Subscribe to discover Om’s fresh perspectives on the present and future.
Post(news) Script
Post.News, a Twitter-like news-first social network, is shutting down. It is not surprising. It lacked dynamism and excitement, even as an early adopter and a former media professional. Given the overwhelming emphasis they put on establishment media, I am not surprised. The last time I visited Post.News was to read founder Noah Bardin’s post. “Our service is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform,” he noted.
It is not just Post.News. Many Twitter-like social platforms such as Mastodon, Blue Sky, and Threads got out of the gates fast but eventually slowed down. When Threads launched, I pointed out, “The days of getting a social network to grow by importing an address book are gone — instead, it is about using, reusing, and using the social graph again to launch new products.”
Threads seems to be the only one with staying power because it is being bootstrapped by Instagram’s social graph. Of the lot, it would be interesting to see how much bigger it can get — it has 130 million users — and how much activity it can generate. But is it a full-time Twitter replacement? I don’t think so.
Trying to replace Twitter can only take you so far. You need to stand out and give people a reason to keep coming back. Something like AirChat is an exciting new way to socialize. Bottom line — social is going through its cable-like nichefication phase. The audience for each new flavor of Twitter-like (or any social) network is only so much.
Bardin decided it was time to cut his losses and move on!
April 22, 2024, San Francisco
4 thoughts on this post
Comments are closed.
The good news for the Mastodon crowd is that there aren’t any VCs to placate with a 10x exit, and it can keep going on in much the same way that RSS didn’t die for a lot of us after Google pulled the plug on Reader.
The Ghost newsletter platform’s (an open-source Substack competitor) announcement today that they’ll be supporting ActivityPub is another step back towards a “protocols, not platforms” world where users are free to bring the clients they like to consume and produce the content they’re interested in. (Much like the early days of the Twitter API or multi-protocol chat clients were popular in the early Aughts.)
I haven’t been this excited about social networks for the better part of a decade and a half.
We need to really internalize that all purpose one size networks are history. Now people need to find a way to survive and thrive in niches.
Forums! — great for hobbyists and professionals to coalesce around a topic
Lol, yes.