Truth Social has lately taken on some qualities of a QAnon forum, serving as a proving ground for election-related conspiracies as well as a general Trump fan site. Parler briefly became a gathering place for election deniers, many of whom posted about attending and participating in the January 6 Capitol riots after its removal from app stores and the arrest of many of its users, Parler relaunched with more censorship, promptly became a ghost town, and recently claimed to have entered into an agreement to be purchased by Ye, formerly Kanye West. Gab isn’t an alternative to Reddit or Twitter in any meaningful sense it’s more like an extremist sub-Reddit. When these sites get a little momentum - as Gab, Parler, and Truth Social have in different ways and at different times - it’s by becoming something else. They’ve had years to gather up disgruntled Twitter users - people who suggested they needed to leave because of how the company was run! - and haven’t found much success. You might find your people, but other people are also there to be engaged with or mocked or simply observed. Twitter is a compelling place to read or talk about politics because lots of powerful people are there and there’s lots of conflict. Twitter users who say they’re upset with the company’s moderation decisions might be telling the truth, but the reason they’re upset is that they still want to be on Twitter. In most ways, these platforms are cautionary tales. Gab, Parler, Gettr, and Donald Trump’s own Truth Social all borrow features from a range of mainstream social networks, but Twitter is obviously the strongest influence. Many of Mastodon’s new users know why they signed up, but it doesn’t take that long to wonder what they’re doing there.įor years, conservatives have been claiming censorship by the big platforms, perhaps none so often as Twitter, which, to be fair, did ban a sitting Republican president’s personal account. Mastodon faces the same core problem as any new “alternative” to a social-media platform: Features are easy to copy, but what makes the originals compelling is who’s there and what they post. While people on different instances can interact with one another, the one you start with actually matters - the last time I signed up for Mastodon was in 2018, and the instance I joined is long gone along with my account. New users have to select a server (or “instance”) on which to start, which isn’t especially intuitive. Created in 2016, during another rough period in Twitter’s history, it’s seen record sign-ups in recent weeks.Īnother way Mastodon is not like Twitter is that it’s not especially easy to get started. Mastodon has a lot going for it in theory - it’s decentralized, it’s built with open-source software, and it allows people to sort themselves into servers and communities that have shared expectations and norms. (Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is working on a service based on similar principles, for what it’s worth.) Others have drawn comparisons to much older technologies like email - anyone can start and run an email server, but emailers can all talk to each other regardless of the one they use. Mastodon isn’t a platform but a tool for creating platforms: There are thousands of servers created and hosted by Mastodon users and connected in a large, loose federation known as the “fediverse.” It’s a bit like Reddit in that different communities with somewhat different rules are connected by a central structure through which they interact if they want, except Reddit is centrally owned and controlled. Twitter is a centralized platform run by a single company and, now, a single man. These striking similarities conceal something fundamentally different from Twitter, however. The equivalent of a retweet is a “boost,” and Mastodon’s version of the tweet is a “toot,” which sounds profoundly silly, but then so did its inspiration and, wow, look at us now. Once you’re set up with Mastodon, you’ll see a familiar feed with familiar features. In form and function, Mastodon is a fairly direct replacement for Twitter. Fair! Whatever their reasons for worrying, they all end up with the same question: If not Twitter, where? Is there a better place to tweet than Twitter? Here’s where people are looking now. The sudden acquisition of a major social and professional space by a volatile Twitter-addicted billionaire has plenty of users wondering whether it’s time to make plans for the future. Musk’s message has been consistent on one thing: Major change is coming whether you like it or not. The platform is largely the same as before, but it’s been only a couple of weeks. The Elon Musk–led era at Twitter is off to an alarming start with mass layoffs, sudden feature changes, and at the center of it all, a man who truly cannot stop posting.
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