The hunt for the next Twitter: all the news about alternative social media platforms

US President Joe Biden signed up for a Threads account today, as did the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the second gentleman, Douglas Emhoff.

Biden’s first post on Meta’s X (formerly Twitter) competitor harkens back to his 2020 presidential victory speech with references to the country’s divisions and its current “inflection point.” Harris gestured to her travels throughout the US and her having met “over 100” world leaders, and Emhoff wrote about gender equity and “countering hate of all kinds.”

Bluesky, a decentralized social media app alternative to X (formerly Twitter), has announced that it has now crossed 2 million users — doing so just two months after crossing 1 million users. The company is also finally about to add a public web interface, which might help make it a more attractive destination for journalists and other users.

One big hurdle for Bluesky to reach a bigger audience is that people can’t view links to posts without being signed in, so the upcoming public web interface should finally help alleviate that problem. The public interface is slated for launch “around the end of this month,” according to the company’s blog post.

Mastodon, the decentralized Twitter / X alternative, is adding lists to its Android app, according to a blog post from CEO and founder Eugen Rochko. Lists are available as part of the most recent Mastodon for Android update.

“With the new update, you now have the ability to create custom lists and categorize your follows based on specific topics or interests, while removing them from your home feed,” Rochko writes. “This not only helps in decluttering your home feed but also allows you to engage with certain topics on your own terms, when you are ready.” The update also has a redesigned home tab to make it easier to navigate between your home feed, lists, and hashtags, Rochko says.

Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said in a reply on Threads last night that his team is working on an API for Threads, despite concern that it would help publishers push content more than it would creators. TechCrunch spotted his reply in a thread in which Platformer’s Casey Newton told another user the lack of a developer API is why Threads has no TweetDeck equivalent.

If the API is robust enough, it could open the platform up to new ideas, expressed through third-party apps and web experiences, about how to actually interact with Threads or view its content. It could also add features that Threads is missing right now, like lists or the ability to follow specific topics.

Meta is going to let you make polls and insert GIFs right from the Threads post composer, the company announced on Thursday. Later in the day, Instagram head Adam Mosseri revealed that the company is testing view counts on Threads posts and pinned posts on profiles and in your replies.

The polls and GIFs features are now rolling out, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated by making a post with a GIF and another post with a poll. They’re small additions, but they’re features you have been able to do on X (formerly Twitter) for a very long time.

Meta is starting to roll out an edit feature and “Voice Threads” for its Threads platform, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday. They’re two major new features for Meta’s burgeoning X-like social network — and unlike on X (formerly Twitter), you won’t need to pay a subscription fee to be able to edit your posts for five minutes after they’re published.

Posts that are edited will have a little icon next to the timestamp showing that they’ve been revised. You aren’t be able to see an edit history — that’s one advantage X still has over Threads — and Meta spokesperson currently doesn’t have plans to add one, Christine Pai tells The Verge.

Just one week after adding the ability to post, Artifact announced on Wednesday that users can now use AI to generate cover art for their content. The company says the feature will add “eye-catching images” that’ll help users better tell their stories.

Up until recently, Artifact was an AI-powered news app from Instagram’s co-founders that aggregated news and links around the internet. By adding the ability to directly share and personalize content, it’s becoming even more of a rival to Instagram and X (formerly Twitter).

Artifact, the AI-powered news app from Instagram’s co-founders, is adding a major new feature: the ability to post. So far, the app has been an aggregator for news and links from around the internet, but you’re going to be able to add posts directly to the app.

Mike Krieger, one of the co-founders of Artifact, announced the new features onstage in a conversation with Casey Newton at the Code Conference on Wednesday. The new feature is a logical next step from Artifact’s recently launched update that lets users share links. This new feature means you won’t just be limited to links; your posts can include things like a title, text, and photos. The posts will also have unique URLs, which should make them easier to share on different apps and services.

Mastodon, the federated microblogging platform, has been updated to version 4.2, which comes with massive improvements to search and the web interface, particularly for logged-out and first-time users.

One of Mastodon’s many charming qualities is that, unlike Twitter X, Bluesky, Instagram, and most other social media platforms, the user base is split across thousands of instances, each of which can decide to federate with or block any of the others.

Meta will launch the web version of Threads, its competitor to X (formerly known as Twitter) early this week, reports The Wall Street Journal. A web version has been frustratingly missing since the short-form posting service began.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company is working on adding the feature along with better search (well, search at all, really — right now, you can only search for usernames on the platform) earlier this month, and that it would be ready in “the next few weeks.”

The BBC has launched its own “experimental” Mastodon server, marking one of the first major news outlets to establish an instance on the Twitter alternative. You can access the server at social.bbc, which encompasses posts from a handful of BBC accounts, including BBC Radio 4, BBC Taster, BBC Research & Development, and a few more.

The BBC says the outlet will try out the server for six months before it decides “whether and how to continue.” While you can’t actually create accounts or posts on the server, you can still leave replies from the instance that you’re using, as well as follow its accounts.

One of Instagram Threads’ most requested features is finally here: the Following tab that lets you see only the people you, er, follow. “Ask and you shall receive,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads quoting a user asking for the feature.

For those of us who have the Following feed, we can make it appear and disappear by tapping the home icon or the Threads logo at the top of the page. Annoyingly, if you reopen the app after it fully shuts down, it reverts to the “For You” feed, meaning you’ll have to know where to look to bring the Following feed up again — whether that’s a bug or not remains to be seen.

Twitter users (and ex-users) are still watching to see what the next chapter will be in the soap opera called “What Elon Musk Will Do With Twitter Next.” Oops — sorry. It’s no longer Twitter now, is it? It’s some weird new entity called “X.”

If you’re becoming bored with the whole thing and you want to continue following social networking without having to deal with Twitter (let’s still call it that for now), where do you go?

Mastodon, the decentralized network viewed as a viable alternative to Twitter, is rife with child sexual abuse material (CSAM), according to a new study from Stanford’s Internet Observatory (via The Washington Post). In just two days, researchers found 112 instances of known CSAM across 325,000 posts on the platform — with the first instance showing up after just five minutes of searching.

To conduct its research, the Internet Observatory scanned the 25 most popular Mastodon instances for CSAM. Researchers also employed Google’s SafeSearch API to identify explicit images, along with PhotoDNA, a tool that helps find flagged CSAM. During its search, the team found 554 pieces of content that matched hashtags or keywords often used by child sexual abuse groups online, all of which were identified as explicit in the “highest confidence” by Google SafeSearch.