Over the last few days I’ve been diving in the surprisingly diversified world of twitter clones or twitter substitutes. So far I’ve tried two twitter replacements and compared them to Instagram (as a kind of control). I did this because I can kind of feel something happening in that space that seems to be kind of under public attention for the time being, but I suspect in the not so distant future we’ll see it burst out like a facehugger’s spawn.

The first app I tried was threads. It sucked. There’s not much to say other than it was boring to scroll, my post got no engagement, and I have no idea if anyone even saw it or if there’s even anyone there.

The second app I tried was Mastodon using the mastodon.social network as my host. This experience was MUCH BETTER. Mastodon actually shows me what I want to see, and shows my posts to people interested in them. If I used the right tags, I got engagement, even hours or days after posting. Honestly, I was surprised that it worked so well. I would say it’s about twice as easy as Instagram to get attention on Mastodon, but on the flip side, there are a lot less people there than on Instagram and you can’t pay for more attention (as far as I can tell), so that might be a downside to SOME PEOPLE (i.e. annoying people).

That being said, that’s kind of damming to Meta that Mastodon can match the engagement I get on its flagship product (sorry Facebook) despite having a MUCH smaller audience. Kinda shows how Meta is so extractive and essentially a negative value proposition for content posters.

That was my very non-scientific experiment. Really more of a vibe check than anything else.

After I had done this little test, I realized I’d forgotten Bluesky. I haven’t done a similar experiment on there yet, but I did read about the AT protocol. Basically, what they’re doing is that they’re trying to define a federated protocol for Bluesky compatible servers. This includes descriptions of how to store data, communicate between servers, and negotiate user identity.

TBH, I have some CONCERNS. I think it’s all very well and good to create a federation protocol, but I have EXTREME misgivings about why a for profit business might want to do it. I think it’s PARTICULARLY telling that they have this concept of a dual layer architecture, where part of it is the “speech” layer and the “reach” layer. I get that they’re trying to protect free speech while also moderating the reach of harmful speech, but what I see is a business that is trying to center itself as being in control of the attention of users, the same as any other social media company. They’re basically saying “oh yeah, you can totally set up you own servers to publish whatever you want, but WE will still get to decide who will see that content by being the biggest fish in the pond and taking all the air out of the room.”

Additionally, I have some strong misgivings about a for profit business being in control of all this stuff. At the end of the day, the corporation is motivated to please its share holders and make profit. Yeah, I KNOW that it’s a “public benefit corporation” which in Delaware (where Bluesky is incorporated) this means:

A public benefit corporation shall be managed in a manner that balances the stockholders’ pecuniary interests, the best interests of those materially affected by the corporation’s conduct, and the public benefit or public benefits identified in its certificate of incorporation.

https://delcode.delaware.gov/title8/c001/sc15/

Basically this means that you have a slightly better chance in a class action lawsuit against a public benefit corporation, but other than that it’s basically the same as a regular c-corp. What concerns me about this is that Bluesky is positioning itself to take over the concept of federated online publishing in the name of corporate profits. They will sit at the center of the federation, they will allow the plebes to control the small pieces of the network that don’t make the actual money, but they will control the protocol that runs it all. Because we all know that the medium IS the message, Bluesky wants to make sure THEY control the medium.

Contrast this with Mastodon. Mastodon uses an open protocol called ActivityPub that is defined by a democratic group of concerned parties moderated by the rules of the W3C. If you want to have input on ActivityPub, you can! The protocol is COMPLETELY open, so if you want to implement something that uses ActivityPub, you can! If Bluesky wanted to be a good faith actor in the federated social internet, they WOULD NOT have come up with an entirely new protocol that they own and control. They would have implemented ActivityPub in their app, and started taking an active role in its governance as an equal partner with all the others involved.

Personally, I prefer another set of W3C protocols, and outlined how I’d like to use them elsewhere, but I still think ActivityPub is worth somebody pursuing. It’s way better than what Bluesky is doing.

In conclusion, I think at this point in time, Mastodon is actually the best value proposition for somebody looking for a new social network. It has enough users to be interesting, it actually shows your stuff to people, and it’s the only option that is governed in a way that takes the interest of its many users into account.

(Seriously, though, check out my other post on this topic)