My Week on Spill, the Invite-Only App Hoping to Be the New Black Twitter

Users For now this is a private club. What will happen when the app is available to all? Photo illustration by Slate. Images via Spill. Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter and, for lack of many better words, fucked around and found out, plenty of alternative platforms have volunteered as tribute to take its place. There’s Mastodon, the too-complicated-to-use option; Bluesky, the exclusive (for now) option; Threads, Zuckerberg’s 360-deal option; and one more that has been largely overshadowed by the launch of Threads on Wednesday: Spill, the Black option. Created by two Black former Twitter employees, Alphonzo “Phonz” Terrell and DeVaris Brown, Spill launched in June but gained further traction within the past week in light of Musk’s decision to set rate limits that cap how many tweets unverified Twitter users are allowed to see per day. The rate limits are the latest in a tiresome line of Muskian changes toward a more restricted Twitter that is focused on money-based tiers of usership. Obviously, this makes for an even less accessible Twitter than the one before, which was already inhospitable to its own “culture drivers,” a phrase used by Terrell to invoke the two main groups that maintain the
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