Pebble, the Twitter alternative previously known as T2, is shutting down | TechCrunch
Pebble, the Twitter alternative previously known as T2, is shutting down | TechCrunch
The first I've heard of this platform is when it's shutting down... might be why it did.
I remember hearing about "Pebble" for the first time about a month ago when it showed up in an article in my "all" feed (https://pawb.social/post/2688668).
Its name before its rebrand was already questionable as I think T2 already has strong associations with the Terminator franchise; and its new name was not any better. "Pebble" is too generic a term to get people to understand the platform's concept and in the tech space, I think everyone would think of the wearables first.
All this to say I am zero percent surprised they went out of business. I'm only surprised it happened so shortly after their rebrand (though at this point I'm starting to think that must have been some sort of Hail Mary).
I think the T2 was to insinuate that it was âTwitter 2â. I didnât understand the rebrand, because, even though itâs been a few years, Pebble to me is still associated with the smart watch.
I actually signed up and used it a little, but I put up a funny post with a Corvette that had a wheel off sitting on wood blocks with the caption, âWhen Rednecks get Corvettes! đ¤Łâ It was a stupid little joke, but my post was flagged as offensive and removed. At that point I made one more post explaining what had happened, and that I was going to be leaving the platform. I left the post up for a couple of weeks and then deleted my account. If that was considered offensive, my sarcastic self didnât stand a chance on that platform.
Iâm not surprised they didnât get any traction.
I actually think conceptually "Pebble" is a great name for a social media site if you lean into the "drop a pebble in a pond and it ripples outward = even the smallest person can reach a large group of people with their message."
At least it MEANS something, unlike whatever "X" is supposed to represent (a name so bad, it's STILL usually followed by "formerly Twitter" whenever it's mentioned by anyone)
Following that concept, a platform called Ripple where individual posts are called Pebbles and responses/reshares are called Waves wouldn't be half-bad, branding-wise.
Hey that's the exact same time I heard about it! ...and I'm the one who posted it. Brilliant me đ
Yep, I looked it up that day for the first time and havenât heard about it again until now, when theyâre kind enough to tell us to not even bother with it.
I have never heard about it until this announcement of its demise :p
Crazy to me that they'd shut down instead of going open source and integrating with the fediverse. Doesn't even seem like a good business move as offering hosting for other companies and professional groups seems like a good market opportunity in a world where businesses even dislike Twitter.
Edit: for example, offer gitlab like service but for social media.
Wouldn't even need to open source - they could have joined the fediverse as closed source, offering a platform to those people who are apparently scared away by anything with a permissive license.
Then again, these people are probably more eager to be on bluesky.
Is there a part of bluesky that's under an impermissive license?
I think the whole step to integrate with the fediverse would have taken too much time and too many resources. Seems like a massive rewrite of the codebase to me, if it wasnât taken into account from the very start.
I'm mystified by why everyone wants to make a Twitter clone despite Twitter famously not being all that profitable.
I think one of the things Musk has proven is that there was a fair amount of organizational dead weight in Twitter.
If he'd made some staffing cuts, paid less for ego offices, and done it all while shutting up and not being Apartheid Boy we'd be applauding his 4d chess.
This is what happens when an organization gets sufficiently large. And this is not necessarily a bad thing.
"Surplus" staff is very important when a new project comes and the organization needs to scale up. Instead of suddenly hiring a lot of people with no understanding of organization culture, the staff can be mobilized to work on new things without affecting existing project and structure.
There is a reason why governments around the world don't suddenly fire their staff when it is apparent a lot of them are not working at max capacity. Redundancy is a kind of safety.
How did he prove that? I don't know how to determine how much of Twitter's decline is due to Musk's public statements.
Not sure if it's from an alternate universe or from our own future, but somewhere there is a version of this article that's like "Today, the market for Mastodon alternatives is a crowded one to say the least. There are numerous services for consumers to try, including the open-source based Misskey, smaller startups like Pleroma, plus the Elon Musk-based product formerly known as Twitter."
Every time I went to sign up for their site they required that I list my Twitter account. But, I've never had consistent interconnected social media profiles.
@UngodlyAudrey Guess there's another score for decentralized social media. đ
đ¤ I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary The would-be X rival had grown a small but engaged community on its microblogging service that aimed to dupe Twitterâs features, from its verification systems to functionality like DMs.
There are numerous services for consumers to try, including the open source-based platform Mastodon, a soon-to-be decentralized system from Bluesky, plus smaller startups like Spill, Spoutible and Post, as well as a new app from Meta called Instagram Threads.
Though the company may not have yet succeeded from a business and financial perspective, itâs been hard for others to duplicate its function as a breaking news platform and place for spirited debates.
In addition, some 10,000 users arrived at that list from early press, like TechCrunchâs coverage of its first outside funding â a $1.1 million angel round that included investors like former Google VP Bradley Horowitz, Android co-founder Rich Miner and the former CEO of Wikipedia, Katherine Maher.
Cselle agrees, noting that, perhaps, Pebble should have opened up enough space for disagreement to happen, while still drawing a hard line on the most disagreeable parts of running a Twitter-like platform.
It was a perfect storm of competition, Xâs continued traction, the lack of a native app, a brand that didnât resonate and a space that was maybe a little too safe to be as addictive and as fun as the original.
Saved 82% of original text. :::
I don't trust you any more, bot.
Also, why do you always say "click here to see the summary" then state the summary without a click button anyway?
This is smaller than many mastadon instances.
Hell - the fediverse has more than 20 000 registered servers.
It was invite only, not open registration, so not surprising they didn't have many users. Although Bluesky is the same and that seems to have loads. Hmm.
I had an account but literally used it for five seconds and then largely forgot about it.
I dont get Bluesky. I dont even care for this "app" what and why? Who would use that?