I’m quite sure everyone understands how dreadful Twitter is: its user base, privacy policy, moderation, and everything else about it is terrible. People usually leave Twitter for one of the four reasons I just mentioned. Most of the time when people leave Twitter, they commonly choose Bluesky or Mastodon, which are both popular open source decentralized social media platforms, and one of them is also known for cats :3
Let’s talk about which one is better and make a final decision on what platform you should use instead of Twitter.
Bluesky (Finally) and Mastodon are both open source, decentralized social media platforms. Both are constantly expanding with new features similar to Twitter, but they are all free to use and do not require subscription (unlike Twitter), and you can do a lot more with both! However, there are a few of negatives with one of the social networking networks over the other, which is Bluesky.
Now, while I give the Bluesky developers some respect for making it open source and decentralized, there are a few serious issues with it right now, including its user base and moderation.
One huge thing that BlueSky did was fairly recently released a feature that will make it even easier for people to harass you the moment they join the platform, the feature is called Starter Packs. This is not even an opt-out feature, and there is no genuine moderation involved. Not only that, but Bluesky is full of anti-Iranian racists everywhere on the platform; the Bluesky moderators have done nothing to address it, and it has not changed since, and if someone quits Twitter and switches to Bluesky, they are literally moving to the exact same platform, except slightly decentralized and open source. Bluesky is TWITTER and isn’t really so much better in terms of privacy either even as it being open source.
Until Bluesky improves its moderation and other aspects, it is recommended to leave Twitter or Bluesky by deleting your account, find yourself a good Mastodon instance or create your own Mastodon, and make a account on it :3
Huge thanks to Cyrus and David’s Creation for giving me some pointers on what Bluesky is doing, you should definitely check both of them out!
As always, if there is any incorrect information on this post, notify me and I will correct it right away!
I’ve been on mastodon for years and I don’t recommend it.
It’s dominated by usaians to the point where it’s basically impossible to find anything interesting. Even instances explicitly based around other countries tend to get dominated by usaians unless they moderate them away which sucks.
There have been recent advances in discoverability but generally finding stuff via trying hashtags or third channels is still required.
Due to harassment many people post follower only and require followers to be approved which further harms discoverability.
Finally, it’s so excessively cliquey. Like lemmy has the divide between the commies and the fashies with the broader lib audience falling between the two large blobs of aligned instances somewhere. Masto has sooooo many tiny little instances and their highly curated fed list. All helped along but peak tumbler-twitter lib style ‘discourse’ where some week someone says something moderately abrasive and suddenly admins are choosing sides on whether lift buttons are uninclusive of one-armed bonobos which moments ago nobody had ever thought about.
Don’t get me wrong, stuff needs discussing often, but the way twitter style posting works imho tends to lead to unconstructive and reactionary takes.
This is an actually good and accurate anti-mastodon take.
Most of what I’ve seen the last few years is podcast grifters whining about having to build an audience all over again and their hangers-on parrotting the same.
Counterpoint tho, a week ago I got to harass a member of the OSI directly for being a comprador, which was nice.
Tbh I think person focused soc med just tends to be a shit fest in the public sphere. It works fine if we go old school FB or MySpace, where you just follow people you actually know and that’s all you see. Once it becomes public though it seems like it’s favoured by people with nasty intentions or orients itself around cults of personality.
I think topic focused is better for public interaction personally. It’s still awful but at least it’s less dominated by whatever bullying is currently popular. Also it’s easier to filter out the complete brain-rot of amplification of dumb hateful stuff (“look at this terrible take” stuff that just spreads the name of horrible people/movements).
Anyway, irc was our Eden and every day we stray further from god.