The Post-Twitter Social World
A look at some of the places that all the people who were smart enough to leave Twitter ended up (that I’m aware of):
Mastodon. My first impression of Mastodon was not favorable, though I’ve come around to it in the last year or so. When I first started using it, it reminded me of one of those forums that mods would create as a place to dump all the obnoxious people away from everyone else.
It was full of posts “welcoming” newcomers with walls of text outlining rules and expectations, admonishments about the “right” way to participate, and an overall supercilious tone that really rubbed me the wrong way. It felt like dealing with an HOA.
Of course, anyone pointing this out would be set upon by people who would proceed to engage in the very behavior that they were denying. I mean, I get it–these folks had their little community with a “specialness” that would be necessarily transformed into something different by an influx of outsiders, and their response was something I’d seen dozens of times over the last 30 years. While it wasn’t surprising, it was still off-putting.
I left for awhile, but I returned and signed up to the popular mastodon.social server to see if things had calmed down or at least improved. While it was a better experience, it’s not one that I find compelling. The “Explore” feed is more varied but still dominated by partisans, and while I would never accuse mastodon of being “fun” it’s at least informative and interesting people occasionally emerge from the churn. Like a lot of social media these days, there’s way too many posts that are just images from Twitter polluting the feed, but I can’t really knock it for that since it seems like most social media is just people posting pictures from other social media sites.
I’m a big believer in the idea of the Fediverse and Mastodon’s the elephant in the room, so I hope that it attracts a broader range of minds, but I’m not optimistic. I think most people who initially checked it out were immediately turned-off and moved on, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if Mastodon had a wide variety of engaging niche communities. But it doesn’t.
Bluesky. I signed up for Bluesky and promptly forgot all about it for like a year or so, when I suddenly received an invite email. I created an account and soon discovered that while it’s a smaller community, I really vibe with its design and user experience. There are the usual partisans, but they can pretty much be ignored by engaging with Feeds, which are collections of posts that are focused around certain topics, like Aviation or Gardening. While a person doesn’t necessarily make a post with a Feed in mind, if it has certain keywords, it can appear on a Feed’s timeline, though some are invite-only to post (but not to read).
It makes for a great experience for me. When it comes to social media, I’m more old school. I came up in the era of newsgroups and forums where I was an avid lurker. I’m happy reading what other people write and I’ve always preferred following topics rather than individuals. Bluesky is a lurker’s paradise. I have several Feeds and along with the Discover feed, I can sit and scroll to my heart’s content over a broad range of topics and ideas.
The Discover feed itself seems to be the algorithmically driven portion of the app, which makes it even better since I will like any picture of a cat that shows up, leading to a feed full of cats.
As I said, Bluesky has a smaller community, likely owing to the very lengthy time it was invite-only (which also has likely hamstrung it’s growth), but its Feeds feature allows a user to engage with a wide variety of interesting topics.
Threads. If any app is going to pick-up the ball that Twitter dropped, it’ll likely be Threads. It’s definitely the place where the casuals landed. It’s fun, there’s good memes, and the general vibe is far more easy-going than Mastodon or Bluesky. The problem is that I don’t know if this is actually the case, or if it’s just the site I’m seeing due to the most aggressive algorithm I’ve ever experienced.
Let me provide an example. I once liked a picture of a cat that someone posted. I rarely read the text accompanying the pictures since I only care about the cat, but I apparently liked a picture about a cat who passed away, and within a few flicks of the thumb my feed was full of posts about dead cats from heartbroken people. I didn’t need that and the only way to make it go away was to swipe left to tell the app I wasn’t interested in that type of content. I had to swipe left a lot, because while the algorithm will enthusiastically serve anything it thinks you’re interested in, it takes awhile for it to remove content from your feed.
And then it eventually removed all cats from my feed, which left me sad.
Threads’ algorithm also seems to know how long you paused to look at or read a post, since I’ll take a little longer to look at a post (not click on it, just read it) and I’ll soon begin seeing related posts appear in my feed. It’s really creepy and now I use the app with an eye toward gaming its algorithm to not show more of something I briefly looked at because it was interesting in that one instance, rather than just enjoying content.
Threads also has a problem with people posting obvious engagement bait, like asking stupid questions or making a post designed to make people click on it to learn “the rest of the story” to get more views. I’ve learned to immediately block those, but it’s also an indication of Threads popularity since I doubt as many people would be doing it as much as they are, if they didn’t know there was a large audience full of enough suckers to take their bait.
On the plus side, Threads has been a decent second screen during live events like the Olympics, and while its algorithm and “For You” feed prevents it from being a superior replacement to live tweeting events, it comes close enough to be a suitable replacement. The other cool thing is that because of the block and mute features, I can limit the amount of miserable people who befoul my feed.
Even given its flaws, I genuinely like using Threads but I stopped posting on it since it seems to be built more for consumption than community building. They continue adding features to make it more Twitter-like, and while I’m sure they’ll eventually make a lot of money once they turn on ads, I don’t think it’ll ever be more than my “something to scroll through when I’m bored” app.
Cohost. Cohost is the first time I’ve used something and thought that I was too old to use it. It’s weird, I’m here for it, and in a just world they’d be an unstoppable juggernaut. It has a wide array of niche communities, lots of artists, and some really fascinating and thoughtful minds. It’s like if you took Tumblr, LiveJournal, Deviant Art & some old ezboard forums and tossed them all into a salad shooter.
I dig it. I really dig it.
Agree on the mastodon points. And Bluesky’s custom feeds are DEF one of the best selling points. I agree, I can scroll through this for ages… it’s a great way of meeting new people, aswell 😁