Elon has weakened Twitter substantially and now it's leaving the door open to newcomers with ideas in a different direction.
It's the churn. Platforms rise and fall. But this time the power vacuum is so big a non commercial platform might have a fighting chance.
For Mastodon? I need to:
- pick a server and remember it (I've actually lost my own handle a couple of times between months of giving it a try!)
- manually copy-paste the handles of people I want to follow back on my server, since there is no native single-click way to just follow an account I am looking at on my own server
- do the same on mobile, because all Mastodon apps can't possibly be associated with all server URLs on iOS and Android
- remember to follow people I care about, since otherwise there is no way to discover interesting posts outside my bubble
- give up on the idea of global search entirely, which is one of the things I miss most from Twitter: "flight delays XYZ", "MTA line X delay", "<bandname> <cityname>" would allow me to find content by people about any topic of interest in a way that web searches don't.
All of these are annoying but doable for me, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're a major deterrent for many non-sophisticated users.
So I can't compare the platforms at this level of detail but I have used Reddit and Lemmy a lot. And I think Lemmy is really great and just as good as Reddit. No issues with follows across instances following my mobile apps, having searches work etc.
And Voyager allows me to be signed into many instances (and in fact have multiple accounts on the same instance)
> - remember to follow people I care about, since otherwise there is no way to discover interesting posts outside my bubble
And this really is a feature for me, I hate algorithmic feeds. I just want to see who I follow and no other suggested or promoted stuff :)
Twitter was great for following the updates of a given person/company/group etc. It allowed me to keep up to date with various topics of interest (cryptography, engineering, my city's public transit system etc). The 140 character limit was always a red herring, in my view: People can just link to their blog or start a thread (which I can both easily follow and ignore).
Reddit was more useful for researching and discussing a given topic. Discussions are way more meandering, and the tree-based interface made that both acceptable (whereas spamming somebody's replies would be considered rude on Twitter) and ergonomic.
In that sense, Reddit was always the spiritual successor to self-hosted bulletin boards, in the same way that Discord has replaced IRC for many groups. (What makes me sad is that it's now seemingly also replacing discussion boards, which sucks because it's not anonymously searchable at all, but that's a different complaint.)
In that way, Reddit seems like a very low hanging fruit to decentralize: Its predecessor already was decentral, in a way! In contrast, there was never a successful decentralized microblogging service before Twitter (and no, RSS doesn't count).
> I hate algorithmic feeds. I just want to see who I follow and no other suggested or promoted stuff :)
That's very fair! I believe this is what ultimately got me quite hooked on Twitter, but in the long run has made me very unhappy while there and prone to doomscrolling.
You say RSS doesn’t count, but the way you describe your use of Twitter sounds exactly like the purpose of RSS.
>Twitter was great for following the updates of a given person/company/group etc. … The 140 character limit was always a red herring, in my view: People can just link to their blog
I don’t see how this is appreciably different than reading headlines and the first sentence in an RSS feed and clicking through to the blog that backs it, if it seems interesting.
Twitter always felt like RSS for people who didn’t know what RSS is. Hence its popularity, as most people don’t know what it is, but the concept is very useful. A lot of people use Facebook for the same thing.
Yes, but that’s a lot of people!
Other than that, RSS doesn’t support commenting somebody else’s post.
An anonymously searchable alternative to Reddit's search function is PullPush, an archive site independent of Reddit.
It has full-text search and will even search through deleted and removed content.
Main site: https://pullpush.io
Frontends: https://search.pullpush.io, https://ihsoyct.github.io
> - do the same on mobile, because all Mastodon apps can't possibly be associated with all server URLs on iOS and Android
these are all possible with the official app on Android and the web interface. You don't need to copy the handle, you can just open their profile page on your server's interface and click to follow.
But, I stopped using Mastodon because there is no algorithmic feed (either of my own follows or in terms of surfacing things)—-sorry I massively prefer something lightly curated to just a chronological firehose. Most-recent-first is an algorithm of course. One that’s biased in favor of constant posters and those in your own time zone.