T2

T2, also known as Town Square Technologies, started as a short-text social platform and an alternative to X (formerly Twitter). The company was founded in November 2022 by former Twitter employees Gabor Cselle and Sarah Oh. Cselle, who served as CEO, previously worked on consumer products at Twitter and later at Google's Area 120 incubator. Oh, a co-founder, was a Human Rights Advisor at Twitter and held roles at Facebook, bringing over a decade of experience at the intersection of technology and human rights.

The platform, initially launched as t2.social, was designed to be similar to early Twitter, with a 280-character limit for posts, but with a strong emphasis on user safety and content moderation through a combination of human and AI review. It gained initial traction, raising $1.4 million from angel investors in December 2022 and growing to a community of 20,000 registered users. In September 2023, T2 rebranded to Pebble. However, the platform struggled to grow its active user base quickly enough to secure further venture capital. Faced with low user engagement, the company announced its shutdown on November 1, 2023. Shortly after, the platform was relaunched as a Mastodon instance called pebble.social.

The current iteration, t2.world, has pivoted to a decentralized social network where users are rewarded for reading and engaging with content. It utilizes a native reputation system called Time Point (t.p.) to recognize valuable contributions and interactions. The platform focuses on fostering niche, topic-based communities for writers and readers. Content is stored on a blockchain-based permanent storage solution, and posts can be distributed across other compatible networks within the Lens ecosystem.

Keywords: decentralized social media, content creation, community building, web3, blockchain platform, creator economy, social network, content monetization, reading rewards, niche communities, permanent storage, Lens protocol, Gabor Cselle, Sarah Oh, Pebble