The plug is being pulled at Post.news, an app that was marketed as an alternative to X, the former Twitter. Other Twitter clones have also dropped out in recent months.
After the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk in 2022, it was teeming with apps that hoped to profit from the unrest caused and the dissatisfaction of many (mainly progressive) users. Post.news also had its own approach: it emphasized news from respected publications. The user sometimes had to pay for that news: for a small amount you got access to individual articles.
“We have built a community free of toxicity,” wrote founder Noam Bardin (the former CEO of navigation app Waze) in a post on Post.news. “A platform where publishers come into contact with readers, an app that has validated many theories surrounding micropayments and the willingness of consumers to purchase individual articles.” But, Bardin adds, “our service is not growing fast enough to become a truly profitable business or significant platform.”
Another Twitter clone, Pebble (originally T2), shut down in November 2023. Pebble was founded by former Twitter employees. And in January 2024, Artifact also called it a day. That app was the work of Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the founders of Instagram. But Artifact is getting another chance of sorts: at the beginning of April, Yahoo announced that it had purchased the technology behind the app. Artifact used AI to select and summarize news. That technology would be included in a future version of Yahoo News.
The main remaining challengers to X (as Twitter is now known) are Threads from Meta, Bluesky (funded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey) and Mastodon. Threads is by far the largest, with over 100 million users. Mastodon may be able to benefit from that success: both apps support the ActivityPub standard, which means Mastodon users can recently also read messages from some Threads users such as President Joe Biden.
