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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

So far, the alternatives are 'inferior' in various ways.

But after the owner of the site started posting various anti-semitic things (blaming the ADL on the site's problems, going off about 'Soros'), I decided I'd rather use inferior products than support that kind of thing. Not just me who thinks this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-antisemitism-on-x-twi...

My impressions of the alternatives:

* Mastodon seems to not have a great deal of traction. It could be cool for the right small, tight-knit community, but I don't see 'normies' hanging out on it too much.

* Blue Sky has a "cool kids" vibe and people I know, but I wonder if it'll grow. For a long time they were very slow to hand out new invites.

* Threads seems like the best so far. Zuckerberg is no angel, but at least it's a public company which probably adds a little bit in terms of guardrails. And they seem to be investing in improving the product, fairly quickly.

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Ever since Musk took over, Mastodon has felt pretty much identical to old Twitter for me; same people, same conversations. I recommend it. I've stopped paying attention to Bluesky.

Everybody always points out that the alternatives to Twitter are inferior. The issue there is, X is also inferior to Twitter. Pick your poison.

The only problem I have with Mastodon is that it's hard to discover new things. If you already have some people you know who to follow that's great, but there is hardly any discovery or recommendation beyond that.

While you can follow people on Mastodon, that's not the best way to discover new things. The best way is to follow hashtags. I only follow a few people on Mastodon because there are few people who I want to see everything they post. I'd rather follow hashtags so I can see posts on topics I am interested in and not posts I'm not interested in.

What's wrong with the “explore” and “live feed” buttons?

Also isn't that the point of a micro-blogging platform that the discoveries are made through the “retweet” of the users you follow? For years that used to be the main way discovery worked on Twitter, before they moved to algorithmically curated feed (which became full of “high-engagement” crap pretty soon).

That is true and the usual recommendation is to follow hashtags but I think making lists easily shareable would also help a great deal.

I think it _really_ depended on what your Twitter bubble was. Mastodon generally feels like “better twitter” to me, but the sort of people I interacted with on Twitter were generally also the sort of people who’d find Mastodon appealing. (Actual Twitter now feels like a graveyard; if I look at the “Following” tab on my dormant Twitter account, there’s barely anything going on at all.) This will not be the case for everyone.

Mastodon is already everything I wished Twitter had been. Maybe I'm not like most people, but I'm fine with that. It's a roaring success.

As far as I'm concerned, Twitter can just keep being Twitter... as long as it does it over there.

If Threads wins, all I have to say is that we have learned nothing on this subject in the past decade and change.

We've learned a lot. We've learned that global social media needs tens of billions of dollars in funding to succeed, and the only possible alternatives are those backed by nation-states.

I know we'd love to believe that a bunch of geeks with $5 Digital Ocean droplets running Mastodon can disrupt this reality, but that's just not happening outside of a very niche market.

> a very niche market

If you join it, it will already be less niche. Instead, you advocate using the product of another monstrous company.

You could argue Twitter was a niche market as compared to Facebook!

Twitter was constantly criticised for never living up to its potential; features, growth, revenue.

Now people are complaining that Twitter isn’t like it was.

The world has moved on I guess.

Do people generally have the energy to get engaged in new social media networks.

Dark social is where my activity is. Almost nothing is public these days, for me and my friends anyway.

That’s not my dream. I simply hold the opinion that Meta is the worst possible candidate for this.

Among those with the means to fulfill it, who would you trust? Google? Microsoft? Apple? Another VC-handcuffed startup?

If there’s no one around to trust enough not using social media at all is fine alternative.

Honestly, he’s a step away from claiming global warming is a hoax…

He has been trying to convince people that global warming is not a hoax for decades. Where does your mindset come from when it is about as close to the opposite of reality as you can get? Is it just because you don't like the guy?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKCuDxpccYM

I get that he is controversial. There are plenty of things to criticize Musk for. We can talk about factory conditions, replacing humans with robots, various political takes... But lumping him in with climate change deniers? That is so bonkers to me.

I did say he is a step away. He’s had a big turn to conservative ideas, embracing all of them, he regularly peddles outlandish conspiracy theories. That’s why I say he’s almost about to turn on all his years of “energy revolution” and pump out gas guzzlers or something.

Bluesky is growing and going more and more mainstream in tone by the month.

https://vqv.app/stats/chart

1.3M members in 5 months is nowhere near critical mass.

For reference, retired American football player and sportscaster Troy Aikman has 1.5M followers.

1.3M members under invite constraints. The implication is that number would probably explode if opened up. They aim to drum up excitement, but it’s a fine line. It’s also to buy time to build out the tech.

To be clear, I’m only offering an interpretation, not my personal opinion. I currently sit on ten invite codes for Bluesky. Among my friends I’ve offered to that have declined, I get the impression that they’re in “wait and see” mode. At least one has told me as much explicitly too.

If you're talking about followers on Twitter, I have to wonder how many are just bots.

This, or just old accounts.

increasingly i just disagree with the metrics along which people compare these things:

1. is the thing likely to survive for long enough that it makes sense for me to build a community/connections on it.

2. will my experience of it improve as it develops over the years.

and i’ve just been burned by the “shiny new platform, it’s cool for 5 years, then the investors cash out” playbook so many times now, and mutations of it like Apple’s (where they lock their devices down over time — but in a way that avoids backlash), that i just massively overweight (2).

Mastodon/Activity Pub is excellent. i don’t have to worry about some nutcase with $$ barging in and slapping ads everywhere, hiding shit behind paywalls, shoving “reels” or “shorts” i never asked for into my timeline, messing with the “algorithms”, or whatever. Mastodon is, and it will continue to be, and at this point that’s about all i ask from anything.

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