Introduction:
Twitter, now known as X, has a more significant hold on the market than previously thought. Unfortunately, this has resulted in Pebble (formerly T2), the first casualty among Twitter substitutes, closing its doors. On its microblogging platform, Twitter Alternative Previously known As T2 the would-be X competitor had developed a small but active community that sought to imitate Twitter’s features, from its verification processes to its DM capabilities.
However, according to the business, there needs to be more time to make Pebble a reality; of the 20,000 registered users, the app can only support 3,000 daily active users. Following its renaming from T2, the number of daily users decreased to 1,000 daily users.
According to co-founder and CEO Gabor Cselle, who had exits from Google and Twitter before founding Pebble, a portion of the problem can be attributed to the intense competition from other Twitter competitors.
There are many Twitter alternatives available today. The open source-based network Mastodon, a soon-to-be decentralized system from Bluesky, as well as smaller businesses like Spill, Spoutible, and Post, as well as a new app from Meta called Instagram Threads, are just a few of the services available for users to test out.
Of course, the X factor should also be taken into account. Despite, or perhaps precisely because of, the antics of the new owner, Elon Musk, the standard platform for short posts still has some appeal. While the organization may still need to achieve financial and business success, it has been challenging for competitors to replace its role as a venue for breaking news and passionate debates.
Pebble initially had a respectable retention rate despite these difficulties. In fact, it was experiencing retention rates of 30% by the fourth week. 60% of those who received a Pebble invite became users, proving its invite list was also effective.
Twitter Alternative Previously known As T2:
Twitter Alternative Previously known As T2 (Image Source: techcrunch.com)
A further 10,000 users joined that list from early press, such as TechCrunch’s coverage of its first outside investment, a $1.1 million angel round that featured investors like former Google VP Bradley Horowitz, Android co-founder Rich Miner, and Katherine Maher, the former CEO of Wikipedia. The Pebble website received over 99,300 visits last month, according to data from Similarweb, indicating recurrent use.
The business reasoned that users were eager for a Twitter substitute that placed an early emphasis on trust, safety, and moderation. To that purpose, Twitter’s former human rights advisor Sarah Oh served as a co-founder of Pebble.
Pebble still believes that its moderation approach was the right one, even though it ultimately had little impact on the growth rate.
“We entered with a specific perspective: gentler, safer. Assurance of safety. And the moderation strategy we implemented on the website was successful, adds Cselle, who also notes that Pebble didn’t have some of the problems other federated platforms did. For instance, TechCrunch claimed that Bluesky’s relationship with Black users had frayed early this year due to the company’s failure to take action against prejudice on the website.
Later, Bluesky users even established usernames that contained racial epithets, but the website made no public apologies. Such disputes were never an issue for Pebble. Other factors, such as Pebble’s absence of a native smartphone app, may have harmed its popularity. To be more agile and adaptable as T2, the firm concentrated on creating for the web and missed out on the potential for discovery offered by the app stores.
In hindsight, Cselle wonders if the transition from T2 to Pebble may have caused problems.
Like other shutdowns, the “why” of startup shutdowns cannot be attributed to a single cause but to several circumstances. That is unquestionably accurate for Pebble. It was a perfect storm of rivalry, X’s ongoing popularity, the absence of a native app, a weak brand, and a possibly too safe environment to be as engaging and enjoyable as the original.
Early adopters can export their Pebble archive as a zip file that loads a tiny web page exhibiting all their prior postings as part of Pebble’s wind down, which will be disclosed to users today at 9 AM PT. However, Pebble won’t return users to X or any other social network.
As a gesture of goodwill to demonstrate its financial accountability, Pebble also returns a tiny portion of the unspent money to its investors. On November 1st, the Pebble website will be shut down, and at this moment, there are no current plans for the IP. Even if Pebble didn’t work out the way the founders had intended, they insisted they didn’t reflect on the experience.
Cselle explains, “One thing I learned is that there’s an audience that wants to see a new kind of Twitter-like platform built and will ask for the features that Twitter has.” After Pebble is finished, the team might continue to work together on new projects while applying the lessons learned from Pebble. This involves better explaining to people what exceptional content on a platform should look like and how they may succeed.
Social media is reaching a turning moment, according to Oh. “With T2 and Pebble, we had one theory. That didn’t work out the way we had hoped. However, when we look back on this year, we’ll realize just how pivotal it was for social media’s role in our lives.
