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How Threads’ privacy policy compares to Twitter’s (and its rivals’)
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Mastodon is very good for following topics. But it's a pain trying to find and follow people. And even when you do have a good selection of people, the culture there is very Boost-heavy (because that's how you discover people, not really via search) so your timeline ends up being full of boosted posts written by people you don't follow, often about things you aren't interested in.
Yeah, the privacy, tech, scalability etc is great. But it's not a direct replacement for Twitter. And that's what a lot of folks are looking for. Which is sadly why Threads will do so well.
Isn't Mastodon very different from Twitter? Perhaps we need a Twitter alternative bacoed by ActivityPub that isn't made by Meta.
It's more different than people expect it do be, I think. So once people have gotten past the 'what is an instance/ server, how do I actually join Mastodon...' stuff that puts people off, they're then in the infrastructure that kind of looks and acts like Twitter but in different ways that you don't realise until you've delved into things. It's just more barriers really.
There is Bluesky as an alternative, but that's not ActivityPub, it's it's own protocol. Personally I think that's the best option - it's open source and decentralised - but I think some people have reservations because Jack Dorsey is / was involved. Plus it's still on beta so is invite-only for the time being.
I guess we'll see where it goes then.
But the fact remains that there really isn't a realistic FOSS competitor to Twitter, despite that being a fairly easy problem to solve. I would've thought that would be one of the first things to get implemented, since it can be filtered in all kinds of interesting ways (e.g. a matrix bridge that listens for topics).
While a tech solution to replace Twitter is possible, the tech is only about 5% of what makes Twitter Twitter - the other 95% is the userbase. Which again counts in Threads favour because they already have a huge Instagram userbase. They could release any old hastily put together system and still get 30m users... Hmm.
Yup, they won initially by being better than Myspace, and I'm convinced they stay on top largely due to inertia.