Elon Musk has cut (either intentionally or as the consequence of his actions) the workforce of his newly-acquired social media platform Twitter from nearly 7,400 to around 2,700 permanent employees since taking over on Oct. 28, according to media reports. The mass layoffs and terminations are, among other things, the result of a new work culture that requires prospective employees to have what Musk calls "extremely hardcore" attitudes regarding performance and willingness to work overtime. This structural change, however, could result in anything from downtime to a total collapse of the site, as numerous teams that oversaw core elements of the platform were said to be severely decimated or non-existent. Despite the exodus of employees, however, Twitter remains far ahead of its direct competitors in terms of user numbers, as our chart shows.
According to company data, Twitter had 238 million daily active users in July 2022, for example. The blogging service Tumblr, which was founded in 2007, bought by Yahoo for $1.1 billion in 2013, and sold to the blog host Wordpress for $3 million in 2019, has experienced a significant surge in popularity over the past two years. Although the service does not match Twitter with 135 million active accounts, it is currently the most heavily used direct alternative.
The services Mastodon and Cohost, which are explicitly considered Twitter alternatives, are still barely relevant. Although there were 70,000 new account registrations for the former on the day after Musk's takeover announcement, according to media reports, and the number of active accounts has tripled in the past two weeks, according to fediverse.party, only 3.6 million people actively participate in the service, which was founded in 2016. Mastodon does not have a global homepage, but is organized into so-called decentralized instances that are run by individuals or teams and often do not collect detailed statistics. Members of different instances can communicate with each other, but the respective administrators can, for example, blacklist certain instances, which makes it impossible to display content and communicate with users from the corresponding instances.
The Twitter-Tumblr mix Cohost, which has been in development since 2020 and was made available to a small circle of users in February 2022, currently has around 9,000 active users, according to its own information. The service aims to offer an advertising- and tracking-free alternative to standard social media portals and chronological rather than algorithmically determined timelines. Whether portals such as Cohost, Mastodon or Tumblr can represent an alternative to Twitter in the long term remains to be seen.
