Let’s talk about the socials!
tl;dr Most platforms bad, Twitter very very bad, Mastodon good.
The social media landscape is changing.
In the Good Ole Days, it was easy – there was Facebork, and there was Twitter. There was also MySpace too but that didn’t last. There was also FourSquare, which couldn’t compete when Facebork ripped off the idea. And Google tried to make Google Plus a thing and that lasted a good six minutes. Anyway, they were simpler, easier and possibly happier times.
Now Facebork is mostly poorly targeted ads and tiresome group posts. And stupid Reels or something which get in the way while I scroll. I see less and less posts from friends, or news outlets.
There’s Instagram, too, but I don’t use it. I don’t see what functionality it provides that I can’t get from FB or elsewhere. And ‘Influencers’ are nauseatingly basic.
I don’t get the appeal of TikTac. I have neither the time nor the interest in scrolling aimlessly through algorithm-generated lists of videos.
And then there’s the birdsite. I used to like Twitter. I made lots of friends through it, it was a fantastic resource for finding experts in so many fields. I could read and interact with the few ‘celebrities’ I actually cared about – people like Felicia Day, Wil Wheaton, Stephen Fry and Nathan Fillion. People would share jokes, memes, news and information that I would otherwise never see. It used to be great.
Then, it started to slide. Trump and the far right hastened the enshittification. Finally, in October last year, Elno Musk bought Twitter and has been slamming his fist down on the Self Destruct button there ever since. Desperate for attention and the adoration of incels, he has been relentless in broadcasting what a narcissistic and cruel manbaby he is. Twitter is now a half-empty cesspit of Nazis, trolls, conspiracy theorists, incels, TERFS, mean people and a handful of survivors from The Old Times still tweeting and linking to struggling media entities. It’s soul-destroying and largely unusable.

As a result, a myriad of alternatives have sprung up, all promising to replace the dumpster fire. There’s Bluesky, Post.News, Spill, Spoutable, Hive, and so many more – even Wikipedia still somehow has its own ghost town called WikiTribune Social.
And now, Yet Another Billionaire has started a social media platform, this time the billionaire is a robot lizard called Zuckerborg, and the platform is called Threads. Threads has been hailed as a Twitter-killer, in the sense that it is a lot like Twitter but “run with sanity” as an executive spruiked it. Seriously, their entire promotional slant is “We’re Twitter but our billionaire isn’t quite as insane… yet”.
Unfortunately, almost all the Twitter alternatives are, in some way, problematic. Whether it’s their founders, their owners, their queerphobic or far-right moderation policies, their small size or their advertising algorithms, none of them are perfect.
Threads may SOUND good – and with its tentacles in Instagram and Facebook there’s a very low barrier of entry to it – but at the end of the day everything that went shit with Facebork is going to go to shit on Threads. The advertising will be obnoxious and unrelenting. Private data will be sold and misused. Accounts will be suspended without notice. And if you decide you don’t like it and you want to leave? It will also delete your Instagram account.
So I won’t be using Threads (at least not for a while…. I may eventually relent, but I can’t see it happening in the near-to-mid future). I’m not on Insta, I won’t join TikTac, or Bluesky, or Spoutable, or Hive. I haven’t logged into my WikiTribune Social account in years.
Instead, I’ve been toying around and exploring Mastodon. It’s a social network with three big strengths – it’s non-corporate, it’s decentralised and it’s open.
Mastodon isn’t ‘owned’ by anyone, and the nature of how it operates is that it can’t be owned by anyone.
It’s decentralised – it consists of thousands of individually run ‘instances’ that all talk to each other. If one instance becomes a haven for trolls, or is taken over by the next odious billionaire, you can block that entire instance, or just some people on it. If the instance you’re on becomes toxic, you can easily move to another.
And it’s open – it uses an open source protocol called ActivityPub that is the standard throughout the non-proprietary internet. The code is publicly available so everyone can see how it works and check that your data isn’t being misused, security breaches are quickly identified and fixed, and it’s robust.



I’ve been toying around with it since 2018, and I quite like it. It has a very positive, community feel and has all the features I need or want. It has great apps (I use Moshidon on Android, but Tusky is also good and for iOS I’ve heard good things about Ice Cubes), and because it’s open source anyone can make a client or web app to use it (eg I like phanpy.social).
The one potential good thing about Threads is that they’ve said they’re going to use ActivityPub and federate – essentially become an instance on Mastodon. If this happens, it will likely still have the advertising, the trolls, the privacy issues, the terrible moderation and all the other problems that Threads and Meta have in general. But depending on how it is implemented, users on other instances should be able to befriend and follow people who are using Threads, and vice versa. So if you do decide to go ahead and use Threads, hopefully you’ll still be able to see my posts and we can interact in the future.
So for me, I’m going to begrudgingly stick with Facebook, and my own blog, and Mastodon. That’s enough social media for now.
And if anyone’s curious about trying Mastodon, I’m happy to help out. It can be a little bit daunting at first but once you’re set up and know what you’re doing it’s very straightforward.
Further reading:
My Mastodon is here.
The three images explaining federation used above are by Zsombor and taken from their Mastodon toot.
Cory Doctorow has a brilliant and lengthy analysis of Threads, capitalism and why we need to “abolish” the Zuck.