The first I’ve heard of this platform is when it’s shutting down… might be why it did.
the app maxed out at 3,000 daily active users, out of 20,000 registered users.
This is smaller than many mastadon instances.
Hell - the fediverse has more than 20 000 registered servers.
It was invite only, not open registration, so not surprising they didn’t have many users. Although Bluesky is the same and that seems to have loads. Hmm.
I had an account but literally used it for five seconds and then largely forgot about it.
I dont get Bluesky. I dont even care for this “app” what and why? Who would use that?
it feels more like twitter did, and it is more centralised and less technologically focused, so more normie-friendly.
I think it should take for someone to make a mastodon instance that just doesn’t boast about federation yet is federated for this to take off more. People say “join mastodon” or “join lemmy” but then you’re hit with a list of servers and you just give up. Contrary to something like “join talkfunhouse.com” which is actually a federated instance
Probably people who want to use it.
Every time I went to sign up for their site they required that I list my Twitter account. But, I’ve never had consistent interconnected social media profiles.
Not sure if it’s from an alternate universe or from our own future, but somewhere there is a version of this article that’s like “Today, the market for Mastodon alternatives is a crowded one to say the least. There are numerous services for consumers to try, including the open-source based Misskey, smaller startups like Pleroma, plus the Elon Musk-based product formerly known as Twitter.”
At least hopefully in that future they’re all interoperable so choosing one over another wouldn’t really be that big an issue
Except for Twitter, which burns through the last of its lifeline to bolt-on ActivityPub to the code only to not find anyone to federate with.
I remember hearing about “Pebble” for the first time about a month ago when it showed up in an article in my “all” feed (https://pawb.social/post/2688668).
Its name before its rebrand was already questionable as I think T2 already has strong associations with the Terminator franchise; and its new name was not any better. “Pebble” is too generic a term to get people to understand the platform’s concept and in the tech space, I think everyone would think of the wearables first.
All this to say I am zero percent surprised they went out of business. I’m only surprised it happened so shortly after their rebrand (though at this point I’m starting to think that must have been some sort of Hail Mary).
Hey that’s the exact same time I heard about it! …and I’m the one who posted it. Brilliant me 🙃
Yep, I looked it up that day for the first time and haven’t heard about it again until now, when they’re kind enough to tell us to not even bother with it.
I have never heard about it until this announcement of its demise :p
I think the T2 was to insinuate that it was “Twitter 2”. I didn’t understand the rebrand, because, even though it’s been a few years, Pebble to me is still associated with the smart watch.
I actually signed up and used it a little, but I put up a funny post with a Corvette that had a wheel off sitting on wood blocks with the caption, “When Rednecks get Corvettes! 🤣” It was a stupid little joke, but my post was flagged as offensive and removed. At that point I made one more post explaining what had happened, and that I was going to be leaving the platform. I left the post up for a couple of weeks and then deleted my account. If that was considered offensive, my sarcastic self didn’t stand a chance on that platform.
I’m not surprised they didn’t get any traction.
I’m not surprised they didn’t get any traction.
Nobody would be if it was up on wood blocks.
🤣
I actually think conceptually “Pebble” is a great name for a social media site if you lean into the “drop a pebble in a pond and it ripples outward = even the smallest person can reach a large group of people with their message.”
At least it MEANS something, unlike whatever “X” is supposed to represent (a name so bad, it’s STILL usually followed by “formerly Twitter” whenever it’s mentioned by anyone)
Following that concept, a platform called Ripple where individual posts are called Pebbles and responses/reshares are called Waves wouldn’t be half-bad, branding-wise.
Crazy to me that they’d shut down instead of going open source and integrating with the fediverse. Doesn’t even seem like a good business move as offering hosting for other companies and professional groups seems like a good market opportunity in a world where businesses even dislike Twitter.
Edit: for example, offer gitlab like service but for social media.
Wouldn’t even need to open source - they could have joined the fediverse as closed source, offering a platform to those people who are apparently scared away by anything with a permissive license.
Then again, these people are probably more eager to be on bluesky.
Is there a part of bluesky that’s under an impermissive license?
I think the whole step to integrate with the fediverse would have taken too much time and too many resources. Seems like a massive rewrite of the codebase to me, if it wasn’t taken into account from the very start.
I’m mystified by why everyone wants to make a Twitter clone despite Twitter famously not being all that profitable.
I think one of the things Musk has proven is that there was a fair amount of organizational dead weight in Twitter.
If he’d made some staffing cuts, paid less for ego offices, and done it all while shutting up and not being Apartheid Boy we’d be applauding his 4d chess.
This is what happens when an organization gets sufficiently large. And this is not necessarily a bad thing.
“Surplus” staff is very important when a new project comes and the organization needs to scale up. Instead of suddenly hiring a lot of people with no understanding of organization culture, the staff can be mobilized to work on new things without affecting existing project and structure.
There is a reason why governments around the world don’t suddenly fire their staff when it is apparent a lot of them are not working at max capacity. Redundancy is a kind of safety.
How did he prove that? I don’t know how to determine how much of Twitter’s decline is due to Musk’s public statements.
The advertiser exodus is 100% a result of his policy changes and public persona. That’s just how it works, the advertisers don’t care about anything but brand awareness.
He changed policy, they left because that policy could be damaging to their brands.
But one of his policies was gutting the workforce, and despite all the dire predictions the platform has somehow still not exploded. There’s certainly a lot of reasons for that, and he’s been publicly embarrassed more than a few times, but if he’d gone in with a scalpel instead of a hatchet and not scared away the money and the tech it’s almost certain he could have made Twitter at least briefly profitable.
Twitter was losing money, but not by standards of potential and net valuation.
Put it like this.
In 2016, Twitter probably decided the US election. At the time, they had 3500 employees.
In 2021, they had 7500, and were losing less money.
Can you think of anything they did in that five year period that made you say, “Wow, that’s a good feature,” or “this community is amazing?”
Not really, right? It was the same Twitter, with double the workforce, doing not a whole lot with them.
@UngodlyAudrey Guess there’s another score for decentralized social media. 😁
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
The would-be X rival had grown a small but engaged community on its microblogging service that aimed to dupe Twitter’s features, from its verification systems to functionality like DMs.
There are numerous services for consumers to try, including the open source-based platform Mastodon, a soon-to-be decentralized system from Bluesky, plus smaller startups like Spill, Spoutible and Post, as well as a new app from Meta called Instagram Threads.
Though the company may not have yet succeeded from a business and financial perspective, it’s been hard for others to duplicate its function as a breaking news platform and place for spirited debates.
In addition, some 10,000 users arrived at that list from early press, like TechCrunch’s coverage of its first outside funding — a $1.1 million angel round that included investors like former Google VP Bradley Horowitz, Android co-founder Rich Miner and the former CEO of Wikipedia, Katherine Maher.
Cselle agrees, noting that, perhaps, Pebble should have opened up enough space for disagreement to happen, while still drawing a hard line on the most disagreeable parts of running a Twitter-like platform.
It was a perfect storm of competition, X’s continued traction, the lack of a native app, a brand that didn’t resonate and a space that was maybe a little too safe to be as addictive and as fun as the original.
Saved 82% of original text.
