social hive
Hive
There have been many concerns about Elon Musk’s management of Twitter TWTR, where he has fired half the staff and another quarter or so have resigned.
The site isn’t likely to crash tomorrow, but many users are concerned about its downgrading both technically and in terms of content moderation, as Musk allows more and more suspended accounts, including Donald Trump’s, to return with each passing day. Fewer and fewer people actually control hateful content.
Enter Hive Social, a new Twitter alternative that has positively taken over my Twitter timeline as people flee the platform like rats from a sinking ship. Actually, that metaphor isn’t entirely accurate, as most people aren’t ditching Twitter entirely, but are instead creating Hive HIVE2 accounts, “just in case,” because it feels like the first meaningful alternative to Twitter that appeared since the Musk acquisition.
Yes, I know what Mastodon is, but it’s half the reason Hive is taking notice. Mastodon’s decentralized social network feels much more impenetrable to outsiders, with unique instances and tweets that are unfortunately called “toots.”
Hive is much more basic than Mastodon, and that may be why four out of five tweets on my Twitter timeline are people announcing that they are joining Hive, making it the most talked about on its rival platform, at least among my circles. But even beyond that, it’s the #4 trending topic in the US right now (To update: shot up to No. 2 with over 200,000 tweets and 1 million users as of the end of Monday).
The best way to describe it is a mix of Instagram and Twitter with a dash of Tumblr for good measure. Your main profile page looks pretty much like Twitter, and you can tweet (I’m still going to say tweet) with no short character limits. It already has editing functionality. It has no ads. It has a page “for you” to discover new content. And it’s just… easy to sign up and get going there, instead of figuring out the intricacies of Mastodon.
However, there is a significant potential problem with Hive, as it seems to be run by… two people. Yes, that’s right, Hive was started a few years ago by a college student who later brought in…a second college student, and they don’t seem to have evolved much beyond that. According to a message on the app two days ago, they reiterate that it’s all just two people running the app itself, marketing, design, literally everything.
While it’s extremely impressive that what’s in Hive was built and maintained by two people, that raises some pretty serious questions about its ability to scale, and if you spend a lot of time in the app, its shortcomings compared to social media a lot. more established. the sites are quite obvious.
The app feels… brittle, like it’s about to break at any moment. There’s a significant UI and loading lag most of the time, and it just doesn’t feel technically stable. That may get worse as more people join. There is no desktop version of Hive Social… at all. It doesn’t exist, which is bad since at least half of my time on Twitter is on desktop. You can’t thread tweets, and it’s easy to lose track of comments. I don’t think you can embed hive posts anywhere else. Sharing an article to Hive doesn’t even give me a thumbnail preview, just a literal hyperlink. You cannot search for people by name. Searching for “Paul Tassi” or “@paultassi” returns no results, just search for “paultassi”. Speaking of @names, if Twitter’s new verification raises an identity theft issue, apparently in Hive multiple people can claim the same @name. I’m already seeing things like @Brand accounts that are definitely not the parent company. If this gets more and more popular, it’s about to start happening on a large scale and be very bad.
@Juan
Hive
Again, this is a two person run app. What they have is impressive, and it’s clear that the idea of a simple, functional alternative to Twitter is something that people want. But I see three paths forward for Hive Social here:
1) It collapses under the weight of its newfound popularity and simply can’t scale fast enough to keep up with a new wave of subscriptions.
2) It stays alive, but ends up getting bombarded by some other kind of Twitter alternative released by a Big Tech corporation. Or Elon Twitter gets its act together and no one feels the need to go completely.
3) Big Tech acquires it and expands it that way, given its initially compelling functionality and built-in user base. Can this be the best case?
It’s early days, but for now it’s a lifeboat, even if we haven’t left the main ship yet. Call me(?) in Hive, search for paulassi.
Update (11/22): Since this was posted, there have been some developments around Hive Social, where interest in the app has increased over the course of the last day:
First, the site announced that it hit one million users yesterday, surpassed its crowdfunding goals, and added more than 100,000 users a day amid its newfound popularity. It remains to be seen if Hive is on track to raise additional funding or resources from, say, actual VC or tech investors, but none of that has been announced.
It has moved up the App Store charts, and the site said it has added a third developer to help with the upload. The app struggled with many technical challenges, including registration issues, image loading, and general lag, but remained online. Hive was the second trending term in the US for the whole day yesterday, aside from the US Men’s World Cup team hashtag, and at the end of the day it had over 200,000 tweets about it, which seemed to go on longer and longer than other conversations on Twitter. Alternative Mastodon, which never saw a rise in interest to this level.
Twitter has notably started to block the official Hive Twitter account, automatically hiding some responses and not allowing the account to be found with autocomplete if you’re trying to search for it on the service, something the account itself has taken notice of. . You can’t even tag him in a tweet unless you spell the full @ name, which is true even for me, and Hive and I follow each other. It’s unclear if this is some kind of automated process where Musk’s fans may have reported the account so many times that Twitter automatically labeled it as spam, or if it was a direct action taken by the company. Shadowbanning accounts are not new, but they are generally for low-quality accounts that are spam or hateful, not potential business rivals.
Elon Musk has directly commented on the existence of Hive with a single tweet:
The most likely scenario here is that Elon will ignore Hive until it becomes something he can’t ignore, which is far from certain. Even after this spike in viral interest, there’s absolutely no way to tell where things go from here, and, on the baseline, it seems unlikely that a site with 2-3 employees would have the ability to scale to become a complete Twitter. competitor in the short/medium term without perhaps an actual acquisition. Still, the idea of Hive as a “backup” for Twitter has resonated throughout the site, and it’s been a lot easier to move there than it was to figure out how Mastodon works, and new users are seeing follower growth and post engagement. it grows quite quickly. (I got about 5,000 followers in the first 24 hours of tweeting about this to my existing audience multiple times.) We’ll see where things go from here.
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Source: news.google.com