Sorry team, but you need to be on all the social platforms.

You can't replace twitter, with just one app.

Twitter represented a once in a lifetime thing.

It became the town hall for the entire internet. Users, communities, brands big and small, all had twitter accounts. You could reasonably expect anyone on the internet to have an account.

However, things have changed now, and people are looking for the next twitter. The next town hall that everyone can be on.

Sorry to say, but that’s never happening again. There will never be a single place we all have accounts.

You either have to be on all the platforms, or just one and accept you won’t reach / follow everyone.

Because it can’t be done again. We’re not talking about twitters user base as a single homogenous group, its multiple groups, and they all want different things.

Let’s start with the brands. Brands want a reliable place to set up shop. Their goal is to advertise, offer support to their customers, and get on the latest trend.

They don’t want to be burned again, they don’t want to accidentally find themselves on a platform that houses hate speech, because it reflects poorly on their brand.

They want to be somewhere where people are, but has the backing of a reliable company, and sorry Threads haters, but that’s Facebook. Facebook is big enough to be reliable and big enough to want to protect their brand. Whilst individual users are complaining about moderation, the moderation on Threads is enough to make brands feel safe.

You are also seeing this with celebrities, they already have an Instagram account, so it’s easy and safe enough to set up their threads account. Other competing services don’t have that.

So if you want to scream at Delta airlines on social media, or follow your favorite celebrity, you’ve got to be on Threads.

For all the reasons you want to rightfully hate Meta and their products, it’s the only place for these brands and celebs to go, which means millions upon millions of users will also go there. If you want your game / blog / Twitch / YouTube channel to find engaged users, they’ve already set up shop on threads.

But if we look at the other side of what Twitter enabled, it was communities, and that’s where things get a bit tricky.

Communities don’t overly care about brands and celebs, though there is always some crossover. Gamers liked twitter for the community but it was also good that you could follow Nvidia, IGN, and Wario64.

Communities are going to set up shop in places that align with their values. The science community and more minority communities preferred Mastodon, which allowed them to set up their own instances, and there was never a fear that a pig-headed billionaire could shut it down. So, it’s for that reason you’ll find plenty of LGBTQIA+ communities there, science folk, lots of security folk and so on.

However, ‘the gaming community’, to which it’s not accurate to lump them all into one, spread to the wings. I’ve found users on Hive, BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, Cohost (RIP), and Fuse.

Here in, lies the problem. You won’t ever get a consensus, the days of a single social media app are both a fallacy and behind us. Gamers are all over the show, and have always been, for some their community is on Discord, Reddit, Forums, Steam Groups and weirdly LinkedIn.

Let’s not forget the elephant in the room, TikTok.

We need to move past this mindset of “what are we replacing Twitter with”, because it's not going to succeed. If you just want community engagement, you’ll have to try them all out until you find your people.

If you are ‘selling’ something, like most of us are, sorry, but you need to be everywhere.

I know that sounds like a lot of work, and you miss the old days of being able to send one tweet and its seen by nearly everyone, but this has been slowly in the works since before the demise of twitter. People like choice, and so if you want to reach new fans, you’ve got to go where they are. Some platforms will return more yield than others, and you can take advantage of cross posting tools like Croissant and OpenVibe, but you’ve got to put in the work to grow your audience.

But don’t view it as something new, we’ve been doing this for years now, we just need to drop the dream that we’re going to find a Twitter replacement where everyone is on.

The town hall is dead.

This article is a follow on from something I wrote a few months ago: