I’d never even heard of Pebble before learning it had decided to cease its operations. I wasn’t the only one, which was its problem.
If you used — note the past tense — the social media platform Pebble, then you already know. For the benefit of the rest of us, Pebble decided to shut itself down.
The platform, which also used the name T2, launched in November 2022. Two former employees of what was then Twitter founded the platform. They started with the idea of being a serious competitor for X, the platform that replaced Twitter.
I vaguely remember hearing about something called T2, but I never tried it. The service only rebranded to Pebble two months ago. There was definitely not enough time for the new brand too have much of an effect.
The platform’s home page explains the decision:
Our goal was to build a kinder, safer, public square. We grew from 6 users on the first day (Dec 9, 2022) to a community of 20k by October 2023. But we weren’t growing fast enough (to) justify additional investment, and we also underestimated the number of new competitors with a similar vision who would enter the field.
It will always seem like a daunting task to grow any new service into a platform with X’s number of users. I definitely understand that.
But the fact that so many “alternatives” or would-be alternatives sprang up also says something about how fed up some people are with the direction X has taken.
I’m sorry — to a point — that I never really saw Pebble in action. At the same time, I figure that if I had, and liked it, I’d be ticked off to see it shut down so quickly.
While I still use X, which I’ve been on for 15 years as of this month, I also use several other platforms. You can find me on Threads, Mastodon, Post News and BlueSky. There things I like and dislike about both. My biggest gripe about the four is that none offer an option to schedule posts. That means you have to carve out additional time from your schedule whenever you want to add content.
I’m hoping these platforms will do something about that soon. Maybe that will keep them around longer than our newly-departed Pebble.
