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!

  • erik [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    23·
    4 months ago

    Bluesky is VC backed and could be rug pulled like twitter at basically any time. Mastodon is actually decentralized, like @gay_king_prince_charles@hexbear.net mentioned, and won’t suffer the same fate. That pretty much made my decision for me. I deleted all my information off of Facebook years ago. Completely nuked my twitter. Haven’t posted at Reddit in years. I’m only doing stuff like Lemmy and Mastodon that are actually decentralized and not owned by anyone nor need to pay the piper at some point.

    It’s not fool proof, they could still bottom out, but it’s not guaranteed like it it with Bluesky; where it’s more a matter of when than if.

    That said, Bluesky has done a much better job of getting the “cool kids” over to it. A lot of weird/left twitter folks went there while their Mastodon account haven’t seen posts in years. So, I don’t begrudge anyone that goes to Bluesky too much, pretty much all my favorite podcasters are active there. But I’m done with this corporate shell game crap.

    • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      6·
      4 months ago

      Getting started on Mastodon is a bit harder than other networks because there is no curated feed whatsoever. You gotta dig through the firehose (federated feed) or the local feed (potentially a firehose, potentially a trickle) and try searching different hashtags for a while until you build a critical mass to keep your home feed flowing. Most instances limit search functionality to hashtags, allowing you only to text-search posts you have previously liked/boosted/bookmarked, which makes things extra difficult. Basically, hashtags are used as a method of opting-in to making your posts discoverable. Otherwise, while not private, they are much more ephemeral.

      It is very much a social network in the sense that you need to discover people through people. Instead of simply searching for people, you need to interact with people. Look for popular threads like this, where you can discover a lot of people and where the stakes are very low for chiming in as a newbie. Most of the time I discover people it is because they liked something I posted, rather than me stumbling upon them in the feed. After you follow enough people, the posts they boost will introduce you to plenty of new people.

      Unless people choose to hide their follows, you can click on their profile and see who they are following too. If you find someone cool, you can see who they also think is cool and follow them if their account is not locked (but a lot of accounts are locked, so you need to actually interact with people and be noticed also)

      On Mastodon, it is also possible to follow hashtags to get extra posts into your feed from people you might not currently be following.

      I don’t post / boost as much as I used to, but you can take a look through my follows if you want: https://toots.matapacos.dog/@porkroll/following. Not all of these accounts are active, and some are bots which relay things from Twitter.

      • drinkinglakewater [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        4 months ago

        I think part of it is I’ve lost a lot of my Poster’s Fire, so I’m not as active as I was when I started out on twitter. Good advice though, I’ll give it another try

  • AnarchoSnowPlow@midwest.socialEnglish
    13·
    4 months ago

    The main reason I prefer Mastodon/Fediverse over Bluesky is ActivityPub. They make some good points about profile portability I suppose, but also I don’t think “identity” is as important in the Fediverse as it seems to be in other networks.

    If it is something really important to you then you can stand up an ActivityPub compliant instance of whatever with really strict profile creation rules, as in someone manually verifying identities if that’s your concern. Hell, I came over to Lemmy from KBin, and I was still following some stuff on Mastodon through that.

    I just don’t like that they looked at the spreading existing standard and said “nah, we can do it better” instead of contributing and making what we already have better.

    I know it’s more complicated than just that, but it’s also kinda not.

  • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    12·
    4 months ago

    The main reason Twitter is bad isn’t the user base, the moderation, or the privacy policy, though those are all bad.

    The main reason Twitter is bad that the unthreaded, community-less microblogging format is fundamentally bad and inherently leads to shallow empty discussions dominated by ignorant jackasses.

  • Comp4 [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    7·
    4 months ago

    I can’t say anything about either platform since I don’t use them. How does their future potential look? Are they expected to grow? I don’t mind being on a smaller platform like Hexbear, but for more generalist social media, I prefer ones that have a lot of content and users, like TikTok, for example

    • crafted_104 [any]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      11·
      4 months ago

      I believe both, particularly Mastodon, will continue to expand. Mastodon has more than 8 million users, while Bluesky has 5.9 million users.

      Mastodon is a much better platform than Bluesky and probably has a lot more content. Mastodon uses instances, and you can pick whatever instance you want, and you can do a lot more things on it. Mastodon has most of Twitter’s features, and some of Twitter’s paid features are available on Mastodon for free!

  • gay_king_prince_charles [she/her, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    7·
    4 months ago

    Bluesky doesn’t have federation enabled so calling it decentralized isn’t accurate. It’s software that can theoretically be decentralized but is a centralized Twitter clone in it’s current state. Mastadon has a much healthier federated ecosystem right now.

    Edit: turns out they did enable federation after all.

  • allthetimesivedied [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    4·
    4 months ago

    I’ve been hesitant to make Mastodon my new home base for shitposting, because I perhaps-erroneously expect it to be boring. Bluesky is where (I assume, anyways) there’s more likely to be an audience for me—but also a Mastodon instance will be more likely to post about drugs and drug policy and stuff.

      • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        8·
        4 months ago

        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.

        • combat_brandonism [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          4 months ago

          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.

          • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            2·
            4 months ago

            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.