TechScape: How Substack, YouTube, Jack Dorsey and more plan to pick Twitter’s bones

Twitter isn't dead. But six months on from the site's acquisition by Elon Musk, it isn't a picture of health, either.

From our look at the last half year:

The vultures are circling. Last week, the newsletter platform Substack launched its post-Twitter social network, Substack Notes, and ignited a firestorm:

Substack Notes is an interesting product. From a technological point of view, it's transparently half-baked. It launched, for instance, with no way to follow a user without also subscribing to their newsletter. Then it added the option to follow just their posts, hidden in a drop-down menu, but failed to add any way to keep track of who you've followed. It's easy to miss replies, and hard to find the people you want to follow.

The company's chief executive has also blundered his way into the perennial content moderation debate with scant preparation, responding to direct questions about whether the site would moderate hate speech with: "I'm not going to get into gotcha content moderation."

But Notes is one of the more interesting of the second wave of post-Twitter social networks, because of what it has underpinning it: a swathe of popular authors who already post to the platform in great quantity. Yes, they mostly post newsletters rather than notes, but that could change, and in the meantime it gives the company a runway to fix some of these problems slowly.

At the other end of the spectrum is Bluesky, the Jack Dorsey-backed decentralised Twitter spinoff. Even more than Mastodon, the social network is an explicit attempt to simply clone Twitter, but do it without a centralised authority. From the Verge: