Twitter rival Hive Social has gone viral in recent days — but what is it?

With Twitter under new management and as fears for its future circulate, throngs of users are fleeing the site for alternatives — or at least they’re making accounts on those platforms, just in case.

One such rising star taking over the trending page is a currently mobile-only app called Hive Social, which skyrocketed in popularity this week with an influx of Twitter refugees.

Hive surpassed a million users Monday evening after it topped Twitter’s trending list, before growing further on Tuesday, gaining 250,000 new users overnight. It’s currently the #2 top free app in Canada’s App Store — not bad for an platform developed by a college student and self-taught coder.

What is Hive Social?

In a nutshell, Hive feels like the love child of Twitter and Instagram, with features reminiscent of MySpace. It allows text posts, photos, videos and polls.

Hive’s creator, 24-year-old Kassandra Pop, founded the app in 2019 after becoming disillusioned with popular social media platforms and their algorithms, according to its website. As such, the platform claims to have no algorithms deciding what users see.

Instead, posts appear in chronological order in your feed without preference, unlike Twitter, whose algorithm promotes content it thinks you’re interested in. There are no blue check marks that can amplify your posts or paid options to boost your exposure. For now, Hive has no ads.

Outside of the accounts you follow, Hive’s Discover tab contains trending content from users you don’t. This includes sections for individual topics, including memes, pets, travel and more. Like Twitter, users can comment, repost content on their own accounts or like them to show their support.

Unlike Twitter, Hive offers more in-depth profile customization options. On top of the usual profile picture and cover photo, users can pick a colour theme that all its buttons will match, denote their pronouns or astrological signs and even have certain songs play whenever someone visits their profile.

Another important difference is Hive has no character limits, which is both a blessing and a curse — I’ve read posts that feel more like novels.

Is it worth the hype?

That depends on your personal preferences, but there are some major downsides you should be aware of.

Hive Social is currently run by only three people: Pop and two unnamed developers, one of whom joined on Friday. As such, it might not the smoothest service — for example, users have reported frequent crashes and bugs in recent days with its rising userbase.

Another glaring issue is Hive currently allows more than one person to share a username, putting people at risk of impersonation. A cursory search reveals at least 20 different users all with the same handle @elonmusk. However, Pop told Insider her team is working to fix the issue.

Pop also said the site currently has no content moderators, though she’s working on a strategy to moderate posts through algorithms and human staffers. For now, it relies on users to self-report harmful content like gore or child exploitation.

Finally, Hive is obviously a much smaller app than Twitter. The community is comparatively tiny, there are fewer posts to look at and it’s lacking the polish of its multibillion dollar competitors. Whether that’s a good thing is up to you.

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