I’m sure this has been posted about in here somewhere but in my searches I couldn’t find it. I seem to recall people discussing leaving Twitter back in the campaign days and I’m way late to the party. Twitter has turned into an echo chamber of one sided takes that do not match my own these days and the Mark Hammil’s of the world are too far and too few on there. So what is everybody using these days that hasn’t become a hyper politicized echo chamber? I’m not sure whether I will join or not but I’m looking for some recommends to get out from under Elon’s personal social experiment. Thanks in advance!
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In format, I think bluesky is the closest. It’s virtually a Twitter clone but with a slightly different feature set (and it uses a federation model so it should be interoperable with other platforms that use the same model, that’s all I know or understand so don’t ask me for more detail about that). The main rule of bsky is be nice or people will block you so fast. Oh, and always alt text your images. There’s a setting you can enable that will require you to add alt text.
It’s a very different user base than what’s on Xitter these days. Some folks went to threads, but I refuse to use a Meta products, and I don’t hear good things about Threads anyway (much more corporate/product oriented) so it’s https://bsky.app/ for me.
ETA oh there’s also Mastodon if you enjoy being scolded about not putting a Content Warning on every single thing you post. For example, Popehat said he gave up on Mastodon after someone scolded him for not putting a warning on a photo because it was in black and white. So 
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There really isn’t a single place for social media messaging that has the breadth of users that Twitter had. It makes things a bit difficult sometimes.
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Yeah, even now Xitter supposedly has ~120 million users a day. Bluesky has about 1 million daily active users (per Wikipedia). But, a lot of people who had big Twitter accounts and moved report that they have better engagement on bsky, both in quantity and quality.
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Mind you, these MST3K forums are pretty great.
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Not interested in a “new Twitter.” It blew big time long before the Muskmelon got hold of it. I quit in Fall of 2017, at least as anything but a lurker.
I’ll read there now and then via mirror sites, and I always leave again feeling pointlessly agitated and in need of a shower.
I’ve been on Mastodon since late 2017 as well. Regardless of its many issues, I’d still rather be there than Twitter.
If I had the attention span for long form back, I’d stage a full-scale retreat back to Dreamwidth and just do all my posting from there.
@Pearls_Mint I used CWs freely over there. People don’t have to if they don’t want to, but I’m more likely to boost a thing if it has that. Now I’ve got the habit and I hardly think about it anymore.
I have a hard time swallowing the Popehat claim. Maybe he got scolded because he didn’t provide an image description for his picture. That’s another thing which isn’t mandatory but still heavily encouraged. I think my descriptions used to be really awkward, but they’ve gotten better over time.
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I don’t really disagree, but we can’t tell a jerk they are a jerk.
It’s possible I’m a beneficiary of that feature.
In fact, I’m fair certain.
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P.S. - Pretty sure Bluesky is a better experience for the people involved because it doesn’t have nearly as many people on it as Twitter/X.
The human brain lacks one of those crowd-size-limited-for-safety signs you see in concert halls. But it should have that, probably.
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still look at Twitter (not calling it X) as there are still game companies and some users providing updates/content that interests me, but I haven’t posted, liked or shared a post in years,
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I’m starting to prefer Bluesky over Threads lately. The latter has too much engagement bait influencer crap and way more trolls. Getting a little too toxic for me there lately. Not as much as Twitter but it’s on thin ice for me.
Plus, Bill Corbett is on Blue!
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Definitely agree with this. I fade into the background when things with MST slowed but I love these forums even as a lurker. Interactions are always thoughtful and respectful even when there is disagreement. It’s a bastion of common decency and shared fanfare that’s second to none.
Thanks a lot everyone! I’m leaning towards giving BlueSky a try.
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I’ll put in another endorsement for BlueSky. Been enjoying it so far.
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I spent several months on Mastodon and I’m not skeptical of that at all. He specifically said it was over a content warning – with an appropriate level of bafflement – and I’ve not known him, parasocially at least, to be a liar. I’ve seen people demand content warning on pictures of food (any food, not just meat) and pet photos (your dog is making eye contact). It got to the point where i was afraid to post literally anything (if I mention the weather will that trigger someone over climate change? If I mention an annoying client do I need a “warning: borderline verbal abuse” label? Not only was it tedious and scoldy but I felt like it really undermined the actual purpose of trigger warnings, which is to warn people who could literally have a severe involuntary reaction to depictions of violence and abuse. I find it offensive that people there would demand “a picture of your pet turtle outrages me because I believe pets are slaves” requires the same treatment as “I may literally go into a severe panic if I see a photo of [actually traumatic thing]”.
On bsky, people will ask you to alt text your images, and if you just don’t, they’ll either block you or just not interact with your images depending how strongly they feel. If you post food pics and that upsets them, they block you and you stop existing for them. It’s a very pro-blocking culture, which seems healthier to me than demanding that everyone be able to curate how everyone else speaks. You don’t have to think of blocking as aggressive, you can just think of it as “I have limited time and attention for this so I’m removing that which does not provide value.”
But it definitely has a certain culture, at least if you’ve been there a while, and it won’t be to everyone’s tastes for sure. As my mom says, if we all liked the same thing there’d be a shortage.
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Yeah, you can’t expect everyone to agree on everything.
I almost always CW eye contact and stuff featuring food. But no one ever demanded that I do that. It was just a suggestion. And if they block me, I’m unlikely to know about it, because we haven’t spoken in the first place.
I like the idea of CWs because I might want to read about a difficult subject, but get myself psyched up first. The term CW itself isn’t neutral. I think people might react to it differently if it was just “tl;dr” or “behind the cut,” as we went with in an earlier age.
I’m very free with the Mute button when people don’t CW politics, for instance. Don’t hit me over the head with that before the coffee’s even made, Miss Popular!
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I didn’t know that this was a thing, I thought friend @Pearls_Mint was joking (considering the B&W comment) but The Great Google tells me it’s real.
Or so many others are in on the joke they have swamped the algorithms. Or I’m missing the satire.
And ‘food’?
Just pictures of food, or a mention of food? Any food, or just meat? Is eating included?
Golly, I’m out of touch.
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Some autistic folks prefer to be warned about eye contact. Not all, however. Some think this includes any critter or image with eyes. Some say no, just humans.
There are many reasons people might not want to see food. They might be struggling with physical issues like E.Ds. Or they might be missing meals our unable to feed themselves due to poverty, and so on.
The thing to remember about Mastodon is that it isn’t one unified mass but more like a series of islands or fiefdoms. When you choose an instance, you’re expected to read its ToS. If your instance moderator(s) takes issues with another instance’s contents or practices, they can disconnect from that instance so their own residents don’t see it anymore. However, it’s considered bad manners to do this to your members with no explanation or warning. So they have time to change things around if they want.
Pearl’s Mint’s acquaintance who left over a disagreement of posting styles could simply have blocked or muted the people who didn’t like his style. Or he could have moved to a different instance (subgroup) where people were more lax about such things.
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So, not so much a social media site, but a whole bunch of very small social media sites, serving very small targeted audiences?
I could see the appeal.
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Most of my fellow indie authors are on Threads, along with quite a few readers who support authors. I like BlueSky, but so few author & reader friends are there. I found most of those folks on TikTok; many of them are on Threads. I have to be where the people are to hope to get books sold. I am posting more long-form writing content on Substack, but its Notes feature is not a substitute for Twitter.
To be honest, Twitter was never really “it” for me. I never found my people, and I rarely had much engagement with my posts. I’ve done so much better on TT, and I just hit the 1K follower mark, so I can show my face if I get on a live. I’m probably an outlier here, but that’s where I am with social media at the moment.
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There are “flagships” like .social and then many of middling or small size. Some folks with time and money will spin up an instance that’s just them. Alas, some trolls do this to repeatedly ban evade. But… humanity. It is what it is.
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Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it. There’s no one Mastodon. Mastodon is actually just a piece of open source software that anyone can use to create a federated (or federatable) social site. I was on the SF Bay Area server, for example. Though as @CLANG_Potroast says, there are some biggies that may be misconstrued as “the” Mastodon. (Re spinning up your own personal instance – some hardcore Mastos think this is exactly what celebrities, politicians etc should do – have their own instance completely under their control, and interact through federating their server with others as needed).
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