Image: Ibrahim.ID
This is because I, too, am ready to join the exodus from the former. Even before Elon Musk began his questionable practices, the place had become — to put it mildly — a dumpster fire. There was so much yelling, screaming, and advertising that actual conversations with actual people were getting lost in the signal-to-noise ratio.
The problem hasn’t ever been wanting to leave Twitter. The problem, for me, was figuring out where to go.
Ideally, it would be staying here on my own site, which is run on a self-hosted version of WordPress. However, for some reason, post formats have been removed from WordPress. I’ve looked into various options for adding them back into my theme, but so far have not found one that is workable.
I really like Mastodon, but there is a dearth of features on the site and WordPress integration can be a bit…challenging at times. A lot of this is because it’s a whole new way of thinking; it’s not just a terminology change. The entire point of Mastodon is its decentralization which means it’s not going to be as easily integrated as Twitter was, particularly for someone like me who is not interested in all the technical minutiae. For me, the point of social media has always been the “social” part.
As an example, I was originally on the RCSocial.net instance, but after repeated attempts I could not get it to integrate with Buffer, which I use to space out my social media posts so that they don’t overwhelm anyone’s feeds. As it turns out, the problem was with the instance; its API is private, which means the Buffer application couldn’t connect with it. In the end, I reluctantly found myself up moving over to a more popular (and more generic) instance, mstdn.social.
In addition, Mastodon is not particularly large yet in comparison to Twitter, which means that building a robust network of followers and followed will take a longer period of time, especially since switching instances cost me several followers. That said, I’ve been intrigued by the advent of hashtag feeds and have even begun following a couple.
The other two popular alternatives are Bluesky and Threads. I decided against Threads early on because it seems to me that Mark Zuckerberg is only fractionally better than Elon Musk when it comes to questionable practices; I saw no point in changing from one somewhat-monopolistic platform to another.
Bluesky seems promising, but I’ve had quite a few problems getting it to work right, especially since links apparently count toward the character limit. In addition, there’s no integration with WordPress at all, unless I’m willing to upgrade to a paid account on Bluesky, Buffer, WordPress, or some combination of those. That, plus the fact that it’s been even harder to build up a network there, has me keeping my presence there to a simple mirror of what I’m doing on Mastodon. For the time being, that’s how I plan to keep it.
The next step, of course, is giving up Twitter/X. Unfortunately, I’ve found that I can’t quite do that yet. Although I’ve started to see more post engagements on Mastodon than Twitter/X, the audience on Twitter/X is larger by orders of magnitude. I’ve also run into an odd sort of censorship on Mastodon: as a general rule, acceptance of Catholic ethics and morality seems to be confined to a few small pockets; the membership as a whole is overwhelmingly secular, with a surprising lack of diversity in political opinion. That problem actually doesn’t exist on Twitter, but it’s primarily because of Musk’s misbehavior versus happening in spite of it, which means I’m not inclined to see that as a mark in Twitter’s favor.
(Yes, I have a Truth Social account. But remember, I’m out of place with both the political left and the political right, and if Elon Musk is bad, Donald Trump is worse when it comes to business ethics. I haven’t made a single post over there; in fact, I haven’t even logged in to my account over a year. I see no need to change either of these facts.)
So, for right now, I’m treating Twitter/X the same way I’m treating Bluesky: as a mirror of my content from Mastodon. That said, I am logging in to both Twitter/X and Bluesky regularly to check for replies and updates. As of this writing, Mastodon seems to be where I’ve settled for my public social media activity. Only time will tell if I end up staying there, but so far, it is the platform where the benefit-to-drawback ratio has been most useful to me.