Koo: Indian Twitter alternative is taking over the world

While the Dutch cultural elite are clamoring for them to switch to Mastodon (and stay on Twitter), Indian social network Koo is quietly clocking in millions of new users around the world.

After the troubles at Twitter, you hear a lot about Mastodon in the Western media. A decentralized Twitter alternative. The annoying thing about Mastodon is that there are only a few hundred thousand active users. The reason it doesn’t want to get along with the campaign of Musk haters to migrate en masse to this site. That is different with Koo, an Indian Twitter alternative with tens of millions of users that is growing rapidly, including in Brazil. At the moment, the makers of Koo are working feverishly on Brazilian and European versions of the platform. But what exactly is Koo?

Koo: how it started

India is not called a subcontinent for nothing. Not so long ago it was a real continent, which bore itself into Eurasia from Africa and gave rise to the Himalayas. More than 1 billion people live in this huge country, more than in China. India has more than 20 recognized languages. The ideal breeding ground for the emergence of a huge social network, such as Koo.

Koo started in 2020 in the Indian state of Karnataka, as an app from Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka. Originally only in the local language Kannada spoken by nearly 60 million people. In the following months it would grow like a weed, after which versions in other major Indian languages ​​and English also appeared. The reason was that the Indian government was at loggerheads with Twitter, not all the accounts of Indian activists requested by the government were blocked. In retaliation, the Indian government had Twitter blocked and called on the population to switch to Koo.

Hausa was added to these languages ​​when the Nigerian government blocked Twitter and many Nigerian users also joined the platform. This was the first serious expansion of the network outside of India.

But things really started to take off outside India, when more than 1 million Brazilians registered as users after the vicissitudes on Twitter. The app has now been downloaded more than 50 million times. If you consider that Koo has only been around for two years, this is really explosive growth.

Differences between Koo and Twitter

Koo has two charming features that Twitter doesn’t have: you can edit your koo’s (koo is the Koo term for tweet) and the length is also twice as long as Twitter allows, so 512 characters. The network also works with language areas. With each koo you can set in which languages ​​it will be translated.

For example, you can have your koo translated into English, but also into Portuguese and Hindi. Because most people only speak one language, you only get to see the koo’s that you can actually read. Those who speak more languages ​​also get to see koos from more language areas.

Outlook

Due to the explosive growth in the English and Portuguese language area, Koo has similar problems in terms of moderation as Twitter, but the company can of course draw on large numbers of Indian employees. At the moment there are hardly any advertisements to be seen. Once the number of users surpasses 100 million, the two founders expect ads to appear.

Since Europe is similar to India in many ways, we also have many different languages ​​here, Koo could well become a hit here. You can meet Koo here.