Quitter

The problems with Twitter (like many I refuse to call it X on principle) have been well-documented and I won’t go into too much detail about that, suffice to say it’s not a place I wish go anymore.

This is somewhat sad because once upon a time it was a fun place filled with friends and acquaintances who I enjoyed engaging with on that platform, but it has gone steadily downhill, first by becoming ubiquitous and eventually filling up with the worst kinds of people (and even the worst kinds of non-people), and then of course by being taken over by a stupid man with many questionable traits (far from the worst among them, but noteworthy nonetheless, is actively working to make Twitter an even worse platform).

It also presents a challenge because although many of the people I follow on Twitter may also wish to leave it behind, not many people are actually doing it. The problem is there is no obvious single replacement, and therefore many people stay put out of convenience, and that leads to other people staying put because the people they like are still there (even if the experience of using Twitter is now objectively awful).

For my part, I have tried out two alternatives (I won’t engage with Meta’s Threads for various reasons), Mastodon and Bluesky — both have their own benefits and drawbacks — and a third way…

Mastodon

Mastodon is my preference from a sort of open web ideological point of view. It uses ActivityPub as its underlying protocol which makes it part of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse) (along with potential Reddit replacement Lemmy, which I will probably talk about in a future post), a collection of federated social platforms that, due to ActivityPub, can inter-operate. The idea behind this is that anyone can run a service, but no-one can dominate in the way that Twitter did. If one service becomes intolerable for any reason, it is trivial to move to another and continue to enjoy the same experience, and follow the same people.

In practice, however, the act of joining a federated Mastodon service is rather more complicated than signing up for a Twitter account; you first have to find one that suits you, and that is accepting new members (many are closed to the general public or temporarily closed). You also need to have at least a high-level understanding of what the Fediverse is and I don’t think that is very well-explained.

There is also a problem of discoverability, I’m sure there are Twitter friends who are also on Mastodon but (partly due to Twitter’s bizarre ban on people talking about their accounts elsewhere, somewhat strange for a “free speech” platform) I don’t know that.

Bluesky

Bluesky is a more natural replacement for Twitter; it has pretty much the same UI, and provides a single point of entry, so no confusing process of finding the right server to join, you just join bsky.app (although they are in the process of providing a way to sign up through alternate servers, it is still a totally different experience to Mastodon). It is also designed to be decentralised with an open protocol behind it, but sadly not the same one as Mastodon (though there is a solution for this in Bridgy Fed which will create a mirrored version on the other platform).

They have however really made a concerted effort to tackle the discoverability problem. With “Feeds” (a bit like Twitter’s hashtags) you can find topics to follow that match your interests, and the people who are talking in that space. It still has the problem that few of the voices that I like to hear from on Twitter are actually there, but I think the barrier to entry is lower and they are certainly growing quickly (helped by Twitter being banned in Brazil for esoteric reasons which are presumably in no way related to Ketamine addiction).

There was previously a way to find people you followed on Twitter so you can follow their Bluesky account, but of course, that didn’t last long before Twitter made it impossible (starting to see why I don’t want to use it anymore?)

RSS

Given the issue of most people or organisations I like to follow still only being on fucking Twitter, and not Mastodon or Bluesky, I’ve taken a different approach.

RSS feeds used to be ubiquitous and openly available before publishers realised they needed people to actually spend time on their site in order to make money from advertising, and they essentially allow you to follow the output of various websites in a mostly consistent way, in a reader of your choice, without having to visit the actual website. Of course, RSS feeds link back to the original site, so contrary to the practice of hiding or removing RSS feeds, it can be a useful driver of traffic and therefore advertising revenue, but that’s a bit beside the point. For my purposes, I want to use them so I don’t have to ever visit Twitter.

This takes out all the social interaction element, which given the cesspit Twitter has become, is a total win in my book, but allows me to continue to read the tweets I’m interested in. This is possible thanks to RSSHub and its unofficial Twitter integration. This is not supported, and clearly agains the spirit of what Twitter is trying to achieve these days, but given it uses the authorisation token from your Twitter cookie (which makes it a bit of a pain to set up, but there is a cost to anything worthwhile), which Twitter also needs to use in order to work, is probably pretty safe, and gives me a bespoke RSS feed for each Twitter account I want to follow.

Since I use RSS feeds for other purposes already (I’ll definitely post about this in future), and I haven’t tweeted in years out of principle, making Twitter a purely read-only activity anyway, this is a really useful alternative for me. It’s an awkward compromise; I have to keep my Twitter account to retain access to the tweets via this route, but I only have to visit the site to get a new auth key from the cookie occasionally, and that is necessary evil I’m prepared to tolerate.

Follow me!

I mean, if you want to.

I’m going to try and use my Mastodon account more, and I’ll try and find a way to also syndicate my “toots” to my Bluesky account as well. You can follow me on either, if you are a user of those platforms.

You can also subscribe to this site’s RSS feed! And in the spirit of promoting RSS, I’m going to try and make that more visible on the site soon.

I’ll put all that in the about section once I’ve got around to creating it (oh for an “under construction” gif).

Of course, you can always email me if you’re old school. I might invite that more in future too, I’m not really inclined to allow comments on this site. We’ll see.