Goodbye Pebble.

The friendliest town square on the internet closes November 1st.

What Happened.

Pebble, formally T2, has announced today that as of November 1st, 2023, the platform will be shutting down.

It described itself as the “kinder, safer, more fun public square, enriched with AI”. In essence, it was a Twitter competitor similar to Mastodon, but focused on creating a kind and friendly town square as compared to other ideals such as decentralisation.

The name “Pebble” signifies that even small interactions can leave profound impacts.

Within our platform’s 280-character format, you’ll find familiar features, but the real magic is in the values we’ve championed since day one: trust, safety, and an enriching user experience

From: About / Pebble.

Pebble was founded by Gabor Cselle, previously a Group Project Manager at Twitter, and Sarah Oh, previously a Human Rights Advisor at Twitter.

“We really do want to create an experience that allows people to share what they want to share without fearing risk of things like abuse and harassment, and we feel like we’re really well positioned to deliver on that,” Oh said in an interview with CNN.

What Went Wrong.

In a post made on the platform today, Cselle said that “[Pebble wasn’t] growing fast enough to convince investors of a breakout.

“With many alternatives in the space, the challenge was even greater. We needed more investment and time to fully realize Pebble”

Those competitors certainly had the upper hand.

Bluesky benefited from $8 million in seed funding this summer alone, after a previous $13 million investment from when Bluesky was a Twitter side project. It also benefits from the migration of Twitter power users to the platform. The top 15 most followed users on Bluesky feature the likes of The Washington Post, New York Times, dril and JUNLPER. Neil Gaiman sits at #3, NPR at #17, and Hank Green at #36.

Mastodon benefited from being the most established platform at the time of Twitter’s implosion. Mastodon started life in March 2016, and had 3.6 million registered users by the end of October 2022, according to Eric Khun’s mastodon-analytics.com.

Threads, a relative incumbent, boasts 100 million registered users and the easy on-boarding process that comes from being a Meta product (not to mention access to Meta funding and developers). Despite what you may have heard about the platform dying, users have returned and downloads are rising again.

That leaves Pebble in an untenable position as the friendly town square focused on growing slowly and prioritising safety.

What’s Next.

Current Pebble users will be able to download a full archive of their data before the platform shuts down on November 1st.

Cselle says the team ‘is eternally grateful to everyone who joined [them] on this journey’. If you would like to hear more about what the team does next, he requests you fill out this Google Form.

In my view, Pebble was the nicest corner of the internet. A corner of the internet where people could just chat. Talk about their interests, music, life, and join in on other’s conversations about those topics. A global feed that featured everyone on the platform brought the world closer together, and Pebble orchestrated it in a way that was fun, friendly, and kind.

I will grieve Pebble’s demise.

🫡.