Pebble (formerly T2) was an American social media platform founded by former Twitter employees Sarah Oh and Gabor Cselle.[1][2][3] It provided an authenticated network where users could make posts and interact in communities before shutting down on 1 November 2023.[1][4]
One day before the shutdown, Cselle launched a Mastodon instance of the same name. It closely resembles the look and feel of the old site.[5]
Background
Prior to founding T2, Cselle oversaw the incubation of new consumer products in Google’s since-shuttered Area 120 incubator.[6] Cselle had also been a Group Product Manager at Twitter from 2014 to 2016,[7][8] where he worked on the consumer product, and relaunched Twitter’s logged-out homepage[9] and mobile trends.[10] Sarah Oh had previously worked as an executive in Trust and Safety at Twitter and Facebook.[1][11] On the day Oh was laid off from twitter, Cselle called her to offer his condolences, and to offer Oh a position at T2 to aid in creating a new social media platform.[12]
Cselle announced the development of T2 in November 2022.[13][14]
In early 2023, T2 hired former Discord Senior Director of Engineering Michael Greer as its chief technology officer.[15]
On 15 September 2023, the platform was rebranded as Pebble.[16]
On 24 October 2023, the platform announced its shutdown on 1 November 2023, approximately one year since it started.[4]
On 30 October 2023, Cselle launched the mastodon-instance pebble.social.[17]
Platform
Pebble was one of several social media platforms conceived as an alternative to X (formerly Twitter) after its takeover by Elon Musk.[18][19][20] The platform allowed 280 characters on user posts.[13][11] Cselle expressed a desire to keep the platform as similar to the original Twitter platform as possible.[21][22][12] It also emphasized security and safety features such as user authentication.[11][18]
Pebble's moderation was planned to make use of both human review and artificial intelligence features.[15]
On 25 April 2023, the platform's invite system launched, allowing its current community of around 1,000 users to invite their friends to the service instead of requiring users to join a waitlist. Each member of the platform was allowed up to 5 invites with the ability to request more invites if required. The platform was a web-based app only.[15]
Pebble offered checkmark verification, similar to X. Verification was done through Persona and a $5 charge is invoiced to offset the cost of verification. Unlike rival X Blue, the payment is one-time.
