Spoutible: An Alternative to Twitter

Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, people have been looking for an alternative to the social media platform. One of the newest is called Spoutible. Spoutible launched in January 2023. It was founded by Christopher Bouzy. Mr. Bouzy had earlier founded Bot Sentinel in 2018. Bot Sentinel is a Twitter analytics service that tracks disinformation, inauthentic behaviour, and harassment on Twitter.

As might be expected, Spoutible resembles Twitter a good deal. Like Twitter, it has a timeline to which one can make "spouts" (as posts are called). Like Twitter, one can post images and videos. While Twitter has "retweets," whereby someone can share someone else's tweets, Spoutible has echoes, whereby one can share someone else's spouts. Spoutible even has its own private messaging, much like Twitter.

While Spoutible does resemble Twitter, there are some important differences. First, Spoutible has no algorithm. While most people I know do not use the Twitter algorithm, it certainly seems as if Twitter would prefer they do. Second, Christopher Bouzy is African American, making Spoutible one of the few social media services owned by a person of colour. Indeed, it could quite possibly the only one owned by a person of colour. Third, Spoutible has a focus on protecting its users. It has rules against harassment, threats, disinformation, and spam. Indeed, Spoutible relies on the same technology as Bot Sentinel to help fight against disinformation and targeted harassment.  Fourth, one can edit spouts up to seven minutes after one makes them. If one makes a typo, then, one can edit the spout and not delete it entirely.

I have been using Spoutible now for around two months and I have been enjoying it. I have not seen the sort of harassment many have experienced on Twitter, nor I have seen any of the sort of spam one sees on Twitter. I have yet to be followed by a pornbot there, nor have I seen any. And while I haven't many followers yet, I receive more interaction than I do on Mastodon or many other social media sites. Nearly every day people like and echo my spouts. When I post a link to my one of my blog posts, it seems as if people will actually go and read the post, rather than ignore it and scroll on by.

One disadvantage with Spoutible is one I think may eventually be corrected with time. As of yet it does not seem like there are a lot of people on the platform. Right now I only have 41 followers, as contrasted with the 277 followers I have on Mastodon. At the moment there is not much in the way of a classic film and classic television community at Spoutible. I think there are only a few of us who spout regularly about classic movies and TV shows. Of course, this is something that I think will change with time. As Spoutible continues to grow, people will get more followers and eventually classic film and television communities will develop.

Now I do have to point out that like any young social media service, Spoutible has had occasional glitches. Pages would fail to load or the timeline would fail to update. While these glitches happened from time to time when I first joined Spoutible, they have declined considerably just in the past two months. From what I have read some have complained about Spoutible's Adult Content Policy, maintaining they are much too vague. Now I don't post Adult Content myself and I have yet to actually read the policy, so I cannot say much about it myself.

Spoutible is hardly the only Twitter alternative out here, as several seem to have sprung up of late. That having been said, I think that it succeeds in many ways that the others don't. Only time will tell if it takes off.