Quick thoughts on Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads

We’ve now got three replacements for Twitter. I’ve been trying out Bluesky recently, like the rest of the tech world. I’ve been active on Mastodon for a couple of years now. And Threads… exists.

Threads 🧵

I’ll get this one out of the way quickly: Threads feels completely irrelevant to me. I’ve had an account since it launched and barely used it. The app pushes the algorithmic timeline instead of the time-based one and I don’t like that. There’s very little interesting content there, and what is interesting is either federated to Mastodon, or cross-posted. So I don’t bother with Threads.

Mastodon 🐘

I’ve used Mastodon since the idiot with the sink sank Twitter. I like it, but it’s a very tech-focused community, unlike Twitter where I followed silliness, F1, and non-tech friends. I miss having those in my timeline. But I do enjoy the tech community, it’s been genuinely interesting and productive for me in a professional way that Twitter rarely was.

It gets some stick for UX, but I don’t really see that. Just sign up to mastodon.social and don’t overthink servers. It can be hard to find people, but it’s hard to find people on any service. You need to go looking for them. And as for the apps, It’s great that there are so many 3rd party apps, because you can tailor your experience the way you want it. I love Ivory, it’s my ideal social media app.

Bluesky 🦋

Bluesky is interesting. It’s clearly catching the desire to leave X/Twitter in a broader way that Mastodon never did. I guess that’s a combination of it only currently having a single server (even though it’s theoretically decentralised just like Mastodon), and how similar the app is to Twitter. It feels familiar and comfortable to people leaving Twitter. Whereas I never liked the Twitter app and I don’t like the Bluesky app either.

Bluesky has starter packs to find followers, which I think is another helpful feature in moving over. You can easily find a lot of people you followed before. As I touched on above, Mastodon has often had the criticism that discovery is difficult.

And in my experience, it is definitely easier to find people to follow on Bluesky. On Mastodon, I had to follow hashtags for a while, which did work, but doesn’t have that immediate satisfaction of finding a follower list when you sign up, because it relies on people posting over time, and with the hashtags you choose.

However, I also find that a lot of people are following whole starter packs and will have massive feeds, so I don’t know how they’re finding value in that. Lots of content, sure, but that’s not the same as value.

I’ve made as many followers through being in one starter pack as I have done in my whole time on Mastodon. But that’s not all good; the starter pack was for iOS developers. So now I kinda feel like I have to post more about iOS development than I naturally would. On Mastodon I feel completely comfortable posting about whatever I want.

Roundup 🥇

Overall, I like Mastodon best. I have Ivory, the perfect app; I can follow the whole timeline that I’ve curated without any algorithms or weird refresh behaviour; I feel happier posting whatever I want.

But Bluesky is really promising because of how many people are coming on to the platform. It mostly just needs a good 3rd party app.