We've got Mastodon, and it's doing a bit better. We had Hive, which did okay til the security issues and shut down. Cohost and Post kinda... exist I suppose? And there are a few more I can't remember.
I've got an account on each one, and about 1/10th of those I follow exist across all of them combined. Maybe most people just don't care about a Twitter replacement and are fine without one.
Firstly, a significant fraction of the most interesting accounts I follow on Twitter have moved to Mastodon.
Secondly, Mastodon feels incredibly fresher than Twitter, which has completely ossified.
Thirdly, I know this sounds slightly contradictory, but it really is quite a lot like Twitter, in terms of recreating the good aspects of Twitter.
* Advertisers leave to protect their brands
* Major multi day outages
* Data corruption
* Security breaches
* Outlandish payment schemes for posts or reach
* Company is broken up and sold off in chunks to pay down the financing debt
Mr. Musk also continues to cut staff and leaders, including Nelson Abramson, Twitter’s global head of infrastructure, and Alan Rosa, the global information technology head and vice president of information security, according to four people familiar with the moves.
But I do question whether people will move towards any particular alternative, or whether they might even stick with other services they use instead. None of these replacements seem to quite have the pull necessary to attract most of the existing Twitter userbase, and none seem to be taking over in the same way Reddit beat Digg or Facebook beat Myspace. Perhaps the market for a Twitter esque microblogging service might decline as people spend more time on Discord/Reddit/YouTube/TikTok/whatever instead?
Hmm, I guess the only way to know for sure is to wait and see what happens when Twitter comes crashing down.