So "X" - nothing to see here. Elon's in control - Part XXX

I struggle to find an intelligent comment on twitter now. All reactionary nonsense. A town square full if blue ticks agreeing with each other and posting 4chan memes. Peppered with super liberal outrage.

The centre has fallen, or at least been wiped out on twitter. Can't be arsed anymore, account closed

I'd say what you'll end up with is fragmentation. I don't think you'll ever see a single space like Twitter was again.

Twitter really just became something else when Musk took over and I think the X rebrand is really the final nail in the coffin for whatever Twitter was.

While Twitter in its original form had problems, it was also genuinely useful for decimating information, interacting in niche areas like science, tech, and so on. What it is nowadays is really just a toxic mess and it's no longer useful for those kinds of users.

Mastodon's improving, particularly with the growth of decent apps like Ivory and Ice Cubes on iOS and Melodeon, Fedilab, etc on Android. Ivory is visually and functionally one of the best iOS social apps I've ever used. It wipes the floor with X and Threads in terms of how it works and looks

There's still a problem communicating what Mastodon actually is though. It's just a protocol. The actual services are the likes of Mastodon.ie which is really well run to be fair to them. The problem though is that anyone can spin up a server, it just gets defederated if it's badly managed. However, it's a protocol just like the WWW or email or whatever and that does create some issues with how it works and how it's discussed.

The dark horse is Bluesky. It's building quite rapidly (I have an account) and for example much of Irish core old Twitter is already on it. They're working by giving existing users an invite code every couple of weeks, and you can bring more people on board and the logic is it will be populated by people who are essentially in the networks of other solid posters, so the standards are kept up. When they throw the doors open widely is anyone's guess and it's still technically in beta mode, so nobody knows.

Functionally it's not great tbh. I think it's getting more tech press than it deserves. It's basically just a 'me too.' The app is very basic and doesn't even support video or gifs yet and the hash tagging system is a complete mystery to me. You can search fairly effectively and you can even design your own algorithms or subscribe to different ones, which gives you a lot more control over it.

In theory Mastodon and Bluesky can be bridged, but whether that happens is also anyone's guess.

However, it's the same guy who founded Twitter and it could just be tech bros talk about tech bros, so it gets more coverage than Mastodon despite being an inferior setup.

Threads is Meta so ... beware!