What the Next Short-Form App Will Have to Do to Match Twitter’s Star Power

Text-based social media appears to be back in the Wild West. With X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, inching toward obscurity and a number of contenders stepping onto the field, we’ve been left with more questions than answers.

Apps like Threads, Bluesky, Truth Social, Mastodon and Spill are all picking up users, and people are tweeting their new handles like students on the last day of school signing yearbooks.

But will any of them truly be able to match Twitter’s star power? For all the app’s issues, there are four key attributes that kept it in a class of its own for 10 years: anonymity, messiness, commitment to chronology and cultural currency.

Anonymity

Whether you joined Twitter in 2010 or 2020, one constant has been the platform’s unique blend of authenticity, vulnerability, celebrity and anonymity. Twitter was relatively easy and granted users a safe space to post anything from memes to more serious topics without their usernames showing up in their friends’ and family’s suggested contacts. Twitter was a place where you could hide in plain view.

Meta’s competitor app, Threads, also catapulted users over other Twitter knockoffs and their biggest hurdle: building an active following, by allowing signups to import their existing Instagram followers. But that same need for an associated Instagram account has been a setback. In the days after Threads launched, many users expressed regret about the unfiltered thoughts from longtime followers and influencers they had so easily gained and given others access to.

This is not to say that Twitter’s anonymity always worked. Bot accounts, especially during national elections, did plague the app, and certain communities are still relentlessly keyword-targeted by scammers and phishing attempts.

To best contend with Twitter, its imitators must find a way to replicate the feeling of their app being its own world, free of aggressive “People you may know” recommendations and doxable profile information. A place where anonymity doesn’t hurt your content’s visibility and being yourself doesn’t feel risky.

Safety

If you were to ask the public which social media site is the most toxic, Twitter would likely be No. 1 on Family Feud’s big board.

Twitter has been called out repeatedly throughout its history for allowing hate speech and misleading information, especially in the wake of the pandemic. Black creators often expressed irritation at targeted harassment and have always been critical of the platform’s lack of support and transparency when enforcing rule violations and account suspensions.

When Elon Musk took over, his updates to Twitter’s terms of service resulted in hate speech on the platform skyrocketing. Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, resigned from the company alongside other top employees tasked with ensuring platform safety for users and brands alike.

Spill has such stringent policies that The Shade Room was almost immediately kicked off the platform by users, while Bluesky filters let someone join with a handle that was just a racial slur. Competitors need to strike the right balance between allowing users to feel comfortable posting about their thoughts and experiences, while also putting in safety measures that will reassure advertisers that the app isn’t going to be harmful to a brand or service.

Messiness

One of Twitter’s biggest strengths is its imperfections. Where Instagram was a highlight reel, Twitter was seemingly off the cuff. Everything felt very authentic; people posting about their struggles, likes and dislikes, posts riddled with typos and a degree of unhinged “who is also up at 3am?” energy. While other platforms chased short-form video and polished influencer-driven content, Twitter stayed true to itself and remained a platform dictated by its users, not its algorithm.

Because Twitter is so dialogue-driven, its “influencers” felt like your average everyday person with anywhere from 5,000 to 50,000 followers, unlike the 100,000+ accounts that shape the user experience on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. There were no boxes or labels to put on your content. You could be a power user and not be a “content creator.” In a way, Twitter was the place for everything you’d keep far away from your LinkedIn.

The ability to participate in the conversation gave everyone the ability to become the app’s main character for the day and allowed brands and companies to feel more relatable; they were in on the joke. This is one area that will be especially difficult to imitate.

Chronological timelines

Like all the platforms around it, Twitter experimented numerous times with shifting away from chronological feeds and toward a rank-based, algorithm-driven system. But unlike other platforms, Twitter’s users successfully got the platform to keep the chronological feed an option and the main user experience until Musk’s arrival.

A chronological feed is vital for following topics in real time—many used Twitter to join in on sporting events, television premieres, festivals, elections and awards shows. Who could forget instant memes like Bernie Sanders’ mittens or The Slap? Twitter was the loudest town square on the internet, and many of its daily users enjoyed having a seat at the show.

Twitter also invented the hashtag. When combined with chronological timelines, hashtag groupings allowed not only easily following along with live events but were also responsible for catalyzing more than a handful of national and global social uprisings and movements. They are also used by local government and aid groups to quickly convey information in emergencies.

For other platforms to take Twitter’s place, they’ll need to be able to have a similar use value.

Cultural currency

Twitter’s most unique attribute is the countless number of cultural moments the platform has played host to: celebrity clapbacks at fans, The Rock being the second person to break the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed, Wendy’s and other brand accounts becoming human, Trump’s 4 a.m. antics and so on.

Twitter was around for 17 years, and in that time became the de-facto curator of pop culture. The list of moments true and unique to Twitter could go on forever and will be difficult to replicate.

An unforgettable app

So who will emerge victorious and fill Twitter’s big shoes? Who will strike the right balance of essential features and safety measures?

None of these questions can be answered today, tomorrow or next week, but they’ll continue burning up the industry and consuming the minds of everyday social media users. But why do these things matter so much outside our advertising bubble?

That answer is simple: the innate human desire to belong to something. And Twitter, love it or hate it, was and is truly something. It is a collection of memories, communities, safe spaces and inside jokes that so many users, despite disdain for what the platform has become, still refuse to let go and let die at the hand of one overzealous, out-of-touch billionaire. It is a place that can be endlessly imitated but may never be duplicated.

The Twitter experience simply cannot be X’d out.