Castaway

It's been exactly three months since I left Twitter. I created accounts on Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon. These are my thoughts on them as replacements for Twitter:

Threads
Followers: 98
Following: 96

My departure from Twitter (when they decided to rebrand it as X) coincided with the launch of Meta's Threads. Like everyone else, I was inicially excited, especially as a lot of Instagram friends, who didn't tweet, used it for a few days. Then, as the realisation dawned that Threads didn't have a news agreggator or a search function (other then to search for specific accounts), the place emptied out.

I stuck around. Threads felt like old school Instagram to me, with people posting beautiful photos, but what I really liked was that the algorithm kept showing me content that was equal english and brazilian portuguese, because of my large groups of brazilian friends on Instagram. I also enjoyed how random some of the posts were - it reminded me a little bit of TikTok. The usual thirst traps - so prevalent on Instagram - also showed up, but it was easier than Instagram to ignore them.

More recently, after more badly-judged changes to Twitter, there's been a huge surge of new users to Threads. People who had deserted it came back, with their usual complaining posts about how much they now hated Twitter. For a while, that's all you saw, but that now seems to have died down. The algorhythm enjoyed this new surge and posts got more interesting. People who I enjoyed on Twitter finally joined; it felt like Threads could turn out to be Twitter's big successor.

If Threads was a TV show or movie, it would be "2012" - big budget, lots of talk of how Twitter destroyed everything, survivors showing up all the time and trying to get in the surviving boat.

Mastodon
Followers: 46
Following: 134

Mastodon is its own unique beast and I predict - at this stage - that it will never become popular, due to the whole concept of the fediverse. It's a great notion but a difficult one to sell to users who just want to pick up an app and start using it. For one, you have to decide at first which "instance" you want to join, so that already involves a bit of figuring out what instances mean, and how to decide which one is the best for you. And what if you want to follow someone who's in another instance? I went for the Books one, which turned out to be a great choice: I was immediately welcomed and made some nice, new connections. I tried to find old Twitter friends but there were only a few there, and definitely nobody from Brazil.

My particular instance is very left - sometimes even extreme left. Big popular topics are Trump and long Covid. Are there right-wing instances? Sometimes you hear murmurings that an instance was taken down, or they ran out of money to keep it going (Mastodon has no ads and so relies on its users keeping their instances going; if your instance's admin decides to quit, and nobody wants to take over the job, the instance dies.) As Mastodon is run on a limited budget, you can't post videos. Users are also older, I noticed, and there are no celebrities, aside from George Takei (but he seems to be on all apps).

If Mastodon was a TV show or movie, it would be "Battlestar Galactica" - a group of interlinked ships in outer space, escaping some menace, eternally paranoid that some of that menace is in their midst.

Bluesky
Followers: 18
Following: 58

I came late to Bluesky as it took me a while to get an invite code. I'd heard it was pretty quiet inside and the rumours were not wrong. There isn't much going on - it's like what Twitter was like just before it became popular. It has many of Twitter's functionality.

I used to have lists on Twitter for literary journals, translators and writers. Bluesky has turned out to be a giant literary list for me. I've given up on treating it like Twitter - it's simply not big enough for that. When I log on, I get updates on journals that are seeking submissions, info on writers and published material I may wish to read. It's low level commitment. It's very unlikely Bluesky will grow to become the next Twitter.

If Bluesky was a TV show or movie, it would be "Lost" - a small group of survivors from an airplane crash, on a strange island that seems like the real world. They soon learn that only a select few can enter this island, and that there are "others" already living there who don't wish to leave.