The ‘Twitter killers’ never replaced Twitter. Here’s what happened instead.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, a parade of new platforms emerged. Threads brought Meta’s enormous reach while Bluesky promised a more open social network. Users scattered, and for a while, it looked like one might emerge as the next buzzy digital gathering place.

Nearly four years later, there is a clear winner in size. Maybe not so much a winner in culture.

“Twitter was really the platform when you wanted to go have some kind of interaction with people who are doing something bigger than themselves,” said Deborah Bowen, assistant professor of instruction and integrated public relations and advertising at the University of South Florida.

Twitter once excelled at creating a shared second screen, she said. Bowen recalled during the Super Bowl blackout in 2013, Oreo jumped into the live conversation with its “Dunk in the Dark” post. Cultural events unfolded collectively.

“We are so spaced out now,” Bowen said. “I’m not sure that kind of togetherness is going to happen again.”

Bowen says her advice for brands looking at the social landscape in 2026 is to stop looking for the next Twitter. It probably doesn’t exist. The audience that once gathered in one spot is now spread across countless smaller communities.

Threads won scale

Bowen initially thought Meta had the best chance as a Twitter replacement.

“I thought if anybody could possibly go up against that microblogging juggernaut, it would have to be Mark Zuckerberg,” she said.

On raw audience, that prediction looks pretty good. Threads is enormous, and Meta is leaning harder into communities, including dedicated spaces around books, sports, parenting and music.

The platform reached 500 million monthly active users in June, according to Meta. Similarweb data reported by TechCrunch estimated 147 million daily active mobile users in July, up 21.3% from a year earlier.

But Bowen found something missing.

“I found it hard to chat with people on Threads,” she said. “I just didn’t find it to be satisfying.”

The distinction between reach and connection is important for communicators, she said. A large audience doesn’t equate to a strong community.

Bluesky lost momentum

Bluesky comes closer to capturing the old Twitter sensibility, but not in the same way, Bowen said.

“The closest I’m seeing to that tone now is on Bluesky,” she said. “But the kind of biting, sarcastic, edgy, not edge lord, but edgy stuff that you could get away with on Twitter, it’s not on Bluesky.”

Similarweb estimated Bluesky had 10.4 million monthly active mobile users worldwide in June, down 27.2% year over year. Daily mobile users dropped 25.6% in July to about 3 million, even as the platform approached 46 million registered users.

The gap between registered accounts and active users is probably the most useful data point.

“I’m seeing the same people who were on Twitter, the same newsmakers and kingmakers and so on, but it’s just different,” she said.

Migration spikes are not the same as durable behavior, she added.

Mastodon has noticeable limits

Mastodon is the most different structurally. It has a decentralized network spread across independently operated servers.

But it has remained a much smaller network than Threads, X or Bluesky. Mastodon publishes current network statistics, including active users and servers, based on its crawl of accessible servers.

When she tried the model, Bowen instantly thought, “I don’t understand that.”

A social platform can offer greater control, but mainstream users still have to understand why they should join and how to use it, she said.

X is still surviving

X remains far larger than Bluesky or Mastodon. Similarweb data showed 123.7 million daily active mobile users in July, down 7% year over year. Its worldwide monthly active mobile audience stood at about 302 million in June, while web1 visits actually increased 5.3% year over year in July to 4.7 billion.

So declaring X dead is not completely accurate, but its audience is different.

There’s no clear winner

The platforms doing well now may offer a clue about where audiences diverge, Bowen said.

Instagram and TikTok emerged as strong competitors. Both are highly visual, algorithm-driven and built around endless content discovery rather than Twitter’s text-heavy public conversation.

“One thing I loved about Twitter is that it was the reader’s platform,” Bowen said. “I could go on and just read. Now we have pictures, videos, captions, et cetera in one post.”

So which platform should you lean into? That depends on your audience, Bowen said.

“If I’m a brand, I’m going to figure out where my people are,” she said.

Ask where your audience has developed an actual habit, what it does there and whether your brand has a natural role in that behavior.

“I think part of the issue is that we haven’t gotten our footing on these platforms yet,” Bowen said. “We don’t know what they are supposed to be. And we don’t know what we don’t know.”