Building a social media app by yourself is tricky
Image: Allie Sullberg / The Verge
Last year, Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter and promptly brought chaos to the company — laying off three-quarters of the staff and upending many long stable (if not always successful) parts of the business. So Twitter users began looking for a way out. Many migrated, even if only for a few days, to Mastodon, others moved to Instagram or Snap, and a lot of people declared Hive Social their new home.
Hive seemed like a cleaner, better version of Twitter, with an attractive app featuring a familiar interface — only it creaked under the sudden influx of new users. Then, the company announced it would need to shut down its servers for two weeks to fix security issues. The challenges Hive faced were enormous — as they would be…
