A Twitter challenger called Spill, designed by two former employees, started trending this past weekend as Elon Musk announced that Twitter is putting limits on the number of posts users can read. Spill climbed in Apple’s App Store rankings over the holiday weekend, rising to the No. 3 most downloaded app and emerging as the store’s most-downloaded social media app. Spill users call themselves “Spillionaires,” a moniker the company has embraced. On Saturday, Musk said Twitter will limit post views for non-paying users, sending Spill downloads soaring.

Spill was created by Twitter veterans Alphonzo Terrell and DeVaris Brown. As with other social platforms, Spill’s live news feed is a central component, but it is designed to be more visual.

“Instead of tweeting, users ‘spill’ — taken from the popular expression ‘spill the tea,’ which refers to gossip,” reports The Wall Street Journal, noting that “the platform makes it easy to post text over photos, videos and GIFs.”

While Terrell told WSJ all users are welcome at Spill, the outlet writes that “he and Brown created it as a safe online destination for Black people and members of the LGBTQ community,” noting that “people in those groups are often targeted with hateful rhetoric, even though they ‘consistently set the new trends on all social platforms.’”

Spill will diligently monitor for hate speech using both artificial intelligence and human moderators.

Meanwhile, The New York Times writes that Meta Platforms will today launch Threads, saying some in the tech community are calling it “a ‘Twitter killer.’”

Meta CEO “Mark Zuckerberg has long wanted to dislodge Twitter and provide the central place for public conversation online. Yet Twitter has remained stubbornly irreplaceable,” NYT reports.

NYT says Threads “appears to function much like Twitter, emphasizing public conversations,” with users able to follow people with whom they’re already linked on Instagram, owned by Meta, whose portfolio also includes Facebook and WhatsApp.

Musk may be doing as much to promote these new outlets as their owners, The New York Times suggests, writing that the billionaire “said on Saturday that Twitter will temporarily limit the number of posts users can read per day to address concerns over data scraping, just hours after thousands of users reported widespread problems using the site.”

Related:
Is Threads Really a ‘Twitter Killer’? Here’s What We Know So Far, NPR, 7/6/23
Twitter Threatens to Sue Meta Over Threads App, The Guardian, 7/6/23
Bluesky Suffers Outage as People Flee Twitter in Wake of New Restrictions, Forbes, 7/1/23
Quitting Twitter? Here Are Six Alternatives, from Bluesky to Spill, Variety, 7/3/23
Twitter Announces New Version of TweetDeck, a Twitter Blue Exclusive, Social Media Today, 7/3/23
Meta Unveils Its Upcoming Twitter Competitor for Employees, ETCentric, 6/12/23