When Elon Musk began to transform Twitter into X, a slew of people who had either once worked for the platform or were simply ardent users launched various efforts to build better alternatives. One of them was Gabor Cselle, who from 2014 to 2016 worked as a group product manager at Twitter, tweaking the timeline and new-user experience.
Cselle’s product, T2—which later rebranded to Pebble—was designed to be a kinder, safer alternative to Twitter. Trust and safety were paramount to Pebble, which gained 20,000 users, 3,000 of whom logged on daily at its peak. But it didn’t last long. Launched in December 2022, it’s already shutting down at the start of next month.
Cselle did not respond to an interview request for this story, but he told TechCrunch “the competitive landscape evolved faster than we thought.” Loyalty to Twitter was also stronger than many believed it would be, even as Musk gave users a host of reasons to leave.
Pebble is far from alone in its struggle to make a dent in X’s dominant market position, even as the app has lost one in eight users in just a year, bringing its total base down to 121 million. But those figures are still far above upstart competitors like Cohost (162,000 users), Bluesky (1 million users) and Mastodon (1.7 million users).
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