If you want to drop the blue bird
In Elon’s Hands Now
For better or worse we are all in the twitter boat with Elon as our navigator. Will we sail on to new free lands or crash on the shores of his ego is anyone’s guess. Luckily other options are available if we are ready to take the plunge.
Mastodon
Mastodon’s open source software has been deployed in numerous online initiatives to create the next killer social media network but they still feel like they have a long way to go before grandmas hopping on a mastodon server to share baking recipes. Overall the setup for mastodon is a little more complex than say signing up for twitter as you aren’t actually signing up with one provider like twitter. Mastodon is the server software as well as the client. Anyone can host a mastodon server (like truthsocial) and create their own mini social network. The great part of this design is that at anytime in the future you can move your entire social profile to someone else’s Mastodon server or spin up your own if the server you were on changes policy or does something you don’t approve of. You are in control of your data which is a strong change from today’s social networks.
TruthSocial
TruthSocial seems to enjoy being billed as the next twitter killer app but since it’s Mastodon wearing a skin that they tried to hide (https://www.pcmag.com/news/trumps-social-media-site-quietly-admits-its-based-on-mastodo) I don’t think it’s really creating any new value and it’s going to always have a tendency to lean right politically so it’s like reading fox news headlines and commentary with probably less of a filter.
Truth Social URL: https://truthsocial.com/
Bluesky
The true twitter alternative may come from a project it organized back in 2019. The original twitter founder Jack Dorsey envisions this new app to be the decentralized version of what twitter can never be. The design would allow a decentralized social network (bluesky) that would allow other social networks to connect to it to share data through open standards. Each of these external social networks (think facebook, twitter, etc…) would be an “application” in Web3 parlance that could still have the ability to for example moderate but only within their own application. Bluesky is still in active development but you can join the waitlist at: https://bsky.app/
CounterSocial
CounterSocial promotes itself as a place free of the trolls and fake content that plagued other sites (including twitter). It is available in the browser, on mobile, and even via VR Goggles. It too looks to be a product fork of the Open Source Mastadon software. The founder can still be found on twitter as well these days (https://twitter.com/th3j35t3r) but the site itself does at least seem like an interesting idea. I signed up for an account and realized that the interface was a lot different than I expected and yet it seemed like a layout that could work. I had a column for my friends feed, next to a column of what counter.social called the community firehouse which looked like my normal twitter feed. However, with the absolute censorship the creator retains this site too feels like it’s going to have a hard time walking the “freedom of speech” line without being a censor advocate.
Counter.Social URL: https://counter.social/
Let me know if you have tested any of these other networks out. I plan to sign up with them all in the future and see where the social seas takes me.
