Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash

Being a glass is half-full kind of guy, I’ve tried to look on the bright side of billionaire Elon Musk scooping up Twitter for $44 billion and turning it into his private company plaything.

But I’m faltering. Maybe it’s his constant needling tweets that intentionally attempt to pit the left against the right or nonsense about buying other brands — like Coca-Cola — and doing ridiculous things with them.

I get it, Musk likes to have his fun and until the deal is done, we really won't know what he’ll do. But I think a lot of people are beginning to assume the worst and have started looking for safer or maybe more favorable social shores elsewhere.

Recently, I heard about BeReal, an unusual social media platform with a simple premise: gathering friends together to share, once a day, all at once, what they’re doing. The secret sauce is that the app uses both your front and back camera to capture what you’re doing. Looking at the “Discovery” feed, I’m not entirely sure everyone realizes this. There are a lot of photos of laps with insets of smiling faces.

For me, BeReal is a lonely experience because I don’t have the guts to try inviting friends to yet another social media platform, especially when it’s starting to feel like everyone is over this whole social media experiment.

Even so, I like the intention of BeReal: Less is more. Instead of endless scrolling of an overstuffed feed, there’s a time when everyone is supposed to share (the app sends you a daily notification, encouraging you to share). The problem is that no one seems to follow the schedule, and everyone is always sharing late (BeReal lets you know how late you are).

There is something quaint, even sweet about the concept. BeReal feels less real than it does gentle, quick, and determinedly lightweight, and joyful.

However, a social media platform without a strong angle or point of view seems unlikely to survive in a world where people are hell-bent on sharing their strongest opinions and hottest takes. Twitter is, by its nature, full of people who make careers out of hot takes: Journalists, social media managers, marketers, celebrities, and big brands. There are others on Twitter but millions of watchers and many more probably feel shouted down by the millions of strongest voices.

For some, including potential new owner Elon Musk, Twitter’s takes aren't hot enough (he means it to favor no one and to make the extreme left and extreme right equally unhappy).

Even before Musk’s offer arrived, the dissatisfied were off building their own platforms like Parler and Truth Social.

I signed up for Truth Social because I always like to see alternate conceptions of perfect or at least unfettered social media. I’d heard that Truth Social, a platform backed by former president Donald Trump’s own company, was a vast wasteland. Trump only just started posting on the platform.

It took me weeks to get in and when I did, I found it was far from dead. There are thousands of topics, seemingly millions of posts, and lots of activity around many of them. It’s also decidedly right-wing, which means that anyone who leans left will quickly lean right out of it.

Truth Social scares me a bit: a hyper information bubble that can only incubate more anger, misunderstandings, and disinformation. Parler did its job so poorly that initially it was banned from the app store (it’s back and more chill now but no one cares anymore).

Twitter stands on the precipice of a future-changing moment, one from which it could just as easily jump and soar or fall and smash uselessly into the rocks below. Musk thinks he knows the solution, but he’s also aware that whatever changes he makes, the alterations are unlikely to satisfy everyone. I worry they won’t satisfy anyone, and we might be witnessing the rapid decline of a once vibrant and fun social media platform (even if it was always far from an accurate reflection of the real world).

BeReal’s double-view posts are refreshing, honest, and simple, but, unlike TikTok did two years ago, it’s not generating any heat. For a new social platform to break through, a post or two needs to spin outside the platform’s orbit and into the public space. TikTok blew up when people started talking about and sharing dances they found on the platform on other mediums. No one — really two —BeReal images is likely to achieve that viral status.

Is there a dire need for one social media platform to rule them all, for a single app to save us from the cacophony of angry voices on existing social media? Do we need to be connected across borders and ideologies? Maybe. But what we need more is education and understanding. Social media is not a teacher. It’s still just a tool for sharing and commiserating. Enlightenment must come from elsewhere. As for where that might be, I’ll leave that up to you.