From a business point of view, we are (were) on Twitter to connect with like-minded people, join in conversations and ultimately generate awareness for our business. But how much time and space will Twitter be dedicating to e-commerce or ads when Musk’s talk so far has been on the importance of free speech and user experience? He’s also spoken about his frustration at how slow the platform has been to innovate, compared to TikTok or Instagram, so expect more features and functionality. Will it become a platform that continues to help businesses, individuals and communities grow or will it become another Facebook? Elon Musk’s tweets referred to accounts being able to monetise their own content as well as adding longer form content. There’s also been talk of upgrading Twitter search – with rumours of making it SEO-friendly. With so many changes on the horizon, it’s hard to trust the platform at all.

If you’re hanging in there with Twitter, there are rumours about changes to account verification on the platform, which includes existing accounts. We’ve already seen the unpopular launch of the paid-for Blue Verified scheme. Musk has announced that he wants to purge the platform of bots, remove trolls and do away with the anonymity of accounts.

It’s thought he might introduce government identity verification as part of the account set-up.  So in theory governments will be able to deal with hate speech on the platform directly. But many existing account owners may not be that keen to hand over yet more information to the government or simply might not be bothered. Either way, you’ll need to watch out for a dive in the number of your Twitter followers.

We’re in unprecedented times. The world’s richest man clearly hasn’t bought the platform with over 300 million users to make money. No one knows what his motivation is. So if you’d rather not see what a corporation wants you to see, or indulge its new owner on his platform, what are the alternatives to Twitter?

What is CounterSocial?

CounterSocial proclaims itself the no-nonsense alternative to Twitter. Established in 2017, it has a similar format to Twitter but the app has no ads or sponsored content, bots, internet trolls and a “zero tolerance to hostile nations.” Its founder ‘The Jester’ blocks six countries with high rates of cyber attacks: Russia, China, Iran, Syria, North Korea and Pakistan. It looks a bit different to other social platforms – it resembles Hootsuite or Tweetdeck with 5 feed columns or feeds that refresh. You can alter the order of the columns, and filter content based on keywords and phrases.

How do you use CounterSocial?

When you sign up your user name is fixed and cannot be changed or reused by anyone else as a security precaution, though you can update your display name (up to 24 characters).

Your bio has a character limit of 500 and you can include hashtags plus your avatar image and a banner image. You can include up to 4 items at the top of your bio – eg your location, pronouns, website or social links or labels. Your CounterSocial profile is private by default but you can enable your public landing page (PLP).

There is a 500-character limit for text posts and you can include links, hashtags, polls, content warnings and emojis. You’ll need to post GIFs from a third party as there is no

built-in GIF search engine. You can reply to posts and also boost posts – equivalent to the retweet or share options. And there’s an edit button! Boosts are shown to your followers only, not to the ‘Community Firehose’ – the community feed which includes everyone’s public posts. Clicking on the favourite star shows that you have read the post. Use popular hashtags to make your posts more discoverable. Similar to Twitter you can also create a thread of posts by just replying to your preceding post. You can also pin up to 5 posts to your profile and can access moderation tools including the Mute, Block and Report functions.

Filtering helps you get rid of any content you’d rather not see. CounterSocial (CoSo) lets you curate feeds from your favourite accounts through Lists (again, similar to Twitter). CoSo doesn’t track its users and does not let third-parties track you either as all outbound links are automatically sanitised to remove any embedded tracking parameters.

There is a pro version of CounterSocial which includes some neat features that other platforms don’t have, including CounterShare (file sharing), COSOGuard (identity theft alerts), COSO Groups (create your own groups) and use of COSO Realms where you can create your own 3D virtual reality spaces and invite others to join you. Pro users can also set their post to ‘self-detonate’ by clicking on the timer icon at the bottom of the post box.