 I'm Tom Merritt from Daily Tech News Show. Here are five alternatives to Twitter. Ah, Twitter. If you're a regular Twitter user, you probably know the platform's been on a bit of a roller coaster lately. Maybe you're even thinking of trying out an alternative platform. But which one do you pick, especially if you want the microblogging experience, maybe something new? Heck, you might even just add these to your social media routine and keep Twitter in the mix. Who knows? Here are my top five alternatives to Twitter. At number five, Post. Post launched in late 2022. It's a platform designed with journalists in mind, and the only thing journalists like more than talking about journalism is getting you to pay for their journalism. To that end, Post enables micropayments in the form of points that you can spend to read long-form stories. Users can comment and share stories with fellow Post users, but reading the originating story is going to cost you some points. That way you're supporting the journalism, and you get 53 points when you sign up. Coming in at number four, Tumblr. Although it's an older social media platform, Tumblr's microblogging features and ability to add images and video and stuff like that make it very flexible. The service has been through a few owners, but its current owner, automatic, the WordPress folks, have kept it very relevant. Tumblr is free to use, but if you want to avoid ads, you can pay $5 a month or $40 a year. Up to number three, Substack Notes. Notes is a Twitter-like feature of the Substack newsletter platform. When you publish a note, it appears on your Substack profile page under a new section called Notes, and like Twitter, you can mention other Substack users by using the at symbol followed by their name. You can see notes without subscribing to the poster's newsletter, too. Sliding in at number two, Blue Sky. Blue Sky is a microblogging service based on a decentralized protocol called AT, or AT. It was spun out of Twitter by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and is completely independent of Twitter now. But because of its origins, it looks a lot like Twitter. Currently, the service is in Invite Only Beta. You can sign up for the waitlist at the website, and existing users get an invite to send to their friends once every two weeks. At number one, Mastodon. Like Blue Sky, Mastodon is built on a decentralized protocol. This one is called Activity Pub. Each individual server and community is called an instance, with all the interconnected instances making up the Fetaverse. To join Mastodon, you just need to pick an instance and join it. It really doesn't matter which one you join. You'll still be able to interact with all the other folks on all the other instances. And if you change your mind, you can move your account between instances. Whichever of these alternatives you try out, remember that your experience will not be exactly the same as it was on Twitter, and that's fine. Look at it less as a replacement, and more as a new adventure. I found something new that I like at each one of these that I've tried. If you want more great tech news and info, subscribe to our channel at youtube.com slash Daily Tech News Show, follow us on Mastodon and Twitter at DTNS Show, and get the podcast at DailyTechNewsShow.com. I'll see you there.