To make sure, the dream of a decentralized Twitter-like service has been round for years. Historical past is suffering from failed makes an attempt—most notably App.web and Identi.ca. An actual competitor by no means broke out as a result of not sufficient folks had a powerful cause to go away Twitter, or a spot to go in the event that they did. Now they’ve each.

Based on Similarweb, X’s visitors is down by almost 20%, yr over yr. One other examine, by Apptopia, discovered that the variety of every day energetic customers went from 141 million to 120 million. In the meantime, decentralized companies like Mastodon, Bluesky, and a few Nostr purchasers have surged in reputation.

However it’s Threads, from Meta, that’s been the massive winner. Meta disclosed in September that Threads already had almost 100 million month-to-month customers. (As of press time, Threads has not but applied ActivityPub, but it surely guarantees to take action.) Nerd favourite Mastodon is a distant second at 1.5 million energetic customers however is rising, whereas the nonetheless invite-only Bluesky, which runs on the AT Protocol, is at 2 million. 

And naturally, the true Twitter killer? That’s Elon Musk.