Threads, Bluesky, Twitter et al
The other day I went off on Twitter because it literally stopped functioning for me. For two days I couldn't see tweets because of some rate limit I hit. I was so ticked off, I moved the not-so-secret Twitter DM group to Whatsapp.
Ever since Elon fired an FOTM HOFer (I won't tell you who, but it's someone on this page) I've been actively searching for a Twitter alternative I like better. The moment I find one I prefer, I'll peace out of Twitter.
At first I tried the usual suspects:
None of those social media apps gave me what I like about Twitter. But then a new batch of hopefuls arose, and I tried them all:
- Mastodon
- Sproutible
- Post News
Needless to say, I was back on Twitter, as it remained the best game in town.
With this recent outage, and the DM group move to Whatsapp, I dove into two more Twitter alternatives with high hopes:
- Bluesky
- Threads
Let's start by talking about Threads, which is yet another Meta app and very closely tied to Instagram. It's so tied to Insta that my Threads account seemed to be born from my Instagram account and I was following the same people. I downloaded the app, threw up a post, threw up a second post, then bailed. That's right, I tapped out after 24 hours on Threads. Here's why...
There was no way for me to post or comment or even read replies to my posts in the browser. That means I can't create Threads content on my laptop. You must do it via Android or iOS mobile app. Laugh if you will, but that's a deal breaker for me. I only became interested in Instagram when they made it possible to update via the browser.
Farewell Threads, I hardly knew thee. But this leads us to Bluesky. Bluesky is by invitation only, and I finally got one last week. I'm at https://bsky.app/profile/torontomike.bsky.social if you're also there.
Bluesky is by far my favourite Twitter alternative thus far. I like how it behaves, I like that I can do everthing in the browser, and I'd switch today except for one small but important detail.... most people aren't there yet, because they can't create an account. It's a slow roll-out, but until more people I want to follow go there, Twitter is still the best game in town.
So today I tweet... because it's still free and it functions again. So long as it says free and functional, I'll probably stay on Twitter.
Twitter is dead.
Long live Twitter.