Twitter alternative Post News is shutting down

Post News, a Twitter alternative that emerged in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover, is shutting down. Noam Bardin, the platform’s founder and former CEO of Waze, writes that Post News “is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform.”

The Andreessen Horowitz-backed platform launched in a closed beta in November 2022, but now it’s set to shutter “within the next few weeks.” It serves as a social platform that also offers users ad-free access to paywalled content from publishers such as Fortune, Business Insider, Wired, The Boston Globe, and others. All users have to do is pay a “few cents” per article instead of signing up for a subscription to each publication.

After lifting its waitlist in early 2023, Bardin told TechCrunch that around 430,000 people signed up. The platform eventually rolled out a mobile app and later launched a real-time notification system, with plans for more features in the future. However, the cost of keeping the platform running seems to have outweighed user activity.

“We built a toxicity-free community, a platform where Publishers engage, and an app that validated many theories around Micropayments and consumers’ willingness to purchase individual articles,” Bardin writes. “A consumer business, at its core, needs to show rapid consumer adoption and we have not managed to find the right product combination to make it happen.”

Post News will let users download their posts on the platform starting next week. Users can also withdraw the cash balance used for article payments and creator tips until May 31st. Post News isn’t the only Twitter alternative that struggled to find an audience, as another potential rival, Pebble, shut down in November 2023.

But several Twitter alternatives are still standing — and all of them are part of the fediverse, which means they’re open to sharing their content with other social platforms. The decentralized platforms Mastodon and Bluesky are still going strong, while Meta’s Threads launched its fediverse beta in March and added Taylor Swift to its user base.