Players Are Fleeing Twitter for Hive. Can It Deal with the Swarm?

Twitter, each as an organization and as a functioning service, is hurtling towards the unknown. Within the weeks since Elon Musk took management, customers have been fleeing to no matter platforms they will regroup on: Instagram, Mastodon, Cohost, Substack. (It seems nobody needs to return to Fb.) Rising quickly amongst these ranks is Hive Social, a three-year-old firm run by an excited, if not barely overwhelmed, trio now confronted with a large inflow of recent customers. 

Hive’s performance echoes a lot of Twitter’s, from profile pages and header photographs to lengthy stream-of-consciousness threads. Nevertheless it’s additionally extra customizable, permitting customers to alter profile colours, add pronouns, publish songs to their pages, and maintain Q&As with followers. For anybody who needs Twitter with out Musk, Hive affords a good reproduction. Even earlier than Musk purchased Twitter, Hive was gaining traction. However as customers have migrated from the fowl app, many—notably these within the gaming neighborhood—have landed on Hive. A lot in order that the app surpassed 1 million customers on November 21, greater than doubling its person base, and it continues to develop.

However with nice growth comes nice duty, and for Hive, an upstart coming into the social media enviornment, the street forward is tough. The app itself is a bit, properly, busted, crashing usually and crawling when it does transfer. The crew, based on founder Raluca Pop, has been working across the clock to squash bugs, enhance efficiency, and sustain with demand. They’re additionally busy answering person questions and moderating the platform’s content material. Pop has been resting about two hours per night time lately. “Truthfully, none of us have actually gotten that a lot sleep,” she says. “However the app is one thing we’re obsessed with, so it is enjoyable proper now.” 

Enjoyable, based on Pop, is what Hive needs to deliver again to social media. A self-taught coder who launched Hive in 2019, she needs to return social media to its so-called golden period by “making it a happier place for folks … a protected place for [users] to specific how they really feel, a protected place for them to publish content material.” 

With a crew of simply three—although Pop says they’re trying to deliver on a fourth particular person “simply because we’re scaling actually quick”—this received’t be a simple job.

New-platform rising pains apart, if Hive is to succeed it must be extra than simply secure. It’ll should have extra protections in place for customers and be moderated extra vigorously than it may be at present. Left unchecked, platforms can simply develop into overwhelmed by harassment, hate campaigns, disinformation, little one sexual abuse materials, or violent photographs. To keep away from that, a platform like Hive must be constructing in these safeguards now.

For proof, look no additional than the pitfalls skilled by different social media platforms. Take into account Clubhouse, the chat-driven app that gained recognition within the early days of the pandemic. Because it grew, so did its issues with harassment, racism, anti-Semitism, and extra. “There’s a cycle,” says Daniel Kelley, director of technique and operations on the ADL Heart for Expertise and Society. “This concept of constructing to scale development and stapling on security as an afterthought as soon as [founders realize] ‘Oh, it is a drawback.’”