According to the head of internet services company Cloudflare, Twitter traffic is “shrinking,” amid signs that users are migrating to alternative platforms like Thread, BlueSky, and Mastodon.
On Sunday, Matthew Prince published a Cloudflare ranking graph of the most popular sites in the world, showing that Twitter has declined since the start of 2023, shortly after Elon Musk took control of the platform.
The graph shows a significant drop in Twitter’s Cloudflare domain server rank in mid-2023 coinciding with uncommon changes Musk made to the site, and the launch of rival Meta Threads.
At the end of June, Musk tweeted that Twitter had set an all-time record for “user seconds.”
In early July, Twitter began forcing people to log in to view tweets. It also sets a limit on the average number of posts that different account layers can read each day – initially 6,000 for paying users and 600 for non-paying users. Musk said the changes were made to reduce attempts to corrupt the site.
The limit has since been increased, and Twitter removed the login requirement last week. The Guardian received the usual automatic emoji response when Twitter was requested for comment.
Twitter’s Meta answer, Threads, has surpassed 70 million users in the first three days since it launched last Thursday, and is expected to reach 100 million on Monday. This excludes users from the European Union who cannot access the app until it complies with EU law.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on the topics site that he believes the toxicity of Twitter — which allegedly has 250 million users — has prevented the site from succeeding.
“The goal is to keep (the strings) amicable as they expand. I think this is possible and will ultimately be key to its success,” he said last week. “That’s one of the reasons why Twitter has never been as successful as I think it should be, and we want to do it differently.”
While threads aim to be a “nice” place, research from Media Matters showed that “within 24 hours of threads being released, right-wing and fringe personalities registered with the platform”. This included white nationalist Richard Spencer, who used to write for Breitbart, and white supremacists like Nick Fuentes, an outspoken anti-Semite.
Some far-right accounts are testing the platform’s moderation — which adopts the same rules as Facebook and Instagram — in an effort to get banned as a badge of honour.
Mastodon, a former Twitter competitor, saw its monthly active users rise slightly in July, after stagnating since earlier this year. It’s back roughly two million monthly active users, according to an analysis by The Guardian.
While BlueSky is still in beta and users can join the platform by invitation only, it had to pause new sign-ups to handle demand after implementing Twitter’s price cap change.