New Delhi: Most of the people are compelled to get irritated with the current Twitter scenario. Some people are considering to get rid of this App tantrum and find another alternative to twitter. This is after the Elon Musk, who now owns twitter, announced charge of $8 (Rs 651.41) for verified accounts.

Twitter Alternatives

Here’s a look at some of the top alternatives so far.

Mastodon

Everyone is talking about the Mastodon, and it is the first pioneer among people who fly cooperatively. At the time of writing, the number of people who have signed up to Mastodon this week has surpassed 230,000, bringing the total number of accounts to nearly 5.9 million.

The platform has been around for six years and is definitely aimed at someone who is already tech savvy. The first hurdle you face is trying to figure out how to sign up. It’s a decentralized open source platform, which means you don’t have to join one company on one platform – you have to join an established group hosted by an organization or individual on their server.

“It’s a public square,” Mastodon tweeted this week. “It is a global decentralized social network. Your server is where your account is hosted, communication is global.”

Once you’ve chosen your server, or “home room” as I’ve come to understand it, you can create a profile, upload photos and videos, and post “toots”—Mastodon’s version of tweets—messages of up to 500 characters. It’s best to use hashtags so other people can find your “toots” and you’ll see it all unfold on a Twitter-like timeline.

To join, go to joinmastodon.org/ on your desktop and click the Servers link at the top of the page to find out which group to join.

You can choose your “homeroom server” by theme or language, or use a general server like mastodon.social, which has a larger user base to begin with. While you’re there, you might want to use a site like Twitodon to regroup with all your Twitter friends on the new platform.

Tumblr

You might already be familiar with Tumblr – it’s been around since 2007 and is easy to use, beautifully designed, and you might find that a lot of your contacts are already there.

Instead of tweets, you make microblog-like posts that can be text, images, audio, video, DM-like chats, or quotes. It offers more variety than Twitter and feels like a design space, while still remaining intuitive, easy to set up and easy to use.

Like Facebook and others, you have the ability to follow and be followed, like, comment and repost. You can also choose the areas of interest that will show up the most in your feeds, including art, pets, technology, parenting, news, cooking and many more.

Hanging out on Tumblr for a few hours this week made me wonder why it never really took off. It’s only a year younger than Twitter and at one point was valued at more than a billion dollars. The point? Yahoo! bought it for 1.1 billion in 2013. By 2019 and another owner of the company later (Verizon) sold it in a sale for 3 million dollars. Here is a good write-up of her troubled past as well as her promising future.
Tumblr is free, but you can pay $5 a month to get rid of ads on the site.

uSync

If you’re missing a kinder, gentler way to stay in touch with your friends, family, colleagues, or people you went to high school with, try uSync ($3.99). It quietly came out of beta a few weeks ago and is available in the app (iOS, Android) or from your desktop.

You can post long blog-style content with text, video, and photos in the “Story” area, or post shorter “doodles” that are limited to 275 characters by trial and error. In addition, you can also create events, search for specific crowds of people who share an interest, share music, entertainment and even manage your calendar.

The first difference from other social media that you will notice right away is that you have to pay for it. CEO Darrell Lynn told me it’s just one way to avoid the mess Twiiter is in now, both with advertisers and new subscription fees.

As a social media startup, uSync shows a lot of promise, but it’s still new and still frustrating. Several times I had questions about specific features that he didn’t answer on board, as well as the FAQ pages, like how to import contacts or delete a post.

Bluesky 

The company said a few weeks ago in mid-October that the app would launch soon with 30,000 people signed up to its waiting list. That number is sure to be much higher now that I and hundreds of other people added our names to that list last week.

What we know so far about Bluesky is that it started as a non-profit Twitter initiative in 2019 and promises to give users control over their own data and algorithms.

The company also said it will allow people to retain ownership of their published content and move their posts across different social networks. The company is still inviting people to sign up and try the app in beta before it launches to the public.