Move over, Twitter. A new app is ready to cater to Black and other marginalized communities as the bird app continues on its seemingly downward spiral. Users have been calling out Elon Musk and the app all weekend following the rollout of usage restrictions on how many tweets an individual can view daily.
“To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits: verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts [per] day, unverified accounts to 600 posts [per] day, [and] new unverified accounts to 300 [posts per] day,” wrote Musk on Saturday (July 1). The disruption is the latest in a series of widespread outages that users have encountered since the tech CEO took over the platform in a $44 billion deal on Oct. 27.
A flood of Black users have since begun to sign up for Spill. The social app was created by former Twitter employees Alphonzo “Phonz” Terrell and DeVaris Brown. Spill introduced its Beta app to the Apple App Store in January and is invite-only. Those interested in joining are also able to add their names to the waitlist. It boasts a similar function as the bird app but swaps tweets for spills and leans heavily into meme culture. However, a significant difference in the competing apps’ user experience is in how Spill prioritizes weeding out hate speech, especially messaging aimed at Black users.
“We’re going to be more intentional and be more accurate around things that will be deemed offensive because, again, this is our lived experience or learned experience,” Brown told TechCrunch. “It’ll be much more accurate to catch those kinds of things that will detract from the platform, that would not lend to creating a safe space for our users and our creators.”
The two developers were among the thousands of staff who were abruptly laid off weeks into the Tesla founder’s tenure at the helm. Countless complaints launched at Twitter’s struggles can be found under the following hashtags: #TwitterFail, #TwitterIsBroken, #RIPTwitter, and the trending topic Black Twitter.