This weekend, Twitter was considerably messier than usual. As a means of combating “extreme levels of data scraping,” Twitter’s owner Elon Musk tweeted on Saturday that it would limit the number of posts that non-Twitter Blue subscribers may see each day to 600. Almost any action you took on the site after hitting the quota would result in a “rate-limit exceeded” error.
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 300/day— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
Users once again went to some of the numerous Twitter competitors after yet another period of Musk-fueled chaos, which experienced a wild few days of growth.
Spill seemed to have won the weekend out of all these new apps. Spill was founded by former Black workers of Twitter to create social media platforms for diverse communities from the ground up rather than as an afterthought. The app started.
Only a few weeks after the app’s limited beta debut, Spill reports that more than 100,000 newly created accounts were generated over the weekend.
Keke Palmer and Ava DuVernay are just two of the prominent celebrities that Spill has been successful in recruiting to use their app. Questlove, an iconic musician from The Roots, tweeted a link last weekend promoting his Spill profile. Lizzo took to her luck on Twitter and Instagram in the hopes of landing a Spill invite.
Check out my profile at https://t.co/kzq6pb0nRR pic.twitter.com/5MchdnhezC
— ?st (@questlove) July 2, 2023
At the time of writing, Spill was ranked third overall and first on the iOS App Store’s social networking chart.
“They tried to bury us,” tweeted Spill CEO Alphonzo “Phonz” Terrell. “They didn’t know we were seeds.”
Bluesky Surges in User Numbers Over the Weekend, Experiences Impressive Growth
Bluesky, a decentralized app founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, had a successful weekend as well. By Public data compiled by third-party developers, Bluesky jumped from about 184,000 and 238,000 users from Friday to Monday. These user counts would be significantly higher if Bluesky weren’t still an invite-only service.
Since Saturday, when Twitter users began experiencing rate-limit issues, daily active users are up 4 times, and new signups are up 10 times, according to Post, a publisher-focused alternative to Twitter. Post declined to share exact user numbers.
Although the temporary rate-limiting on Twitter appears to have stopped, each massive error made by the Musk-run network pushes more users to go into other platforms. Mastodon, one of the early front-runners among Twitter competitors, conveniently launched on Android this past weekend.
Mastodon had around 380,000 monthly active users when Musk bought Twitter. The federated, open-source platform has 2.5 million monthly active users within only two months. Although it has since dropped to around 1.4 million, that is still more than triple the amount of monthly active users from the previous year.
This summer, Meta is expected to enter the fray with its own Twitter clone, which is said to be called Threads. Start the games now.
