Ex-Employees Launch Rivals To Musk-Owned Twitter

After Sarah Oh lost her job as a human rights advisor at Twitter late last year in the first round of layoffs following Elon Musk’s chaotic acquisition of the company, she decided to join a friend in building a rival service.

Photo Insert: T2 founders Gabor Cselle and Sarah Oh

With Gabor Cselle, who previously worked at Twitter and Google, she launched T2, currently available in beta. Like Twitter, it offers a social feed of posts with 280-character limits. But the key selling point, according to Oh, is its focus on safety, Jennifer Korn reported for CNN.

“We really do want to create an experience that allows people to share what they want to share without fearing risk of things like abuse and harassment, and we feel like we’re really well positioned to deliver on that,” Oh told CNN.

In the months since Musk completed his takeover, a small but growing number of services have launched or gained traction by appealing to users who are uncomfortable with the billionaire’s decisions to slash Twitter’s staff, rethink content moderation policies and reinstate numerous incendiary accounts that were previously banned, among other moves.

The list of newer entrants in the markets includes apps like T2 and Spill created by former Twitter employees, a startup backed by one of Musk’s Twitter investors, and a service from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. While some apps like T2 strongly resemble Twitter, others take a different approach.

Last month, for example, the founders of Instagram announced Artifact, “a personalized news feed” powered by artificial intelligence, a description that quickly earned it comparisons to Twitter. In CNN’s recent test of the app, however, it resembled news reader applications like Apple News or the defunct Google Reader.

Artifact displayed popular articles from large media organizations and smaller bloggers in a main feed, tailored to users based on their activity and selected interests, Jon Sarlin also reported for CNN.

But all of these apps appear to be vying for the opportunity to scratch the itch users may feel for a news feed that isn’t Twitter — at least for as long as that itch lasts.

“Something that we’ve heard a lot from people who are moving over from Twitter, either partially or fully, is that it is just for them a nicer experience overall,” said Jae Kaplan, co-founder of Anti Software Software club, the group that develops Cohost, a text-based social media feed similar to Twitter.

The service launched publicly in June of last year, after Musk offered to buy Twitter.

In November, after Musk completed the takeover, the platform saw a surge in activity, adding 80,000 users within 48 hours. “People have been referring to us when they do as a Twitter alternative, which I think is an important distinction from a Twitter replacement,” Kaplan said.

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