I quit Twitter when Elon Musk took over. I know my one account means nothing to Twitter or to Musk, but I just couldn’t support a racist, misinformation peddling, conspiracy theorist. I was never a heavy user. It was fun to go on and chat with friends, read Star Trek Minus Context, and things like that. So, leaving Twitter has left a very small void in my life. I decided to see if I could find a Twitter alternative. I’ve tried three so far with varying levels of success.
The first one I tried was Mastodon. Their big thing is that there’s no algorithms that decide what should end up in your feed. They call themselves a federated platform. There are a bunch of independent servers you can join and each one is supposed to be a community. It seems to perform like they want it to, but I miss the algorithms. Yes, they’re not perfect, but without them, it’s incredibly hard to find people to connect with and topics to follow.
Next, I tried Hive. It never even began to make sense to me. I never made any connections and whenever I tried to search hashtags, I came up empty.
The most recent one is Post.news. They want to create a space for calm and intelligent conversation. This one seems the most promising. The only problem is that it’s still in beta. So, a lot of the things they want to have are not ready yet. Plus, there just aren’t a lot of people on it. Part of what made Twitter work was the ability to find anything and everything. Who knows if Post will ever reach that level.
Those are the three I’ve tried so far. I’m going to keep playing with Post and see what happens. But I’m open to suggestions, too. What other Twitter alternatives are out there?
