Twitter, just a company, and as an active service, is moving towards the unknown. In the weeks since Elon Musk control, user has run away to any platform they can regroup on: Instagram, mastodons, Co-host, Child Stack. (Turns out no one wants to come back Facebook.) Rapid rise among those ranks are social hivea three-year-old company run by an excited, if slightly overwhelmed, trio now faces a massive influx of new users.
Hive’s functionality echoes many of Twitter’s functions, from profile pages and header images to lengthy consciousness streams. But it’s also more customizable, allowing users to change profile colors, add pronouns, post songs on their page, and host Q&As with followers. For anyone who wants Twitter without Musk, Hive offers a respectable clone. Even before Musk bought Twitter, Hive was already gaining traction. But as users have moved from the bird app, many people—especially those in the gaming community—have come to Hive. So much so that the app has surpassed 1 million users on November 21more than double its user base and it continues to grow.
But with huge expansion comes great responsibility, and for Hive, an upstart entering the social media space, the road ahead is tough. The app itself is a bit buggy, crashing frequently and collecting data as it moves. According to founder Raluca Pop, the team has been working around the clock to eliminate bugs, improve performance, and keep up with demand. They are also busy answering user questions and moderating the platform’s content. Pop has been resting for about two hours every night lately. “Honestly, none of us really slept that much,” she said. “But the app is something we’re passionate about, so it’s very exciting right now.”
According to Pop, fun is what Hive wants to bring to the social network. As a self-taught programmer who launched Hive in 2019, she wants to bring social media back to the so-called golden era by “making it a happier place for everyone.. a safe place for [users] to express their feelings, a safe place for them to post content.”
With a team of just three—though Pop says they’re looking for a fourth person “just because we’re scaling so fast”—it won’t be an easy task.
The difficulties of developing a new platform aside, if Hive is to succeed, it needs more than just stability. It will have to have more protections for users and be more heavily censored than it currently is. Left unchecked, platforms can easily become overwhelmed with harassment, hate campaigns, misinformation, child sexual abuse material, or violent imagery. To avoid that, a platform like Hive needs to have those protections built in now.
For proof, look no further than the pitfalls faced by other social media platforms. Consider Clubhouse, the chat-based app that became popular in the early days of the pandemic. When it grows up, it too problem with harassment“There is a cycle,” said Daniel Kelley, director of strategy and operations at the ADL Center for Technology and Society. “The idea of building to scale and emphasizing safety as an afterthought [founders realize] ‘Oh, this is a problem.’”
