(reposted from August 2018)

Tŵt is a bilingual online social content platform, very similar to Twitter in some ways, and very much not in others. You may well be thinking the same thing I heard a more than a few times during its development; “do we really need another social media platform?” and I hope you’ll read on to see if indeed there might just be a good answer to that question.

First, the similarities.

Tŵt allows anyone to create a member account and post messages up to 500 characters to the network; we call these “Tŵtiau” or “Toots”. These messages can contain #hashtags and links, as well as video and image files. Members can subscribe to other members on the network, and reply to anything in their content feed.

Familiar ground for many, but what makes Tŵt a meaningful alternative?

Technologically the differences are privacy and ownership. Unlike Twitter, Tŵt makes it simple for authors to control who can see their content, who can follow them, and they can completely remove themselves from the network at will. If desired, all content can be retrieved and even transported to a competing service providing it uses the same underlying software.

Philosophically, Tŵt is completely open source and is operated as a non-profit; no advertising, no dues, no fees of any kind. And Tŵt comes with clear guidelines about what is considered unacceptable content.