Since Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, the Company has been experiencing a mass exodus - of employees, managers, and users. #RIPTwitter became a trending hashtag worldwide as users and staffers began posting their goodbyes in the face of the Company's unknown future.
Many are jumping ship amid the chaos and switching to Hive Social, an alternative Gen Z-focused social media platform that combines elements of both Instagram, and Twitter. It was launched in 2019 by 22-year old Kassandra Pop who is a self-taught coder. Hive is run by Kassandra herself along with two other developers. Many have cautioned that Hive's inexperienced team, lack of security and 2FA, as well as vague privacy policy terms are reasons to be wary.
Elon Musk has unintentionally catapulted Hive's popularity with his actions which have alienated employees and users alike. The app gained more than 250,000 users overnight and now boasts more than 2 million users in total. Why is it that users have flocked specifically to Hive and not to any other platform?
According to TechCrunch, "Hive may feel more comfortable to former Twitter users looking for a new home because the app has a simple and familiar set of navigation options - there are tabs for viewing the main timeline or feed, a "Discover" section for exploring the social network, a tab for accessing your profile, and another for your notifications, for example. In the center, there's a button to create a new post...Hive also uses the same follower-based model as Twitter, as opposed to the mutual friending model you'd find on a network like Facebook."
It is this familiarity coupled with innovation and change that have drawn downloads.
Mastodon, another alternative social media platform, has also experienced a mass surge in downloads. Mastodon is a decentralized platform based on the premise that "social media is not for sale". Their tagline reads, "Social Your home feed should be filled with what matters to you most, not what a corporation thinks you should see. Radically different social media, back in the hands of the people."
Since Musk's takeover of Twitter, ~500,000 new users joined Mastodon, bringing the total MAU (monthly active user) count to over a million. Hive and Mastodon, alike, are capitalizing on this positive externality, and Elon Musk has noticed, firing off a flurry of Tweets, ultimately laughing off the competition. While their growth is astronomical, this is still just a drop in the bucket as Twitter has over 238 MAU.
This might just be the "perfect storm" that up-and-coming social media platform have been looking for to mark their launch into mainstream adoption. Is this a fleeting trend or a permanent shift? Time will tell.