Some notes on microblogging

This week Twitter continues to burn money by rebranding to X. I’m still at Twitter at @sherwinarnott. But I don’t know for how long.

Twitter remains more or less functional, but the right wing bias, rampant misinformation, and deepening bigotry and hate are leading me away.^{1 2}

So, I’m happy to be experimenting with a few other platforms. You can find me on Mastodon, Threads, and, most recently, Bluesky. It’s kind of hilarious that I can’t even link to my Threads profile. It’s owned by Facebook (Meta) and they continue to be ideologically opposed to the open web.

Of these three, so far Mastodon is the coolest and most awesome.

As I mentioned, Threads is only available by app, so that’s a huge strike. Bluesky is, funnily enough, a little buggy. My attempts to share articles there have been a little sticky. Neither Bluesky nor Threads have hashtags, so that’s a problem. As far as I can tell neither Threads nor Bluesky have DMs. I don’t make a habit of using Mastodon DMs either, but at least they make it available.

The thing I love about Mastodon is that it’s free and open source software. Anyone can run it on their server. There’s no ads! And if I ever move my account, I can take my followers with me. It very much reminds me of the way I can export my subscribers from a newsletter service. Mastodon isn’t perfect but I do enjoy the ethos of the communities I participate in.