My own Twitter alternative

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If you still thought that Musk was a smart man, then the real-time collapse of Twitter should cure you of that misconception. It is, in some way, impressive how little he understands of what makes Twitter unique and how he dismantles the value it had through all kinds of hare-brained schemes.

But to those of us who were with LiveJournal back when it was sold to the Russians, it’s a bit of deja-vu — a platform that is so important to you is changing in a way that does not align with your own goals for it. That means you will have to make a choice, and in the case of LJ, my choice was to create my own blog and cross-post to LJ. (And earlier this year, I decided to start cross-posting to DW instead of LJ.)

I use Twitter much more than I use my blog — microblogging has a different energy. And I don’t have that much interaction on my blog as I do on Twitter. So yes, I am invested in Twitter as a platform. Its breakdown and the way Musk is treating the company and the employees, does not fill me with great optimism for the long-term survival of Twitter.

One alternative is Mastodon, an open-source federated microblogging system. Through the federation, instances exchange content and users can follow and communicate cross-instance. (The cool thing is that it’s also possible to block federation with specific instances, so you can keep the fascists out.)

But for me it is not feasible to run my own instance of Mastodon on my existing hosting like I do with WordPress for my blog. The Mastodon technology stack is much more complex, and there is no easy install option — so I would have to set up everything and, more importantly, keep everything up to date. That’s not something I am equipped and/or prepared to do.

But the cool thing is that there are several places that offer managed hosting for Mastodon. So I got together with a few people and decided that we would set up an instance and see how that goes. We would use it, and we could also offer accounts to those who are not able to host their own instances. Ideally, I would transfer ownership to a foundation of sorts that would ensure a thriving community and ensure the longevity of the system — but for now we go with the ‘benevolent dictator’ model.

I’m now waiting for my application to be approved and the instance to be, eh, instantiated. Can’t wait!

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Comments

[millionbubbles]

It's insane how he's driven Twitter into the ground in a matter of weeks. I already hated Twitter way before Elon got his claws on it (I find it super negative) and haven't used it in almost a year, but I feel for people that are very invested in Twitter or need it for their businesses.

I have heard of Mastodon but I have no idea what it is exactly.

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The main trick of any social media is to carefully curate your feed. The algorithmic content almost always sucks, but Twitter had a mode where you only view the tweets from people you follow, in chronological order -- so you have the ability to control what you see. That took care of most of the negativity.

Mastodon is like Twitter, but then there are multiple servers, each controlled by a different person/group, and the messages get exchanged between them. There are some servers that are "radical free speech zones" (so: overrun by fascists) and those get blocked so that those messages do not get exchanged with the other servers.
I now run my own server, so I get to control what happens there. So far, my experience has been pretty good.