The social media landscape

Up: § 2023 Shareholder Letter Index

There have been some fascinating shifts across social networks and the social media management space in 2023.

Where vertical video dominated in the prior few years, 2023 saw the return of text-based social networks with the rise of Mastodon, the launch of Meta’s Threads, and other contenders such as Bluesky. Much of this was driven by the changes made at X (Twitter), and it is a welcome change in terms of the variety of options for consumers. We’ve seen an increase in the opportunities to serve customers, given the increased complexity that these changes bring about.

Another important shift taking place is the advent of decentralized social networks, including the Fediverse. We believe the efforts being made towards open standards for social networking are important for the Internet and the world, and we were one of the fastest to move to support Mastodon in early 2023.

Across our space, we’ve observed a number of the more established players move up-market, which has opened up even more space as we’ve made conscious efforts to expand down-market. We now see an opportunity to be the largest product in our space by volume of active users and paying customers. Early in 2023, X (Twitter) increased the cost of their API significantly, and this led to a wide number of the smaller products being unable to continue to offer X (Twitter). Social media management continues to be a crowded market overall, and so we’ve made increased efforts to be clear in our strategy and establish a position that is uniquely ours to take and hard for others to replicate.

• The rise of decentralized social media
  • Launching Mastodon
  • Rise of Threads, Bluesky
  • Fediverse
  • Others to be aware of - Farcaster, Pixelfed, Post