Why is Twitter becoming X and should you move to Threads or Bluesky?

What has Elon Musk done now?

Nine months after buying Twitter for $44 billion, Elon Musk has decided to rebrand the platform. The name Twitter will be gone, as will its iconic bird logo. In their place, Musk is planning on renaming the platform X.

Why X?

That is known only by Musk himself, but he does have a fascination with the letter. It seems to have begun with X.com, the online payments company Musk launched in 1999 and made his fortune from after merging with PayPal. Since then, he has gone on to launch SpaceX, while his electric vehicle company Tesla sells the Model X car, he named one of his sons X Æ A-12 and he recently launched an artificial intelligence venture, xAI.

What else will change besides the name?

The logo, for one thing: Musk held a crowdsourced competition to replace the Twitter bird logo with a new one. The winner was Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt, who offered Musk a logo previously designed for a now-discontinued podcast. And this new lick of paint is just the beginning, if Musk and the company’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, are to be believed.

Yaccarino tweeted (or should that now be “xed”?) that “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.”

What that actually means is difficult to discern. It could be a nod to Musk’s longstanding plans to develop an “everything app” in the manner of China’s WeChat – something Musk said back in October 2022 his purchase of Twitter was an “accelerant” for.

But observers are unimpressed. “By claiming that X will be the platform that can deliver everything, [Yaccarino] is forgetting that the internet exists,” says Steven Buckley at City, University of London. “The internet is the platform for everything.”

Will this plan work?

Probably not. Everything apps, popular in China, involve giving access to large parts of your life to the people running them. The past few months of chaos under Musk may put off some sceptics from allowing the entrepreneur’s firm to access their bank accounts.

For that reason, Musk will be relying on the rate of new arrivals to X outpacing those abandoning ship. “If Twitter management is hoping to attract new people to the platform, they hope they are enough to replace the ones they continue to lose and alienate,” says Om Malik, a prominent tech investor.

So should I move to Threads instead?

Meta’s Twitter-alike app, launched earlier this month, would appear to be the most secure lifeboat for those looking to escape Twitter (or X) in the long run. It is backed by Mark Zuckerberg’s massive tech company, and has built-in integrations with Instagram. The team behind it has promised more features in the coming weeks and months to compete with Twitter.

What about Bluesky?

The decentralised alternative to Twitter, started by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has its own issues, including content moderation snafus. In terms of users, it has largely been overtaken by Threads, which was able to tap into Instagram’s existing network to reach 100 million users in just five days. Bluesky is still an invite-only app, and as such is growing far slower, with around 350,000 reported users.

Are there any other alternatives?

An entire cavalcade of competitors has popped up to try and capitalise on Twitter’s travails. Mastodon was one early alternative, but remains the preserve of tech adherents, while Post.Social, Spill, T2 and others make up the pack.

But this is the nub of the problem: at present, there isn’t really a direct alternative to Twitter with all the features users love. Whether they care to stick around on X remains to be seen.