
Twitter, both as a company and as a functioning service, is hurtling toward the unknown. In the weeks since Elon Musk took control, users have been fleeing to whatever platforms they can regroup on: Instagram, Mastodon, Cohost, Substack. (It turns out no one wants to go back to Facebook.) Rising rapidly among those ranks is Hive Social, a three-year-old company run by an excited, if not slightly overwhelmed, trio now faced with a massive influx of new users.
Hive’s functionality echoes much of Twitter’s, from profile pages and header images to long stream-of-consciousness threads. But it’s also more customizable, allowing users to change profile colors, add pronouns, post songs to their pages, and hold Q&As with followers. For anyone who wants Twitter without Musk, Hive offers a respectable replica. Even before Musk bought Twitter, Hive was gaining traction. But as users have migrated from the bird app, many—particularly those in the gaming community—have landed on Hive. So much so that the app surpassed 1 million users on November 21, more than doubling its user base, and it continues to grow.



But with great expansion comes great responsibility, and for Hive, an upstart entering the social media arena, the road ahead is difficult. The app itself is a bit, well, busted, crashing often and crawling when it does move. The team, according to founder Raluca Pop, has been working around the clock to squash bugs, improve performance, and keep up with demand. They're also busy answering user questions and moderating the platform’s content. Pop has been resting about two hours per night recently. “Honestly, none of us have really gotten that much sleep,” she says. “But the app is something we're passionate about, so it's fun right now.”
Fun, according to Pop, is what Hive wants to bring back to social media. A self-taught coder who launched Hive in 2019, she wants to return social media to its so-called golden era by “making it a happier place for people … a safe place for [users] to express how they feel, a safe place for them to post content.”
With a team of just three—though Pop says they’re looking to bring on a fourth person “just because we're scaling really fast”—this won’t be an easy task.
New-platform growing pains aside, if Hive is to succeed it needs to be more than just stable. It’ll have to have more protections in place for users and be moderated more vigorously than it can be currently. Left unchecked, platforms can easily become overwhelmed by harassment, hate campaigns, disinformation, child sexual abuse material, or violent images. To avoid that, a platform like Hive needs to be building in those safeguards now.

While Hive has displayed potential to be an alternative for gamers chiming away from Twitter, it remains crucial that the platform effectively bridges its initial use-case with broader community appeal if they wish capture and sustain this new influx of usERS.

The hive manifests potential as a promising Social Media platform, yet its ability to accommodate the massive exodus of gamers from Twitter is an untested challenge that will determine whether it can indeed become their new haven on social networking.

While the current exodus of gamers from Twitter to Hive is a notable trend, its ability to handle and retain this swarm will ultimately depend on how well it addresses their specific needs as an active community.

Hive's potential to become a viable alternative hub for gamers fleeing Twitter due to its gaming community-oriented features and increased privacy, remains uncertain but promising nonetheless. Only time will tell if it can indeed withstand the influx ofhir situ polit.

The migration of gamers from Twitter to Hive presents a test for its infrastructure and community building potential. Time will tell if it can accommodate the influx while sustaining an engaging, gaming-focused ecosystem.

The migration of gamers from Twitter to Hive exemplifies the demand for a more conducive platform. The real challenge will lie in whether or not Hive can successfully accommodate this influx while preserving its unique gaming-centric features and engaging user experience.