X, formerly known as Twitter, is not the force to be reckoned with that it once was, but experts say efforts to present an alternative to the platform have fallen flat.
Since mercurial technology tycoon Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022, many of the worst fears from users have been realised: layoffs were plentiful, and included Twitter's content moderation team, which built policies to protect users from harassment and the proliferation of hate speech. People who had once been banned from the platform for violating rules were welcomed back with open arms.
Meanwhile, Mr Musk, who himself has promoted far-right conspiratorial, xenophobic and racist ideas, used Twitter to amplify those views. He also binned one of the social media world's most successful brands, Twitter, and renamed the platform X.
Users deactivated accounts in droves, advertisers fled and many in the technology world, both entrenched companies and start-ups, saw an opening for an alternative.
Yet four years after Mr Musk took ownership, X has survived the challenges.
"X has proved to be far more resilient than people probably wanted to give credit for or expected, but not because it's still winning on scale," social media analyst and consultant Matt Navarra said.
"I think it really has an advantage in what you'd could call the institutional graph, you know, journalists, politicians, CEOs, investors, government agencies, and even specialist building social communities."
Mr Navarra explained that because those entities spent so much time creating their social network and communication apparatuses on X, simply leaving for a new platform was easier said than done.
Mr Navarra points out that even Mr Musk's strategic and rhetorical blunders haven't been able to sink X.
"X still feels like the internet's control room," he said. "He has damaged trust and advertiser confidence in X's sense of neutrality, but he also makes the platform permanently newsworthy."
The list of challengers is lengthy: Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Vero, and even US President Donald Trump's platform, Truth Social have not been able to significantly dent X's influence.
Mastodon putters along
One of the first contenders was Mastodon, though its genesis has nothing to do with Mr Musk.
It was created in 2016 by developers who wanted to push the idea of a social network that was decentralised, open-source and largely community owned.
Mastodon's brief brush with mainstream popularity took place as panic set in when Mr Musk walked into Twitter's San Francisco headquarters shortly after buying the company.
It was listed in hundreds of articles as a way to replicate the Twitter experience, but after several weeks, excitement had evaporated.
The decentralised design of Mastodon meant that signing up, creating an account and finding the users once followed on Twitter was highly challenging. New users were puzzled when they had to pick servers revolving around topics that best fit their interests.
Mastodon still has a loyal following, remaining popular with many in the technology sector and academics, but with only 700,000 monthly active users, it has not come close to overtaking X - but in fairness, it never really sought to do so.
Post: The first casualty
Hopes were high when Israeli technology entrepreneur Noam Bardin announced the launch of Post in November 2022.
Post had the financial backing of several prominent venture capitalists, and it also seemed to have the support of various news organisations who hoped to capitalise on its use of micropayments to generate revenue.
"We sink or swim with the publishers," Mr Bardin said in a 2023 interview with The National. "We're all aligned in our interests ... there's no situation where we make the money and they don't."
At the time of that interview, Post declined to provide insights as to how many people were using the platform.
Whatever the number turned out to be, it clearly wasn't enough. In 2024, Post announced it was shutting down.
“A consumer business, at its core, needs to show rapid consumer adoption and we have not managed to find the right product combination to make it happen," Mr Bardin wrote.
Bluesky's boom tapers off
Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey started Bluesky while he was still at the company in 2019 as an internal project to test the idea of a social media platform that could be open source.
Mr Dorsey left Twitter in 2021, and took the idea of Bluesky with him.
The platform, which closely resembled Twitter, started out with rave reviews among those who were allowed to use the beta-version.
As anger towards Mr Musk's policies and politics grew, Bluesky was made available to everyone.
Although its creators said it wasn't intentional, Bluesky became associated with left-leaning politics and more specifically, the anti-Trump movement.
Some pointed out that Bluesky became a liberal echo chamber in the same way that X became one for the political right.
Bluesky hasn't yet released monthly-active-user statistics, but the platform has said that 45 million accounts have been created on the platform.
Its chief executive Toni Schneider recently told the Decoder podcast that BlueSky isn't content simply being a place associated with left-leaning politics.
"We definitely want that to change," he said. "It certainly wasn’t designed to attract one specific group of people, and it works for anyone."
Members of the Trump White House have also joined BlueSky, but as Mr Navarra points out, the social media app has been supplemental to X rather than overtaking it.
"BlueSky [became popular] as direct response to the risks exposed by Musk's ownership of X, but it still lacks any real scale, institutional density or international reach," he said, adding that although Bluesky has proven popular with some journalists and academics, it hasn't been able to win over broader audiences.
Threads stays the course
After the Musk takeover at Twitter, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, fast-tracked an internal project designed to challenge Twitter called Threads.
In October 2023, the social media giant officially released the app to great acclaim.
The excitement surrounding Threads was twofold. It was partially driven by the backlash against Mr Musk, but was also fuelled by the fact that Meta had integrated it with Instagram, making it easier for users to sign up and find accounts to follow.
Though there were a few slight differences between Threads and X in terms of user interface design, most users and technology analysts agreed that it attempted to duplicate the X experience.
Like most technology apps and products, the initial excitement around Threads slowly evaporated, but Meta kept making improvements, added community sections and cross-promoted the app on Instagram and Facebook.
"500 million monthly actives on Threads in less than 3 years," Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg recently posted on Threads. "Thanks for making this platform what it is."
Depending on which social media platform stats you look at, Threads appears to have caught up with and possibly surpassed X in terms of monthly active users, making it the platform's most formidable challenger.
Yet Mr Navarra points out that the metric of monthly active users, although significant, isn't necessarily everything when it comes to cultural cachet or influence of a social media platform.
Though increasingly popular, Threads hasn't necessarily been the go-to place for breaking news or major events.
"I think X presents a powerful co-ordination trap," Mr Navarra explained.
"You know, journalists stay because their sources are there, sources stay because journalists are watching and politicians stay because rivals and reporters are there...Threads is still trying to beat X as a product."
X's biggest threat
Despite no shortage of challengers over the last through years, X still has the influence that other social platforms hope to possess.
Mr Navarra said that with so many examples of social media platforms failing to replace the X experience with something better, the real threat to Mr Musk's platform might come from less tangible factors.
"I think X's biggest weakness is generational," Mr Navarra said, adding that younger people are looking to completely different platforms that aren't necessarily text-based to consume content and find out what's happening.
"They get news from TikTok, Instagram, YouTube creators, and private messaging platforms rather than a public feed of text posts," he said.
Meanwhile, Mr Musk has shown no sign of backtracking on his polarising political views or his embrace of conspiracy theories, and X has given him a global platform.
Despite a slew of challengers, X remains king of social media - at least for now.
