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I'll take the other side of this. While there certainly are examples of click bait and inflammatory BS on Twitter, there is also an element of legitimate thought leadership that can go viral in a way you just don't have on any other social media platform.

There are few other platforms I can think of where someone with deep expertise on any subject can publish interesting, informed takes on their field- On a platform where the barrier to entry to publish is near-zero, provided with a random chance to go viral.

When I used Twitter, seeking out and following these kinds of experts actually made the experience of Twitter a rich and informative platform- albeit one where you constantly needed to "weed the garden".

The problem of course is that was a thin layer of wheat in a big bucket of chaff- but there is a better answer to "best alternative to twitter is no twitter": The best alternative to Twitter is one that can maximize virality for expert opinions; incentivizing other users to write engaging, structured opinions. Try to build a system where the best way to engagement farm is to show real thought leadership.

Well, here we are seemingly near the end of the thing, and I'm not sure it's worth the risk. Twitter was really good at getting people to write, letting them know that others are interested in their area of research or expertise, and I hope they continue to do that. But the awfulness of the propaganda just doesn't seem like it's worth it. Aside from the format being the message (ideas devoid of nuance) I think the incentives are all wrong.

Twitter is grade school. You don't "win" by being right, you get that be being funny, sarcastic, a little cruel, and getting lots of likes.

I'd like to see a return to a platform at a slightly elevated level. Asking for it to be like a university discussion group is maybe a little bit too much, but how about like, the last year of high school, when all the drama has died down and you've all pretty much agreed to be friends? I feel like that's the time when people start listening to reasoned arguments over name calling.

I don't know what that platform looks like, and it's almost sure to be less viral that Twitter. But if that last 3 years have taught me anything it's that fast-moving viruses are bad. I think we should slow down.

This is exactly right, but it's really hard to see when you're still in the mindset of needing to be part of The Discourse. The people I know who were Twitter addicts and left for Mastodon have become Mastodon addicts. They've kept all the self-destructive attitudes they learned on Twitter and view Mastodon as better precisely because it lets them indulge with less out-group interference.

I see a lot of arguments that Mastodon is better because it lacks various bad things about Twitter (algorithmic sorting, the misalignment of incentives between Twitter-as-a-company and users, centralized moderation/ownership) and it certainly is in some sense, but we're still living in a world where the social norms that were created on Twitter completely dominate any other conception of how to behave. There can be no online space that is "like Twitter but good" because anything that is sufficiently like Twitter to appeal to Twitter refugees will import enough of the culture to end up with Twitter's problems. Mastodon might be a step towards fixing the problem, but undoing the damage caused by Twitter will require the grueling and unpleasant work of changing ourselves as well as changing our technology.

The only option for us as individuals in the short term is to reject the entire model and choose to engage with other people in ways that respect each other’s fundamental humanity. Prefer in-person to online. Prefer one-on-one communication to broadcasting. Prefer small groups to large groups. Prefer local to global. Prefer synchronous communication to async. Prefer video or voice to text. Trust me, I know each of those preferences is difficult in its own way and there’s excellent reasons to choose the other option in many circumstances (like this post, in which I'm violating almost all of them!), but they’re also powerful tools for connecting with others as whole people rather than as simplified abstractions. We should work to make it easier to connect people (particularly across geographical and linguistic boundaries) but it cannot be at the cost of flattening each of us into the most shallow, reductive versions of ourselves so that we fit through the machinery we’ve built and can be easily consumed by strangers on the other end.

Good rationale and I agree with all of it. Looks like Mastodon has become the self reinforcing echo chamber of the far right for any group. Never to be challenged again. In fact that's the point of why so many people go there right? There's a feeling of safety in that lack of challenge. A lot of people will say twitter is an abusive place and I don't disagree but to never have your points of view ever challenged again is incredibly dangerous. It's the path towards ignorance. We as humans are imperfect and constantly learning. Part of that means accepting that maybe our opinions or viewpoints could be wrong and taking a step back to think about it when someone does question the things we say. Now there's communities on Mastodon where that will never happen again. It'll be something that creates a new type of privilege. The privilege of choosing to be and believe whatever you want without anyone ever telling you you're wrong.

> Never to be challenged again. In fact that's the point of why so many people go there right?

No. Some people don't view social media as "debate club". We never signed up for debate club. I personally signed up for Twitter at a software developer conference, and I used Twitter to meet other software developers, social network, and exchange information related to tech. I had no interest in debating politics or whatever. Twitter is possibly the worst possible place in the world to debate politics, given its format.

It's a weird assumption that Twitter is the best or only possible place to have your ideas challenged. Go to school. Ready a book. Talk with people you know. Tweeting sound bites at rando strangers typically goes nowhere fast.

That's not what I'm saying. It's that the people that were challenged chose to put out their thoughts in a way that welcomed it. If all you're there to do is meet fellow developers and network is should be no issue. I never ended up in situations of devolving debate. Not once. But there's a lot of people who want to put out their strong thoughts without recourse. If you use a public platform to make bold statements which 50% of the world will oppose and it welcomes comments as twitter does then you should expect to be challenged.

Again it's not about saying twitter is debate club. For the majority of people that's not the case for the outliers it is though and they don't like it.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying.

If people want to debate, then they can go to a forum where people are debating. If they don't want to debate, then they can go to a forum where people aren't debating. Everyone gets what they want. That's good, isn't it?

Yes people should go to a place where healthy discussion is fostered. I'm not arguing against that. What I'm saying is there's a group of very vocal people who have left twitter to go start their own Mastodon communities because they did not like their views being challenged on twitter. If you're going to tweet publicly then it welcomes commentary, it's part of the system. If people want to put out their thoughts in an echo chamber then Mastodon is probably a better place for it.

> What I'm saying is there's a group of very vocal people who have left twitter to go start their own Mastodon communities because they did not like their views being challenged on twitter.

Do you have any evidence for this? The proximate cause of mass migration from Twitter to Mastodon was the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk.

Elon is a catalyst because of the rise of hate speech and an inability to moderate it but it's created the opportunity to build these cult like communities elsewhere. I don't want to point to it because I'll receive a lot of backlash for that but it's happening.

> because they did not like their views being challenged on twitter

> because of the rise of hate speech and an inability to moderate it

You're already changing your story.

> it's created the opportunity to build these cult like communities elsewhere

That's your characterization, which I do not agree with. Some would say that Musk himself has a cult-like following. In any case, Twitter and Mastodon have naturally segregated into pro-Musk and anti-Musk communities through no particular design by either side but simply as a result of the acquisition.

Those who enjoy Musk Twitter have no reason to leave and join Mastodon, so of course there would be less "challenge" from them on Mastodon, but whose fault is that?

No I'm not changing my story. You mentioned Elon musk and I said it was a catalyst, not that it was the reason. There's a difference. A catalyst is an accelerant, it's not the source of a reaction. You're removing context by what's convenient for debate. The things you're saying are true but it's not the whole truth. People were unhappy on Twitter before Elon, for the reasons I mentioned. I'll leave it at that.

> People were unhappy on Twitter before Elon, for the reasons I mentioned.

Yet they didn't leave until the Musk acquisition. Huh.

Again, it's about needing a catalyst. People suffer through much worse. What Elon did and the subsequent behaviour from alt-right uprising was enough not to just cause some people to leave but gave the vocal people with large followers a reason to voice their concerns and use it as a means to pull their audience to Mastodon. People would otherwise not have followed them and they'd essentially lose the audience they built. The cult leaders still need their followers. Without them, what are they? Crazy ranting folk.

> use it as a means to pull their audience to Mastodon

This is all a very nice conspiracy theory, thank you.

> The cult leaders still need their followers.

People who tweet are now "cult leaders". Ok. By the way, how many Twitter followers does it take to become cult leader? I'm curious because I had over 3500, so I'm not sure whether I qualify or not.

> Crazy ranting folk.

Or HN commenters.

lol I'm not actually calling them cult leaders but I'm giving you a point of reference. People in mainstream media can have a "cult following", a group of fans who are so enthusiastically devoted. We have that for brands, movies, comics and whatever else. Today people become personalities on twitter that end up with a similar cult following.

Also I mean I'm not here to spin conspiracy theories. Pulling your audience to Mastodon isn't something villainous. It's an opportunity to remove a lot of the noise on twitter and focus people on your message and community. That could be anything. Your Mastodon server could be dedicated to die hard star wars fans or it would be liberal tech folk on the west coast who want a smaller space in which to voice their thoughts without the other side of the argument. It's just human dynamics.

At the end of the day it doesn't matter whether people use Twitter or Mastodon or whatever else. We're transition between platforms every decade, some people stick it out for the relationships and other people move on to new things. That's life.

> Today people become personalities on twitter that end up with a similar cult following.

Do you have any evidence of this? Name one Twitter personality like this who isn't famous outside of Twitter, and who moved from Twitter to Mastodon, bringing their "cult followers".

> Also I mean I'm not here to spin conspiracy theories.

Your whole argument is a conspiracy theory. Occam's razor suggests that people moved from Twitter to Mastodon because of Musk. And indeed, that was the case for me personally. Yet you say no, it's... something else, Twitter "cult" leaders wanting to move their followers out of Twitter to avoid "challenges", and Musk was somehow just an excuse or something.

> Your Mastodon server could be dedicated to die hard star wars fans or it would be liberal tech folk on the west coast who want a smaller space in which to voice their thoughts without the other side of the argument.

This is a misunderstanding of Mastodon. It's distributed. A server is just a server. I personally switched servers because of technical difficulties on my old server. You can follow and communicate with anyone on the fediverse. You're not restricted in any way to activity on one server.

imo the "echo chamber" scenario would be if you only followed people from your local server, and also set your posts to only show there. If you set your posts to public and gather a couple hundred mutuals...I find the Mastodon 2023 experience turns out to be pleasantly similar to early '10s Twitter.

> The best alternative to twitter is no twitter.

I used to think this. And by "used to" I mean 3 months ago, after I quit Twitter.

Initially, I didn't miss social media. I had a nice restful period, a vacation if you will. Eventually, though, I found that I did miss it, so I signed up for Mastodon. Some of the same problems as Twitter had exist on Mastodon too, I admit. I guess I am addicted anyway. In recent years I've quit both alcohol and caffeine entirely, yet I'm not sure I can quit social media entirely. It's my weakness.

Time for a return to the InvisionFree/phpBB forums of old (I fully acknowledge those also had their fair share of toxicity).

It would be unfair to evaluate twitter according to current features. It is now being actively developed, looking for new features to give it more value. The pre-elon twitter stagnated on a static set of features. For instance, they recently filed to turn it into a payment platform like paypal. These kinds of changes can be a game-changer. Whether they happen or not is another issue, but twitter is no longer a corporate social media, it is a startup.

This is the best reply.

Yes and no. No because it is missing one popular use case: getting updates from projects that don't have mailing lists or RSS feeds.

Mailing lists and RSS feeds don't incentivize me to compulsively check them so that the important updates I care about aren't buried under a 47-post rant about why I should be angry about something in the news or hidden by an algorithm because it thinks I'm more likely to engage with a bunch of memes.

Maybe it works if you only follow low-traffic announcement accounts, but when I was actively using Twitter I found that I regularly missed posts like that because they either didn't get engagement (algo timeline) or were posted when I wasn't paying attention (chrono timeline). I understand that a lot of projects have chosen to rely on social media for that kind of news for various reasons, but it's not a good situation.

If the project is in Mastodon, it has an RSS feed. Just subscribe to https://domain.tld/@username.rss.