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!
Please give me some good follow recommendations on Mastodon
I feel like this deserves it's own post
True, I'll probably post a thread for that later
[email protected] retweets a wide variety of stuff from across Mastodon and can probably help find other people to follow.
Nice, thank you!
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.
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