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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

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drewg123

How are the twitter alternatives doing? The last I checked maybe 6 months ago, it seemed like:

- mastadon was too complex for normal people

- threads was scary, due to meta, and tried to bury discussions about anything controversial

- bluesky was unable to handle the load, and was trickling invite codes out very slowly.

Has anything changed?

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- Mastodon has become a bit friendlier for normal people to use, but it still has a very strong tech-leaning userbase that is very protective of the "culture" they've built so far. In some spaces, it can be openly hostile to anyone hoping for an old Twitter-like culture.

- Threads has eased up on the burying controversial topics and threads thing. But it still has, overall, very low engagement and very poor discoverability. Plus, it forces you to attribute your Instagram account to your Threads account, which ruins anonymity for many normal users. A hallmark of what made Twitter attractive.

- I've never bothered with Bluesky so I have no clue how they're doing right now.

Ignoring TikTok, I think things like Discord and Whatsapp Groups/Channels are soaking up a lot of what's been falling off Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc

The pendulum seems to be swinging back from consolidated forums to fragmented ones, without much concern over whether the undelying platforms are still all being hosted by one entity or are technologically decentralized.

Mastodon is a different product than what I use Twitter for, but for some use cases and communities seems pretty great. Zero chance of replacing Twitter.

Threads is terrible. Not infeasible that it makes it eventually but it’s just so bad I can’t see how it’s a serious threat.

Bluesky feels very different, maybe like the early days of Twitter and seems to possibly be sanely architected as well as having decent “safety” tools. Seems to be growing. One to watch, and the most likely replacement candidate, but not there yet.

I also have one eye on Nostr and another on Discord, WhatsApp, and YouTube.

Most likely though, I think the new Twitter will be Twitter. It’s not going anywhere, that I can see.

I stopped using it as most of the community I was interested in did too and I didn't like tacitly supporting Musk and his fans. I tried all three of the above, they are all not good for different reasons. In the end the alternative was just nothing. It turns out that none of the above is totally viable. We don't actually need this type of thing in the end.

Bluesky’s trickle of invites has become a flood; I gave out 10 over the last two days, and now that I check, it has just given me another one. I’ve got to imagine they’re not too far from just opening the floodgates.

I don’t entirely buy the “mastodon is too complex for normal people” thing; I follow lots of normal people on Mastodon. It is not all nerds.

Twitter and it's alternatives are dead. The truth no one seems to get is that the demographic shift does not bode well for Twitter or any of it's alts. The only demo with any growth on these platforms is 55+, 35 and under are moving to other forms of social media.

Bigger question is are there less users total in aggregate.

The entire premise might be toast.

X posted recently that usage is at an all time high.

and why should we believe their claims?

I don’t know or care enough to question it. I am assuming them making false claims like that would open them up to some kind of lawsuits WRT advertisers or something?

Using a very specific, ill-defined metric that no-one has ever heard of before, so, y’know…

Surprisingly, it looks like Bluesky is outperforming Mastodon:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today+5-y&q=bl...

If this holds true, it is a big win for interface over functionality and under-the-hood-technology.

Mastodon is based on a pretty good protocol (ActivityPub) and has many instances. But the usability is terrible. Bluesky on the other hand only has a single implementation and instance, and I find the protocol (The AT protocol) harder to grok. But the interface of the one instance is way better than any Mastodon instance I have seen.

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