Before Bluesky, there was already a social network that tried to compete directly with Twitter… and it sank: the sad story of Pebble

When something is successful, many rush to copy it in hopes of achieving success as well. Sometimes it works out, like that time Instagram copied Snapchat to create its Stories, but most of the time it doesn’t, like that Facebook copy manufactured by Google called Google+ that no one was really interested in. And what about Twitter? At its core, it’s the simplest social network of all: it only requires text, images, and a couple of functions. It’s easy to copy, but… Why do we need another Twitter if we already have one and don’t like it too much?

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Pebble goes bam-bam

Although now it seems that we have all packed our virtual bags to move to Bluesky, in November 2022 this exodus was not yet so clear. Clearly, something had to be done after Elon Musk’s arrival to power at the social network, but no one was quite sure what. Move to Mastodon? To Threads? To Bluesky? What was the right path? There are very few breadcrumbs, and they have to be shared among several, after all.

As soon as he arrived at Twitter, Musk decided to lay off a large part of the staff, who suddenly found themselves out of work. This was the case for Sarah Oh and Gabor Cselle, who decided to do what they did best: create Twitter 2. Or, to summarize, T2, which to avoid litigation evolved into Pebble some time later. Pebble was an alternative to Twitter that allowed, like the former, 280 characters, with the intention of being as similar to the social network they loved as possible, but with more security and moderation.

After several tests since they founded the company in November 2022, Pebble was finally launched on April 25, 2023, with an invitation system that initially allowed only 1000 users to post, who had to invite five other friends until reaching 6000, and then continue expanding. All this without an app, just through the web. And if you’re wondering if it was a success, consider whether people are moving to Pebble or other places.

Just seven months after opening, Pebble closed its doors: only 3000 people used it daily, and with that attendance, it simply wasn’t viable. The website became an instance of Mastodon and that’s where the adventure ended. Another grain in this vast sand that is the Internet, a footnote in history that at least dared to stand up. Hey, who knows? Maybe with a little more advertising, we would be moving to Pebble instead of Bluesky…

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