Move Aside Mastodon, there's a New Twitter Replacer in Town

Leaving Twitter is all the rage these days. My entire timeline is full of people saying goodbye to the platform they're obviously not leaving.

Mastodon was where everyone wanted to go at first, but a few weeks into it, many who tried it realized it isn't the solution. I talked about that in Issue #138.

Where will they all go if not Mastodon? Right now, it looks like many are trying out Hive, which feels like a mix of Quora and MySpace, and is fairly buggy, according to its reviews.

Hive came out at the end of 2019. Initially, it was only available from the App Store and was recently released for Android on Google Play.

Before it caught the attention of Twitter abandoners, Hive saw just a handful of downloads. Not enough to be worth mentioning. If I had to guess, I'd say it's because of its mishmash of features, but that's not relevant as much because things changed very abruptly over the last few days.

According to our estimates, downloads of Hive started rising last Friday, hitting 66K downloads in a single day! They dipped over the weekend and then ballooned to 294K on Monday, followed by a similar number on Tuesday.

Hive was downloaded 735K times since it started getting traction last week. That's incredible, considering it wasn't at all popular before. Most of the downloads, 56%, came from the US. No other country had more than an 8% share of downloads, but the downloads came from many countries.

While high, this isn't a Twitter killer if you ask me. A combination of strange features, a focus on music, and Twitter not actually dying, all mean Hive is probably not going to replace Twitter any time soon. But, Hive has a revenue model for its app. That's nice.