Do we have an alternative to Twitter?

Reddit is an alternative to Twitter.

You need to be more specific to get a reasonable answer.

Twitter has its social clout, because you can't edit tweets. That lets journalists quote it, which draws in the politicians, celebrities, brands, and other people that makes it "important." Nobody else really has that.

However, if you just want to have conversations with people, Mastodon and Diaspora are the bigger open source and decentralized networks, and small companies have dropped a variety of centralized networks with decent communities. And with Mastodon, the different servers give you the opportunity to shop around for a specific kind of community-within-the-community.

Similarly, if you care about virality, most modern social networks actively work against viral spread in hopes of heading off harassment, and because they don't need viral content to drive ad engagement. That would also affect a good answer.

There is definitely no single "drop-in replacement" for everything that Twitter does for everybody, though, and there may never be one, because they created Twitter with specific intentions that evolved over time to fit the community that grew around it at the time.

I've tried Gettr but the traffic is so much less than Twitter. If this is a business related question then Twitter is better than Gettr (but I've not tried Mastodon).

I've been watching this pretty closely. Here's how it looks to me:

Mastodon is attracting a lot of people who don't know where else to go. It's def the favorite with technology folks.

Post.news is where a ton of journalists and politicos are going, but it has a wait list.

Tumblr is where a lot of people are either going or returning, particularly if they're creative types.

Hive is kinda holding up the rear. They had a major security vulnerability that caused them to stop operations for at least a couple of weeks.

Mastodon is attractive to people who understand the whole decentralized thing. But it's not as intuitive as it could be. Also, I know people who've been kicked off arbitrarily by mercurial server owners :\ My guess is that Mastodon is the place to be right now if you're looking for a more technical audience (like developers).

Post.news has rather barebones functionality right now. But it's definitely hot with the "intelligentsia" crowd. I got access a couple of weeks ago, and it's not clear to me yet if it's going to be a good opportunity for getting the word out about a product. The culture right now feels heavily intentional , vigilant, and indexed towards political news. It has about 250k users right now.

Tumblr, in my humble opinion, is a great option. It already has hundreds of millions of users. It's operated by Automattic now (the WordPress.com people). It's got a really fun culture (search "Goncharov to see what I mean). There are a lot of well-known brands and media outlets who've been there for a long time. It's a great place to find verticals of people with a particular passion like comics, or electronica, or pixel art, etc.

You can install a forum app.

I believe Mastodon is credible. It is somehow decentralized and connected at the same moment. We can get into any platform, or we can host our own. It's pretty good.

The only downside, I think is it's not super beginner friendly.

What's wrong with Twitter?