains to be seen. Some of us will stick around because we just love the platform. Others will too, just to see what happens next.

The buzziest competitor: There’s no doubt that people are looking around for a Twitter alternative. Mastodon has been one of the headlining alternatives (yes, I know mastodons actually pre-date the woolly mammoth, don’t @ me). Nearly 180,000 people joined Mastodon in a single day last week. People like it because it's decentralized and open-source, but plenty of new adopters have said online that the learning curve was large.

The old guy: Legacy social platforms want in on the traffic too. Tumblr’s worldwide downloads have surged 77% since Twitter’s acquisition. Matt Mullenweg has been positioning Tumblr to "be a better Twitter than Twitter ever was.” This week he revealed via Twitter that Tumblr is adding support for the ActivityPub protocol that powers Mastodon.

The newcomers: Right now, it feels like social media has become more chaotic than anyone could have predicted. If that continues, perhaps it’s anyone’s game, so let’s recap new players.

Btw, Elon might not actually care what you do anyway.