But I can only see it continuing to degrade as the hunt for a return on his investment continues. I'm ready to leave.
Mastodon is leading as the top migration destination so far, but it seems to have issues of its own. And there's also nostr, which solves some of these issues but introduces others.
What have you switched to and why?
In all honesty the best alternative to twitter is no twitter, until we find a better format for community discussion. Maybe it's private community chat, or similar, not sure. Maybe it's the end of public social. I think a lot of us are just looking for quieter smaller groups to share with.
A note on Mastodon. It's going closer in that direction of community specific servers but I think a better alternative would be if we could keep it private and cap group sizes. Right now it just feels like a replica of twitter segregated by topic or community. All the inherit bad behaviour still propagates because of the form factor.
And yet, here I am, primarily using Mastodon. Maybe it's just my server, but it's so much more _pleasant_ to be there. I don't need to wade through pages of insanity and irrelevant ads to get to the content I care about.
It's as if an annoying ambient buzzing slowly built up in my favorite coffee shop over a decade, and I never really noticed it, but now there's a crunchy alternative cafe next-door with fewer options which is blissfully silent. I just can't bring myself to go back.
So far, the people who've moved to Mastodon seem happy with that choice, myself included.
Now, more about Mastodon itself:
In short, Mastodon is less toxic and the feed doesn't artificially amplify content made to generate engagement.
People tend to mistake free speech and discourse artificially shaped to pump ads in your eyeballs and that shows. Your content IS moderated but more subtly, and your mod is an advertising company.
On Mastodon, you'll _still_ see weird crap on the federated feed (including controversial stuff, like xenophobic content), but quickly you'll realise that the ratio of truly disturbing, aggressive or xenophobic content is much, much lower.
This is partially due to:
- the fact that algorithmic feeds rely on controversial, divisive, emotional responses as they turn into higher engagement.
- the fact that people are still weird, but _way less_ evil and mean.
You can think of Mastodon as a mix of an internet forum and a chat from 2005. For instance, the default client UX can be clunky (no sweet ad revenue $$), but it doesn't go in your way like the dark patterns on Twitter (e.g. the chronological feed resetting to the algorithmic one ever x days).
Also, you can always change the default client. Elk is neat.
Mastodon will perform worse in terms of reach, but better in terms of engagement (let's appreciate the irony here).
One of the comments says:
> The best alternative to twitter is no twitter
And I 100% agree with that. Better go outside and touch grass, pet a dog. I wish internet forums were more utilised, because I use micro-blogging mostly for announcements regarding my projects and this format encourages shallow discourse.
Edit: be more specific about the UX issues pertaining mostly to the default client. Thanks @wowfunhappy
Mastodon is currently the most popular software that implements that protocol. However, I think Mastodon is very flawed. There are many design decisions that are just awful both in the realms of UX and also software architecture.
Thankfully ActivityPub is an open protocol. Anyone can come up and make a competitor. And that's what I hope happens. Some other social platform(s) implement ActivityPub and replace Mastodon.
It's similar to how back in the day Apache was absolutely the dominant web server, but nowadays nginx is on top. Anyone out there reading this, please make the nginx of ActivityPub.
It's nowhere near as active as Twitter (or to be honest, many social media sites), but it's leagues ahead of the other Twitter alternatives online at the moment, and you often get the same people chat to you on a regular basis. It's got a community feel for sure, and my posts have done a lot better than they did on Twitter because of it.
As for the others I've tried...
Hive was promising once, but the months of non availability after the security issues came to the fore basically took a sledgehammer to whatever level of activity it had, and most people moved on. It also has an issue with self promoters basically having free reign, and said folks having no interest in actually holding a discussion. This is easy to see on the trending content pages, where about 3/4 of the posts are random folks posting selfies and advertising their Twitch streams.
Post is okay... if you're interested in political content. If you want to discuss any sort of hobby, the activity just isn't there. This was probably made worse by the ridiculous waiting list that existed for signups prior, where your average (non referred) member had to wait weeks to get an account there.
Other sites and services I've seen for this are dead as a doornail, and basically have zero people using them on a regular basis.
There was also a very very good comment here on yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34934996
>... every federated network will be judged by the worst actor in that network, whether or not they are isolated from each other. As a result it doesn't matter (for public opinion) if there are strictly moderated mastodon instances because they will be associated with the free-for-all ones by the Mastodon name alone. This is different from how the internet as a whole is interpreted, where both HN and 4chan can exist without impacting each others reputation
Personally I will keep using Twitter unless a critical mass (+50%) of my followings (37 accounts) will move permanently. But not even a single account I follow moved... Anyways I just use the linear timeline, no ads, no algorithmic tweets. Nothing really have changed so far.
1. A server to join. Try techhub.social or hachyderm.io or infosec.exchange or ioc.exchange or sfba.social or even one of the official servers like mastodon.online -- any of those will be fine
2. An app. I use the web interface and am happy with it, but I've also tried Ivory and it's a pretty good app
3. People to follow, to get started. That's going to depend on your interests. There was a HN post with a lot of good recommendations here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34413641
But be careful of the server you choose. I submitted this some days ago to see what people think, albeit it got no traction, so I'll put again here just in case:
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/mastodon2.html
If switching servers is not made painless and straightforward, we'll end up having a single, mostly trusted, mostly centralized server (whatever that happens to end up being), because nobody wants to see themselves in the situation of losing their accounts on a server that seemed to be trustworthy. And also nobody wants to put on themselves the burden of having to make a full research on the viability of each and every potential server that they might want to use, that's something that shouldn't be a problem solved by individual users, but a problem solved by the service itself, somehow. A Covenant is far from enough.
One difference that sticks out to me is that mastodon isn't designed to goad for more engagement. For example, 'likes' on mastodon are public but not the same thing as 'resharing' in terms of appearing in timelines. Twitter used to treat likes similarly, but over time it changed. I imagine they saw more engagement when 'likes' were treated more and more like 'retweets.' I appreciate that on mastodon I can show the author of a post I like the content without automatically putting it in the feed of my own followers (and it's easy to do both if I chose to).
Stuff like support for code blocks, different reactions are a draw for me, coming from Mastodon.
I'm on Mastodon, at this point just to be another follower of all the people I want to follow - who come to check it out, but Twitter is still where it's at for my network.
Hopefully that'll change soon.
Either way, if Twitter is out for you, there's nothing else that really looks like it'll gain traction aside from Mastodon.
I’ve no regrets other than now having two places to check daily.
I was finally able to make an account (when I tried most servers weren't allowing it) and I followed a ton of people that moved off twitter... but I came to realize they seem to have stopped posting all together or quietly migrated back. (our very own pg, for example)