Reject Convenience Forum

Since 2022 we have seen new options for decentralized social media come on the scene. Mastodon is a microblogging platform that's built on the ActivityPub protocol. Bluesky is the same but built on its own AT Protocol. Both provide a decentralized social network that can be owned and operated by the community itself without the need for a giant company running on surveillance capitalism. So they're both great and can even interoperate if you force them too!

Which do you prefer? What do you like or dislike about one or the other? Though forum is ancient bulwarks against the centralized internet of today, I think these other platforms are neat and provide a better path for using social media.

There's an interesting dialogue to be had about centralized vs decentralized open source social media. On one hand, decentralized options like mastodon and matrix are pretty clearly the most free (as in libre), however centralized ones like bluesky and signal offer a significantly more intuitive experience (or at least one that more closely resembles standard social media) to the layperson (non-developers, the average social media user, etc...)

Those are the only microblogging platforms I do have an account on, and I honestly don't use masto as much as bluesky simply because more of the people I know are on bluesky. It's a lot easier to get into since there's one place where it all is and there's arguments to be made about moderation and selective federation between instances and things like that with Mastodon, but I do think they're both neat and Mastodon's open nature gives it some really cool features like custom emoji and things that can't really be done with Bluesky.

(On that note, if you wanna find me here's my Bluesky and Mastodon :3 )

While I have both Mastodon and Bluesky I really dont care about either. I find Mastodon a bit more open because of its Decentralized Nature and am more supportive of it. But generally I don't care about that Type of Social Media and rarely engage with it. I only have a few People there I follow via RSS and that's basically it.

I have never used SNS at all, but I check artists I like on Nitter from time to time. Bluesky’s site is poorly designed: like many 2020s site, it refuses to display anything at all unless JavaScript is enabled. There is no Nitter equivalent for Bluesky, meaning that I cannot access Bluesky tweets at all. Mastodon pages have also never rendered well for me. Hence, I can endorse neither. Surveillance capitalism can motivate bad design, but bad design abounds in any case.

RSS is awesome lmao. If I remember correctly you can plug certain feeds from both bluesky and mastodon into RSS which is such a win.

I've been frustrated that you can't turn stuff like a discord announcement feed, for example, into an RSS feed, as I deleted discord off everything recently but would still like to be up to date with a couple things without having to get sucked into the infinite scroll of it all.

I might end up coding & open sourcing a discord.py bot that assembles RSS feeds and serves them on a get request at some point, gah.

Full disclosure: This comes from the standpoint of not completely getting rid of social media but have gotten rid of the vast majority - no neoTwitter, no Facebook, etc. Instagram is barely holding out (only because girlfriend has chosen it to be the meme place, but soon it'll be replaced I imagine). Because of that, I choose my social media/online presence very intentionally with what works for me and my highly opinionated self. Your choice in social media (or lack of) will likely work better for you.

I was one of those few who tried out Pebble (previously known as t2) when all of the twitter-likes started popping up. I really really wish it was a success but it just didn't work out (they had some very ambitious goals for safety and the like). I got to participate in some of the community workshops to help create their governance framework which was cool. When they shut Pebble down, one of the co-founders opened up a Mastodon and I got to help admin it. It stayed pretty consistent at just around 200 active, but never took off past a lot of people who tried Pebble, or wanted Pebble to be a thing. We tried to keep the same vibes as Pebble had. Unfortunately the SSL cert lapsed and eventually the hosting went away, so it faded off into the sunset too.

I honestly really really liked older Twitter (2008 to 2016 or so), back when it was specifically short-form text. I (heh) embrace convenience, and am pretty chronically online. But the discoverability and the speed at which information, news, active events traveled was unmatched, and really helped in some emergency situations too (natural disasters, civil unrest, local emergencies, etc). There is a massive void for such a thing that nothing is filling now that Twitter has become (at best) a rotting corpse of what it used to be.

I tried Threads, but it had some major flaws, particularly with how little control over the feed and discoverability was, and how it's owned by Facebook is quite the flaw by nature.

Mastodon is neat, and is kinda cool for highly special interests or tight-knit communities. But I don't really know what gap it's actually filling, except for communities or special interest topics that were already tight on Twitter. Scaling Mastodon is a pain, and it suffers the same barrier of entry as many new platforms, but worse, being "decentralized" and constantly making that a selling point. The ease of use is just not there for the masses and for that reason alone, it's doomed to forever be nothing more than a feed for special interests. And in a way, that's okay, because it's a decent platform for that and many want it to remain like that. It's just not for me (too shall we say, inconvenient?).

Bluesky has been pretty great overall. It feels a lot closer to what older Twitter was than the rest, and from a usability standpoint (for "normal" people - gotta remember, most of us are outliers), is much more approachable than Mastodon and others. I love being able to curate lists and feeds, and I love not having to deal with Mastodon's federated nonsense. Though, that's ultimately Bluesky's goal (the AT protocol). I do still quite dislike how custom feeds require either technical knowledge for self-hosting (and incurring the costs associated with that traffic which could potentially balloon) or using third-party tools. I do like that it has some semblance of "trending", which in a way helps act as sticking my head up every once in a while to see what's going on. Twitter was a great pulse check on the world, and Bluesky isn't quite there yet, but it's better than nothing, and better than the rest at being that pulse check. I do have some other annoyances with the platform but from a strictly "feels like old Twitter" standpoint, it's the closest I've seen.

Interestingly, I spend so very little time on most social media these days. I'm a Discord user (for lack of a better option - and no, I do not consider most alternatives to be a better option; Discord is where the people are and people are what makes a community). Discord is part community, but mostly communications platform for me anyways. And Bluesky is the only major social media I open, and I don't open it daily. And on days I open it, I don't really open it more than once that day, and that's even with Bluesky being on my home screen on my phone, on the first page. Weening off of social media to be more intentional with its usage has made a more healthy balance that works for me and what I want to get out of social media.