The State of the Twitter Alternatives in Mid 2024 (2024)

I will now admit that Twitter is dead. I have reached the acceptance stage of my grief.

I still refer to X.com as Twitter out of habit, but the spirit of my refusing to call it X.com… despite the obvious ridiculousness of the name… lived in the hope that Elon was running a business and would make sound business decisions, that perhaps he wouldn’t be a complete tool and ruin a good thing just to stroke his own ego and promote his favorite flavors of white nationalist rhetoric… or possibly just to stop that one guy from tracking his private jet.

There is no going back. That particularly racist white toothpaste isn’t going back into the tube.

So that brings me back to another episode of how things are going in the land of things that once were, or would like to be, Twitter. For Twitter is still the ideal, the archetype, the goal for all of them, though the road to getting there looks very different for each.

Anyway, I looked at Twitter alternatives a year ago, let’s see how I feel about them today.

• X.com – Now Actually Rated X!

Elon previously suggested in a post that Instagram was like a strip club… and he’s not wrong on that at least. But suggesting that our family photos belong on his site then turning around and changing the rules to allow p*rn? All in a day’s work for Chief Hypocrite and King of the Incels Elon Musk!

Yes, X.com is now a strip club by design.

X.com does keep booming, at least relative to its chief rivals. Or so it seems. Both Elon and Zuck fudge their numbers, so it is hard to tell. Meanwhile Elon stooge Linda Yaccarino has to keep claiming progress for the site so has gone all 1984 on us and has started posting about how before Elon the site could only be accessed via Gopher and all messages were in Morse code so X.com can look good via the false comparison… I mean, when she can stop promoting Tesla. You might wonder who is paying her… but then they aren’t looting Twitter to fund Elon’s AI venture the way they are Tesla.

If I could get maybe 15-20 accounts to move to another service… and halt the flow of people wandering back… I could leave X.com behind. Yes, I have 10x more followers on X.com than any competitor, and I get more every day. But most of my old followers are inactive accounts and most of the news ones have *N*U*D*E*S**I*N**B*I*O*.

Though I guess with the rule change they can just say “NUDES IN BIO” without trying to dodge the censors. As Kurt Vonnegut repeated so often in Breakfast of Champions, “Wide open beavers”… or whatever it was. I read it back in the 80s, leave me alone.

On my desktop, in Firefox, with uBlock Origin running, and staying strictly in the Following tab, X.com is usable and gets me the info I am looking for. I even see people I follow who have sworn off X.com back and posting, because it is hard to give up the level of engagement and followers. And in that state I can pretend it is still Twitter if I squint my eyes and stay away from replies by Blue Checkmarks.

And then I am sitting on the couch and look at it on my iPad in Elon’s app and… Good Lord, what is going on in there?! Ads for crypto, white nationalism, and Trump have supplanted Cheech & Chong edibles, block no longer blocks people but is just a soft mute that lets them continue to harass you, you can no longer block noxious advertisers at all, and the algorithm pushes all the most noxious content straight at you, with Elon the king of the sh*t pile.

I mean, followers and engagement are cool and all, and it is fun to watch Liam Nissan troll the Nazis… oh, and Tom Nichols is back… but it has also broken some people. There are a few people I had to unfollow because they clearly felt X.com was reality and had to fight every battle. The block button is there for a reason people… oh, wait, they broke that, didn’t they?

Anyway, the grand unifying conspiracy theory about X.com right now is that Elon, already an emerald mine racist nepo baby, is going all in on Trump support on the site to woo Trump’s favor in the hope of getting pardons when the time comes… for things like looting Tesla to fund his AI venture. The one thing that is for sure is that the only speech Elon was ever interested in was his own.

In spite of all that, some pundits have declared X.com is still the center of the debate, and it is hard to gainsay their point. Plus… you know… p*rn. p*rn always wins in the end.

• BlueSky – As Bad as 2010 Twitter?

Perpetual pedantic grump Tom Nichols, who as noted above has been spotted back on X.com, suggested the other the day that BlueSky was as bad as Twitter… but specifically 2010 Twitter, which is one of those very Tom Nichols things where he has an extremely narrow and specific meaning and context in his head that he won’t share, that nobody else could possibly understand, and that becomes a hill he plans to die on. This habit was probably best exemplified when Tom spent several years fighting against calling Trump a Fascist because real Fascism must come from the Fascismo-Romagna region of Italy, otherwise it is merely Sparkling Totalitarianism. But I digress.

I wish BlueSky was as bad as 2010 Twitter, because 2010 Twitter was pretty fun in my memory… a lot more fun than BlueSky. Even Jack Dorsey says BlueSky is making all the same mistakes as early Twitter… we should be so lucky… but it just can’t quite become Twitter.

Also, Jack left the BlueSky board and is also on X.com buying in on whatever Elon is selling because whatever worm was eating RFK Jr.’s brain has apparently afflicted him as well.

Instead BlueSky is where the very serious people have gone to escape the other sites, but where they all can’t stop talking about those other sites. Seriously, I swear if mentioning or posting pictures from X.com was banned, half the posts would disappear and we’d be left with complaints about Threads and Mastodon. Nobody takes Threads seriously on BlueSky and everybody apparently was stridently lectured once too often about some aspect of Fediverse etiquette on Mastodon and left in a huff because… their sarcasm and wit were not up to the challenge? They couldn’t figure out how to block people? They too have feet of clay? Anyway, they seem to be universally upset at not being welcomed by a cheering crowd for having deigned to join.

Still, for the slim thread of content that isn’t complaining about or reacting to content on the other sites, BlueSky is pretty good. It is can go very heavy on politics with very little interest in entertainment, so lacks the diversity of topics that made Twitter great somewhere between 2010 and Elon, but it could get there.

And some people are trying to help get it there… though I am not sure their efforts are all that effective. I call this the “Neil Gaiman Problem.” I like Neil Gaiman. He is interesting and on BlueSky, so I followed him. Neil Gaiman would very much like BlueSky to succeed so is putting in the effort by interacting with his followers. That means I can look at BlueSky and see 47 messages in a row that are Neil Gaiman replying with a bland pleasantry to every person who responded to something he posted. That, I fear, does not make BlueSky very interesting.

Basically, BlueSky could be good at some point, but it is still getting there.

• Threads – Ending is better than mending

Happily news free content since May 2024!

Threads is not being taken seriously for good reason. To start with, it is very much Instagram for words, with the same sort of algorithm where you see something in you feed, but if you somehow refresh you’ll never find it again unless you are following the person who posted it and go to their profile. But most of the stuff in your feed is from randos that the algorithm throws at you… and all of it is brands and cat pictures and light, happy fare.

None of it is news, however. The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, is on Threads telling people that they are actively suppressing news content, and especially politically focused news content, because it makes people unhappy and distracts from the capitalism and the absolute need to foster desire for luxury goods and expensive vacations. He much prefers content from creatives and you should too! (Also, this might be Zuck’s trying to duck the election influence issue since that would cost money he could otherwise be throwing at the Metaverse or AI or whatever he is on about lately.)

Just to make things even more banal, Threads is planning a swipe left/right option for content… Tinder for cat pictures and luxury goods… though I can’t remember which way means what and it likely won’t work correctly in the browser for another year if history is any guide.

But my greatest issues with Threads is that they only have a phone app that scales up badly to my iPad and that they took the adequate initial web version and forced it to look like and behave like the phone app so it is freaking awful to use now. JFC, these people.

• Mastodon – Still the Linux of Social Media

Still the refuge you’re looking for if you want no algorithm and a quiet little silo of people to interact with. Is that social media though? Is there such a thing as anti-social media? Limited social media? Siloed social media?

The reputation it has for being filled with strident rule makers who will lecture you about how you violated their internal belief system with something you did or did not do is overblown, but not entirely undeserved. I find that the block button works… in both directions… so that takes care of you intruding on somebody else’s curated reality.

It is the site where, as a percentage, I interact with more of my actual followers… once we pare down the count from all the multiple follows from people who have changed servers… than any other of the Twitter pretenders.

But that number seems to be about six. Six people make for a pretty quiet Discord server, much less a social media experience.

Yeah, I follow other people, lots of people, often people I follow on the other sites because I am not alone on spreading my bets in the hope of finding the Twitter replacement that best suits me. That means I see a lot of things on multiple sites… and my followers who do the same see my stuff in multiple locations. You know who you are. I like your stuff here and then over on BlueSky and sometimes again on X.com.

This situation stops at Threads because, as noted, nobody takes Threads seriously. Well, nobody who follows me elsewhere does. Molly Jong-Fast is trying to take Threads seriously for all of us… but it isn’t working. It is cat pictures and luxury goods and stolen memes all the way down.

And it probably says something about Mastodon that in the middle of writing about it I went off on Threads again. It is also dull, in its own special algorithm free way. If that is what you like, you have found your place.

• Spoutible – When One Topic is Enough

As a site Spoutible has some technical issues… I could never stay logged in and the site totally started breaking in Firefox, another victim of the “everybody uses Chrome” mentality of so many developers… so I eventually gave up on it.

But my persistence there for about 8 months was not rewarded by very much in the way of engagement. There was no room for video games, or entertainment in general, on Spoutible.

Instead it was all political… which wouldn’t be bad, but it was all very much anti-Trump memes. And, while I can very much get behind the sentiment, believing as I do that another term as president would be the end of democracy in the United States, I am not sure that goal is moved forward by participating in an echo chamber. An echo chamber with the right message is still an echo chamber, and I am already on board so don’t need constant reinforcement and reassurance.

• Post.news – Ex Post Facto

Post News is dead, having failed to make the cut. It will be remembered as more dull than Mastodon and falling over literally any time Elon sneezed and half a dozen people tried to jump ship.

It was not ready for prime time and now it never will be.

• Other Outliers

At one point Automattic was trying to promote Tumblr as a possible inheritor of the Twitter crown. I feel like anybody suggesting that had either never used Twitter or never used Tumblr. Also, one follower on Mastodon also follows me on Tumblr where my post go automatically because the same people who own WordPress own Tumblr as well… a fact which might point to the third alternative explanation; lack of a grip on reality.

Substack Notes… well, my opinion there hasn’t changed in a year. It sucked then, existing only as a way to promote your substack and I suspect it sucks now.

So that gets me through the options and… I feel like the only appropriate response is a standard internet meme.

I just wanted one platform to win out… one that wasn’t run by a horrible racist. But you don’t always get what you want. So it goes.