Still from the 1995 movie “Leaving Las Vegas” of alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter Ben Sanderson (Nicolas Cage) sitting in a Las Vegas cocktail lounge, staring at a Martini as he drinks himself into oblivion.
On November 14, 2024, I said goodbye to Twitter
Like hundreds of thousands of users in the weeks following the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, I decided it was time to leave Twitter. How did someone like me —who thrived on the platform for years, posting over 80,000 tweets and amassing more than 8,000 followers — decide to move on? And where did I go?
Here’s the story.
Twitter: The early days of wonder and delight
I joined Twitter (now “X”) in June 2009. Little did I know that, over the next few years, Twitter would become the most important way for people to discover my work and for me to connect with thousands of kindred spirits worldwide who share my specialized interests. Over time, this website Conferences That Work grew to six million page views in 2023.
Why did this happen? In its early years, Twitter was small and authentic. Tweets were public, fostering organic discovery of fascinating people and communities, often defined by hashtags. Two vibrant communities I called home for years were #eventprofs and #assnchat.
But in 2017, I noticed a change. In retrospect, 2016-2107 marked a transition where late adopters continued to join Twitter. However, a critical mass of active users concluded that engagement on the platform was not for them. They began moving to other social media platforms, like Instagram and, later, TikTok. Twitter became a platform more suited for consuming breaking news and rumors than meaningful interaction.
The Elon Era: From Bad to Worse
Everything changed in October 2022 when Elon Musk took over. Over the next two years, he destroyed what was left of Twitter’s value. He promoted accounts that paid for meaningless “blue check” verification and eliminated content moderation rules. Elon’s evisceration of safety guidelines and enforcement filled the platform with a toxic stew of bigots, anonymous haters, and misinformation bots.
As quality advertisers fled the platform, Twitter’s desperate need for revenue led Musk to allow a barrage of low-quality ads from companies you’ve never heard of. It didn’t help the bottom line.
I stayed for a while, continuing to post evergreen content and links to the weekly blog posts I’ve written since 2009. But as my community began leaving in droves, engagement plummeted, replaced by toxicity and hostility.
Blocking Changes: In October 2024, Twitter announced that blocked accounts could still view your posts, making the platform feel even less safe for many.
The final straw—AI Exploitation: Twitter updated its Terms of Service to state that, as of November 15, 2024, all posts and attached media would be used to train AI models like Grok.
I stopped posting on Twitter on November 14, except for a week of tweets of this post, bidding the platform farewell.
Where did I go?
Most Twitter emigrants are moving to Bluesky, a rival social media platform. While Bluesky is currently a better place to be than Xitter, I have some concerns about its long-term prospects, summarized in this popular post I made on Mastodon:
Considering Bluesky?
Please bear in mind that #Bluesky is:
—Funded by #BlockchainCapital: • co-founded by Steve Bannon pal Brock Pierce, a major crypto advocate, and close friend of Eric Adams • run in part by Kirill Dorofeev, who also works for #VK, Russia’s state social network.
—A venture-funded startup, so once they need to monetize they’re likely to turn to an exploitative business model.
Sources: @davetroy, @thenexusofprivacy
Nov 16, 2024, at 01:53 PM 183 favorites 235 boosts
Science fiction author, activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow also aptly warns about Bluesky in his post Bluesky and enshittification: “[I will] never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.”
Currently, there are only two major social media platforms that aren’t owned by billionaires tech giants: Mastodon and the quaintly charming CounterSocial (here’s an old review of CounterSocial).
[Full disclosure: you can also still find me, albeit reluctantly, on LinkedIn for professional networking reasons, plus, even more reluctantly, on Facebook for some local groups and staying in touch with a few friends who aren’t on anything else.]
Goodbye Twitter
Twitter was a transformative platform during its heyday, and I’m grateful for the connections and opportunities it brought me. But it’s no longer the place it once was.
Goodbye, Twitter. We had fun while it lasted—until a billionaire ruined it.
In the last two weeks, eXTwitter has become increasingly desperate to show you ads. Here’s what Elon did—and how to avoid ads completely.
We know eXTwitter was losing money before Elon bought it in late 2022 and took it private. Forbes reports that usage of ExTwitter dropped 30% in 2023. And though we no longer have public information on profitability, eXTwitter’s revenue shows a continued decline. Presumably, Elon, the owner of the growing dumpster fire that is eXTwitter, has noticed that he’s losing a lot of money. So he’s attempting to grow revenue by selling more advertising, eXTwitter’s dominant revenue stream.
Two ways to convince potential advertisers that it’s worth advertising on eXTwitter are to:
show ads in more places; and
make it harder to suppress them.
And that’s what Elon has done in the last two weeks.
After Elon’s purchase in October 2022, he made a series of decisions that alienated many mainstream advertisers. And recently, his endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory and eXTwitter’s placement of ads alongside white nationalist and pro-Nazi content has caused more blue-chip advertisers to suspend advertising on the platform.
Today, a glance through your eXTwitter timeline bombards you with low-quality ads from companies you’ve never heard of.
Here are the two ways they’ve recently got worse.
1—eXTwitter now includes ads in searches
Until a couple of weeks ago, eXTwitter searches did not include ads.
Now searches include ads.
Annoying!
2—eXTwitter adds another step to blocking advertisers
One way—probably ineffectual but somewhat satisfying—to send a signal to advertisers that perhaps they’re wasting their money, is to block them.
Here’s how that used to work:
Well, a couple of weeks ago, Elon decided to make this process more time-consuming. Here’s what you have to do now:
No, Elon, I don’t want the option to upgrade to Premium+ every time I block an advertiser.
Incidentally, for a few days, muting the advertiser avoided having to click through this new pop-up. Now it’s there for muting too.
Avoid eXTwitter ads altogether
For most of Twitter’s existence, I never saw a single ad. That’s because I used TweetDeck, “a series of customizable columns, which can be set up to display the user’s Twitter timeline, mentions, direct messages, lists, trends, favorites, search results, hashtags, or all tweets by or to a single user.” TweetDeck was free until July 2023, when Elon restricted it to Premium (paid) users.
As far as I know, there’s no way to avoid ads on eXTwitter’s mobile apps. But you can easily avoid them on some browser-based platforms—I recommend Firefox—by using an ad blocker, such as UBlock Origin (free, recommended) or Total Adblock (expensive).
I joined the social media platform Mastodon a year ago. Given recent turbulent social media trends, I’m glad I took the plunge. Having been on Twitter (yes, I know it’s been renamed “X”, sue me) since 2009, I’d describe Mastodon as the old Twitter.
Twitter is like a top-of-the-range Lamborghini but you’re trapped in the boot full of broken bottles and it’s being driven over a cliff by a madman.
Mastodon is like sitting in the back of a dilapidated VW camper van, with knackered suspension, no air conditioning, but lots of nice passengers having a sing-song and there’s a dog called Mr. Snuffles.”
Now I don’t agree that Mastodon is the kind of hippy-dippy place that Phil Smith characterizes, though it includes some of that vibe. Counter Social is a much better fit, as described in my post Alternatives to Twitter.
Enshittification
I think most people agree that Twitter has gone through more upheavals in the last year than in the five previous years combined. Twitter under Musk is an example of rapid enshittification, a term coined by Cory Doctorow describing what happens “where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.”
I, and many others, have written about the increase in toxicity on Twitter since Musk took over. I won’t say more here.
With ~8,400 followers on Twitter, I have seen engagement with my posts plunge 50% over the last year. Part of this is due to some of my most active followers leaving Twitter. But I think that Musk’s decision to prioritize tweets without links is another factor. Recently I’ve noticed that my retweets of and comments on posts receive 50 times more engagement than my regular tweets-with-links. This didn’t used to be the case.
I’ve used Twitter for 16 years to create, discover, and support many communities of practice. Until recently, it was still possible to hold conversations there. But today, Twitter is a morass of people shouting at each other. Very little listening is going on. Without a framework and support for conversation, I don’t know how much longer I’ll stay active on Twitter.
Twitter felt like a magical place at the time. It was the first major social media platform where the majority of posts were public and searchable. (In 2019, only ~13% of Twitter accounts were private.) Whatever you were interested in talking about, Twitter made it easy to discover kindred souls. The invention of the #hashtag in 2007 made it easy for users to find specific relevant content and communities.
The old Twitter was an essential place for me to discover, join, and cocreate the #eventprofs and #assnchat communities. For that, I’ll always be grateful.
In those days, running Twitter chats was viable and fun! Communities sprang up around shared interests and events. Twitter chats remained useful tools for a community for several years until the rise in hashtag spam reduced their popularity. Although a few Twitter chats still occur today, their glory days are over.
Mastodon is the old Twitter
Currently, Mastodon reminds me of the old Twitter. While engagement on Twitter is a shadow of its former self, I am seeing a significant rise in visits to my website — around 20% — since I started also posting on Mastodon. This is despite my having just a few hundred Mastodon followers. The graph below shows page views per month on www.conferencesthatwork.com for the fourteen years between 2009 and 2023. You can see the impact of the start of social media posting to Twitter in 2010, the four glory years of Twitter that started in 2014, the gradual decline and flattening that began around 2018, and the significant rise in July 2023 when I began reposting to Mastodon.
My posts on Mastodon are frequently liked and boosted; most of them far more frequently than the same posts are liked or retweeted on Twitter.
While my followers on Twitter have been stagnant since 2014, new people continue to find my content on Mastodon and follow me. Conversations on Twitter are now almost nonexistent, while on Mastodon I engage with other people every day.
Mastodon is a much better fit for me than today’s Twitter. It feels like the old Twitter. And with Mastodon’s no billionaire owner and no ads design, I’m optimistic that it may stay that way.
The old Twitter is gone. Long live Mastodon, the old Twitter!
I joined Twitter in 2009 and have had ~8,600 followers for the last few years. Twitter has already transformed once, becoming more about breaking news than engagement as I describe in my post: Why 2017 was a tipping point for Twitter. ~150 of my followers have left the platform since Musk’s purchase five weeks ago.
Click the image for my post: “Why 2017 was a tipping point for Twitter”
Time will tell whether the exodus will become a rout, which could happen if Twitter becomes too toxic or unreliable.
Alternatives to Twitter
[Update: Post News shut down in July, 2024]
Alternatives to Twitter include Mastodon, Discord, Post News, Counter Social, Hive Social, and many more. Each platform offers a different experience due to often subtle design decisions.
In this post, I’ll share my findings and thoughts. This is not an exhaustive review (which would at this point need to be book-length). And it’s biased toward platforms I like. Regardless, I hope this summary will be a useful introduction. I’ve included references to helpful resources for you to learn more.
Before we dive into detail about individual platforms, it’s important to understand a few important structural factors that impact user experience and the long-term evolution of these services.
Ownership, openness, and profit
Most social media companies are for-profit corporations, whether publicly or privately owned. Twitter was a public company until Musk bought it. Meta (formerly Facebook) is a public corporation but Mark Zuckerberg controls over half the corporate votes. An anonymous individual, describing himself as an “American patriot” owns Counter Social. Post News, launched a few weeks ago, is funded by venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Scott Galloway, and others. Several large venture capital companies own Discord. Hive Social is owned by its founder, Raluca Pop, and an angel investor.
Of the above platforms, Counter Social is (probably) the only one that owners who’d like to make money don’t control. Meta’s and Twitter’s main income source is advertising, though both services also make money selling the data they collect to third parties. Since going public in 2013, Twitter has only occasionally turned a profit, and one has to wonder if the recent significant pause in advertising by its major customers bodes well for its financial future.
Why should you care? Ernie Smith explains why ownership and openness matter when choosing a social network alternative to Twitter.
Of course, the distinctive thing about all of these networks is that each ultimately is centralized, rather than being built on an open protocol. And that means that they are built to generate value for their founders. They are built for onboarding, not for long-term growth, which means that they lead with cool features, not with promises of sustainability.
And that’s where commercial networks often falter. The financial incentive has created problems over time that have helped to complicate the shape of social media. The immense value of any given social network has ultimately been in data, rather than by offering services to the creator. And that has meant leaning hard on data-mining or advertising-driven business models—and companies that don’t do that ultimately find themselves out of the conversation entirely. —Ernie Smith, Don’t Fall Into The Well
This brings us to Mastodon, which is different.
Mastodon is not owned by anyone; it’s free, open-source software written by Eugen Rochko and released in 2016. I’ll share more about Mastodon below.
As Ernie puts it:
[Mastodon] has a great lead feature that none of its competitors have yet replicated—its adherence to the open web. Unfortunately, alternative networks can throw marketing money at all sorts of other features trying to convince you that those features matter more. But the only feature that truly matters at this moment, even more than how “hip” a network is, is if it talks to every other network. If it’s open, even better.
Whether Mastodon survives and thrives remains to be seen. But its open network plus community ownership is a strong plus in my book.
Size
Size isn’t everything, but the network effect has its advantages. Ideally, we want our social media platforms to include our tribes. All other things being equal, a larger network is more likely to have folks we want to communicate with on it. Here are current estimates of various platforms’ active users. Take these numbers as a guide rather than a selection criterion, because a smaller niche network may fit you better. (For example, Discord’s members are mostly gamers.)
Network
Active users
Twitter
~240M
Discord
~140M
Counter Social
~160K
Mastodon
~8M
Hive Social
~2M
Post News
~140K
User experience
All social media platforms have their own web interfaces and apps that mediate their users’ experience. Platforms continually upgrade user interfaces, functionality, and features, generally (but not always) for the better. Most platforms aim to be as easy to use as possible.
However, there are four specific factors that affect a social media platform’s experience:
the prevalence of advertising;
content moderation policies and effectiveness;
how platform feeds display and prioritize posts; and
the platform’s search capabilities.
Advertising
Twitter (and Meta and Instagram) depend primarily on advertising. The other platforms mentioned in this post are blessedly free from ads.
Content moderation
Content moderation policies and their effectiveness on these platforms are huge and controversial topics. With Musk’s purchase of Twitter, reports indicate that content moderation has been gutted, with the firing of many Twitter employees and outsourced contractors. Musk has said that such work can be automated, but there’s widespread skepticism that this is possible. Meanwhile, the EU has warned Musk that Twitter faces a ban unless he abides by its strict rules on content moderation.
All social media platforms face this problem, and there are no easy answers. As we’ve seen with Twitter and Meta, what is acceptable to post is a moving target, one that’s intertwined with changing political, social, and cultural norms. As platforms like Mastodon, Counter Social, and Hive Social grow rapidly, they will also have to evolve and scale how they perform content moderation if they are going to meet their founders’ goals as a safe-enough space for conversation.
What you see on the platform
How much control a user has over what they see on the platform is an important aspect of the user experience. You have probably had the experience of seeing content (and ads) on Meta that you have no interest in, nor any simple way of banishing from your feed. Conversely, I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a post in my Meta feed but couldn’t find it later, or had to hunt for posts I’m interested in.
Twitter’s feed also has similar problems, though there are workarounds. The other platforms I’ve mentioned can provide chronological unfiltered feeds, so you don’t have to worry about missing stuff. And each platform has its own way of allowing you to focus on specific content, or block content you want to skip.
Search capabilities
Finally, search capability is one area where the monolithic platforms currently have an advantage. It’s easy to globally search for a word, phrase, or hashtag on them. Mastodon, a federated service, makes some compromises about search. If you search for plain text, you’ll get posts you’ve written, favorited, or been mentioned in, as well as matching usernames, display names, and hashtags. So, it’s harder to find things on Mastodon unless (as the help recommends) members use appropriate hashtags extensively.
Reliability
In the early days of Twitter, the famous “Fail Whale”, indicating that the service was down, was a common sight. For the last few years, the platform has been very reliable, with only a few glitches per year. Whether this will continue after Musk’s firing of a majority of the company’s employees is an open question.
In my limited experience, rapidly growing platforms Mastodon, Counter Social, and Post News have been doing pretty well coping with their explosive growth. (Post News is currently limiting new signups from its waitlist to handle the increased traffic.) But all three services can be slow at times, though I don’t see much difference in responsiveness between them and Twitter.
OK, maybe you skipped the above to see what I think about individual platforms. Remember, this is based on my experience to date, and everything in this space is evolving fast. I’ve listed the platforms in my most-to-least favorite order. Here goes!
Mastodon
Mastodon has been around since 2016. Unlike the other platforms mentioned in this post, anyone with a certain amount of technical expertise can set up a Mastodon server. Currently, there are thousands around the world. Though there are some servers with large general memberships (such as mastodon.social which I’m currently on), most focus on specific communities or interests, such as tech, gaming, LGBTQ, region, activism, art, music, journalism, etc. Mastodon is a federated social network of these servers (which are also called nodes or instances). This allows users on different servers to interact with each other. (Here’s a good explanation of how Mastodon’s federation works.)
Joining Mastodon
You have to choose a Mastodon server. Many popular articles about Mastodon describe this as a barrier to joining the platform. Actually, it’s not something that you need to really worry about unless you’re especially interested in immediately finding a server that reflects a community about which you feel strongly. That’s because you can change the server you’re on at a later date, bringing your followers with you.
If you do want to pick a community right away you can use the tool Mastodon Instances. Or, the official JoinMastodon page lists available servers, categorized in various ways, and shows you which ones are currently open to join.
To find out more about a mastodon server from the server itself, go to its “about” page at https://[server name]/about/more, e.g., https://mastodon.social/about/more. This page includes rules of conduct for the server, additional services provided, and other useful information.
Once you’ve picked a server to join, getting started is like any other social media platform. You create an account on the server and set up a profile. On Mastodon, profiles contain up to 500-character bios and you can add a display name, avatar, header image, and up to four links to relevant websites.
Things I like about Mastodon compared to Twitter
No one owns Mastodon, it’s free, open-source software
This is a huge plus in my book. The beauty of federated social media platforms is that they are loosely-joined collections of communities that are responsive to users’ wants and needs, rather than the dictate to make money, or the whims of an erratic billionaire. Mastodon servers run mainly on volunteer time, with infrastructure funding coming from donations. (I support my server, mastodon.social, via Patreon.)
Federated servers allow you to choose a community that fits you, while still allowing connection across all servers
I summarized how this works above. For more information, these Mastodon introductions, listed easiest first –> most comprehensive, (1, 2, 3) should be helpful.
No ads!
Currently, I avoid seeing Twitter ads on the web by using Tweetdeck. (Mastodon’s “advanced web interface” looks like Tweetdeck; turn it on!) But the mobile Twitter app is filled with ads, which I don’t appreciate.
(Don’t get me started on Facebook ads. They are only tolerable on the web because I’ve installed F.B. Purity, a labor of love that I recommend.)
500 vs 280 character limit
Twitter started with a 140-character tweet limit which was raised to 280 characters in 2017. It’s often still not long enough for me. Mastodon’s 500-character limit is refreshing.
Editable posts!
Twitter, which has become much more a site for breaking news than a place to converse has always, understandably, been concerned that people would edit tweets post-publication to change what they originally said if it later became foolish or embarrassing. Given that people can still delete their tweets, this doesn’t work very well.
Mastodon allows you to edit published posts. I like this a lot! This feature lets me fix typos, add better hashtags and images, etc. There’s one other advantage for me right now. Currently, I crosspost my tweets to Mastodon using the Moa Bridge service. Mastodon’s editable posts allow me to tweak tweets into Mastodon posts that are more “Mastodon-like”, which typically means adding and adjusting hashtags.
Tweetdeck-like “advanced web interface” that allows you to follow #hashtags and lists
Tweetdeck is my favorite way to access Twitter. Mastodon’s “advanced web interface” provides something very similar.
Content warnings when needed
I like this feature. It speaks to Mastodon’s commitment to providing functionality that supports creating safer spaces for users.
One feature that Mastodon provides…is the option to attach a content warning to your posts. When a content warning is included, the status content will be collapsed by default, and only the CW will be shown, similarly to an email subject line or a “read more” break. This can be used to add a summary or subject for your post, to collapse long posts, or to otherwise provide context or setup for the body of the post.
When media is attached, a checkbox appears to allow you to “mark media as sensitive”. This hides the full media behind a blurred thumbnail by default. Adding a CW to a post automatically marks the media as sensitive as well. —Mastodon documentation
Favoriting and boosting (aka retweeting or reposting) are two clearly different actions
On Twitter, you can “like” or retweet a post. Twitter displays publicly a count of a post’s likes, which makes the platform a place where many users try to get their posts liked a lot. You can also quote tweets, allowing you to add a comment to another’s tweet. This is often used on Twitter to publicly dump on a tweet you don’t like, perhaps boosting your standing with your followers.
On Mastodon, you can “favorite” or repost (aka “boost”) someone’s post. The favorites count doesn’t appear on post timelines, so it’s not a status symbol of how popular what you say is. The only people who know you’ve favorited a post are you and the poster. Favorited posts are thus a way for you to remember posts you like. They are searchable.
If you want to promote someone else’s Mastodon post, you repost it. There’s no equivalent of tweet quoting.
Mastodon’s design distinction between favorite and repost discourages the self-promotion that sometimes runs rampant on Twitter.
You can migrate your account to a different server
As far as I know, there are no social media platforms that allow you to export or import your posts and followers to or from another platform. But Mastodon makes it pretty easy to move all your account data from one Mastodon server to another. You might want to do this if you discover a server that better fits your requirements (for example, one for users who speak your native language and post mainly in that language) or because your server doesn’t have as many members as you would like.
You can have accounts on multiple servers, so it’s easy to try a new server and compare your experience there before choosing to change servers.
Mastodon conclusions
Mastodon is my favorite alternative to Twitter, and I’m spending more and more time on it. It feels like the early days of Twitter: a fresh, relatively uncrowded, environment where I’m continually meeting new interesting folks. I’ve had many more personal interactions on Mastodon than any of the other alternatives I’ve tried. If the future of Twitter worries you, I think Mastodon is the place to go.
Counter Social
I joined Counter Social—founded in November 2017—in April 2022 after the news that Musk might acquire Twitter became public. I like the platform a lot, though Mastodon has stolen my attention recently. There was some initial concern that Counter Social’s sole(!) anonymous(!) owner “The Jester” espoused right-wing politics and had a history of hacking targets that he felt threatened America in the past. However, unlike Musk’s recent brazen moves, I haven’t seen any sign of a political thumb on the posts I’ve seen flowing past on Counter Social’s “Community Firehose” stream.
Counter Social is free to join. It receives some income from $4.99/month optional “PRO” accounts but otherwise it seems that The Jester funds it himself.
Things I like about Counter Social
Counter Social members are darn nice!
This sounds silly and may change, but the Counter Social community currently comes across as the nicest large bunch of community folks I’ve seen on a social media platform. Now of course, what I call nice (a mixture of charmingly personal posts, eclectic artwork, restrained mainly left-wing statements, favorite music and movies) may not be what you think of as “nice”. New users are welcome. Browsing my feeds is…soothing. Can you say that about any other large social network?
Excellent interface
Like Mastodon, Counter Social uses a similar but more attractive “Tweetdeck-like” interface. Posts (aka “toots”) can be up to 500 characters, though you can’t edit them after you’ve posted them. You can’t see who has favorited or reposted a post until you click into it, and reply counts are shown as 0, 1, or 1+ which discourages people from writing posts solely designed to get lots of interaction.
Like Mastodon, searching is only on hashtags and usernames. There’s no plain text searching of posts like Twitter does. You get columns for friends’ posts and notifications and can create additional columns based on hashtag searches.
Counter Social has added to the interface a few features which you may like, such as a CNN ticker tape news feed and eight other news channel video feeds.
No ads and content warnings
Like Mastodon, as described above.
Praiseworthy, innovative approaches to reduce bad actors and disinformation
Counter Social has deployed a number of sometimes controversial anti-disinformation methods. The platform bans IP addresses from Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Pakistan (that’s the controversial bit), as well as a proprietary list of “over 100K VPN endpoints and Tor exit nodes that are known to be used by nefarious actors”. Counter Social has also teamed up with Bot Sentinel to reduce disinformation. And users can mute and block other users and flag posts for review.
I don’t know how Counter Social does it or whether my experience is typical, but the platform seems to do a great job keeping nasty stuff off my feed.
Concerns about Counter Social
Reliability
No one really knows if “The Jester” is actually one person. Even if he has a small team to help, the platform has been remarkably responsive, except when the service had to handle half a million new user signups in a few days in May 2022. Today it chugs along, though I wonder how many of its millions of registered users are actually active on it currently. Presumably, The Jester (or a hacker) could abruptly shut down Counter Social. What happens if The Jester has a heart attack or loses interest in supporting the platform? Such concerns have made me hesitant to invest significant time in Counter Social.
We don’t know the answer to these questions. On the other hand, what assurance do we have that Musk is not now rummaging through the vast hoard of data that Twitter has acquired over the years? Ultimately, you’re going to need to decide whether you trust using this service. My approach is that I don’t post anything that would embarrass me if (fat chance) it was widely publicized. And I don’t use private messaging on any service for vital information.
Counter Social conclusions
In one sentence: Counter Social is a really nice place to visit but I’m not sure I want to live there.
Discord
Discord is primarily an audio chat and instant messaging platform that became wildly popular with social gamers. So why am I including it here as an alternative to Twitter? Because Discord now makes it easy for communities to get together. In 2020, Discord shifted its focus away from video gaming toward creating and managing all-purpose public and private online forums for posting and chat. And in September 2022, the company introduced Forum Channels which support organized discussions, stored posts, and message threads: everything you need for an online community.
I joined Discord in July 2021, and currently use it in two ways. First, as a place for occasionally staying in touch with a small group of event production professionals, via a forum set up with four text channels. And second, as an interface for a Midjourney Discord server, which I use to create illustrations for some of my blog posts.
Discord is free to use for forums. Many gamer members spring for “boost” [$4.99/month] or “Nitro” subscriptions [$9.99/month], and Discord receives a 10% commission on games sold through game developers’ servers.
What I like about Discord
The Discord forum channel interface is easy to use. It provides a simple and attractive way to display and organize asynchronous conversations into threads. I like how a forum can have owner-created channels to cover broad categories of conversations relevant to the community. For example, the forum I mentioned above has channels for messages from the owner, requests for help, job opportunities, and general posts. My Midjourney public server has over a hundred channels that cover announcements, service status, rules, FAQs, getting started, polls, support for trial and paid users, various chats about the service, image showcase channels, and many channels where Midjourney images are constantly being requested and generated.
Concerns about Discord
As you might expect, Discord has been and can be used for nefarious purposes, such as cyberbullying, private use by extremists, and pornography and sexual exploitation. All social media platforms with private forums have these problems, which is why content moderation policies and the effectiveness of their implementation are so important.
It’s hard to beat Discord for a free, fully-featured, easy-to-use community messaging service of any size. Given its robust funding by gamers, I doubt that the service will fall out of favor any time soon. And because gamers who desire fast response time use Discord, the owners are likely to maintain reliable service.
Post News[Update: Post News shut down in July, 2024]
The “Chief Poster”, Noah Bardin, was the CEO of Waze for 12 years and the company is financed by well-known venture capitalists. The platform ultimately aims to be a place where big names, especially journalists and “publishers” will congregate and opine on issues of the day.
“Post News is trying to capitalize on the ‘virtual watercooler for journalists’ side of Twitter. The platform describes itself as a place to access ‘premium news content without subscriptions or ads.’ News publishers and independent writers are encouraged to share their articles on Post News under a paywall. The idea is that this would allow users to pay for individual articles from a variety of news sources. It’s an alternative, or a supplement, to paying for individual subscriptions to specific news sources.”
—Amanda Silberling, Post News, a Twitter alternative, gets funding from a16z
Only a rudimentary payment system using points is available to date. Time will tell if subscribers are willing to pay for individual articles in sufficient quantities to sustain the service.
Concerns about Post News
Unfortunately, I have many more concerns about Post News than things I like. Pitched as a “fun” place that “introduce[s] you to big ideas and cool people” Post News is, so far, underwhelming. It has a bare-bones web interface that pales in comparison to Mastodon, Counter Social, and Discord. Perhaps that makes it easier to use, but I’ve found even the simple interface glitchy with minor annoyances that Post News will probably fix soon.
Accessibility features that are standard on Mastodon and Counter Social, like alt text image descriptions and content warnings, are missing. Post News is US, English only, has no app, and you can’t add a video or animated gif to a post. Like Twitter, you can’t edit a post once you’ve posted it. The interface only supports a single feed of everyone’s posts. Post News allows you to flag perceived trolls but is still working on muting posts and blocking individuals.
The platform vibe
Post News has a broadcast-style feel to it. The platform seems to be attempting to create a hierarchy of news producers and news consumers, and that’s probably a deliberate choice. But what I find depressing is that the platform’s consequent vibe is a curious mixture of the trivial and pompous/promotional. It feels like a place where people are mostly trying to impress others. You can comment on posts, but comments are rare and there’s little evidence of conversations.
Post News is like a party where the guests are awkwardly posing instead of just having a good time.
The future of Post News
It’s very early days. Post News may well eventually become a viable marketplace for folks with great interesting ideas and the capability to express them well to grow an audience and make some money in the process.
However, I’m skeptical that this will turn out well for folks who put their significant content on the platform. Because, as I wrote in 2017, posting your original content exclusively on someone else’s platform puts you at their mercy. Third-party platforms change their feed policies (Meta, Twitter, LinkedIn) all the time, and if they go out of business (e.g., Geocities, Vine, MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, Google+) your content vanishes from the internet. I still strongly recommend you maintain control over your content by posting it on a website you own. That’s my two cents.
Things I like about Post News
The two things that I like about Post News are that posts can be of any length and that it supports plain text search. That’s about it.
Post News conclusions
I am clearly not a fan of Post News in its current state. But it still has plenty of time to improve. To be fair, I will be checking back on how it develops, especially to see if it can attract significant numbers of interesting and influential thinkers and writers who chose to post exclusive content there.
Hive Social
I was going to explore Hive Social before I wrote this review, but it’s been down for a week for security updates. So, I’ll summarize here what I like and dislike about this platform based on what I’ve read rather than from direct experience.
Many users describe Hive Social as a mixture of Twitter and Instagram apps. It’s been downloaded about two million times, though the current week-long outage may reduce future growth. Like Twitter and Counter Social, the service allows NSFW posts as long as posters categorize them with a content warning.
What I like about Hive Social
Like Post News, Hive Social has no ads and no character limit on posts. I’m a fan of “neutral” feeds on social media platforms, and Hive Social only offers a chronological timeline. Like most social media platforms apart from Meta, you can follow another user without them having to “friend” you back. The owner says the platform has “zero tolerance for bigotry and hate”, though, like Post News, moderation is currently restricted to reporting by other users.
Concerns about Hive Social
Hive Social’s sole owner with a minuscule staff raises similar concerns to Counter Social; what if the service is shut down or its data misused? Perhaps due to the service’s rapid growth, there are reports that the app crashes and service can be slow at times. Hive Social has no web interface, which is annoying to old fogeys like me. Finally, you have to wonder about the problems that are bound to arise if Hive Social continues to grow, given it currently has no moderators, no security team, and no staff focused on regulatory compliance.
Hive Social conclusions
Hive Social (when it’s back up and running) is probably a nice place to hang out if you’re young and aren’t especially interested in maintaining a long-term history of your social media interactions.
Conclusions
Some parts of this review of alternatives to Twitter will be out of date in a month, while some will stand the test of time. (Now if I could only know which parts were which!) And there are likely to be still more entrants in the Twitter-competitor space, such as Spoutible which is due to go live in February 2023.
Currently, Twitter continues to be a useful place for sharing my content and connecting with meeting industry peers. But its future is uncertain, and having taken some time to explore alternative platforms I thought I’d share my findings with you.
I hope this summary review is helpful and welcome your thoughts, comments, and experiences with these alternatives and any new platforms that appear. Please share in the comments below!
Something strange is happening in the world of Twitter. For well over a year my average Twitter impressions count has hovered at 2.0K impressions per day. (Twitter defines an impression as anytime a Twitter user sees your Tweet.) I’ve never seen that figure deviate by more than 5% (i.e. between 1.9 — 2.1K) for a long time.
And then, starting at the beginning of March, I’ve watched my daily impression count steadily rise to 2.7K per day. Every time I check, it’s gone up. That’s a 35% increase in one month!
I haven’t changed my tweeting activity in any way recently. I continue to post each day:
One tweet about my latest blog post
One tweet for each of an assorted selection of 8 of my older blog posts;
A tweet or two about my upcoming Participate! workshop; and
A few mentions or retweets of other users I find interesting.
All my other Twitter monthly count statistics: engagements, link clicks, retweets, likes, and replies are essentially unchanged.
Yet Twitter insists that suddenly, 35% more people are seeing my tweets!
I would like to think that I’ve suddenly become 35% more interesting, but I doubt that’s what’s going on.
Is anyone else seeing this? Any ideas about what could be happening?
A social media (SM) platform feed that is not a chronological list of all posts, and only those posts.
I am sick of social media platforms deciding for me what I should see. (Read this entire post for a rare exception.)
Every major social media platform started with a simple chronological feed of all the posts from all the people you chose to follow/be “friends” with.
But every platform subsequently FUBARed their social media feed. They dropped some posts entirely, and added content that you had never asked for.
Facebook’s news feed has been FUBARed since 2009.
YouTube has been messing around with search ranking of videos since 2012.
LinkedIn’s homepage feed became FUBARed in 2016, when the company folded in its “Pulse” content.
Twitter’s timeline got FUBARed in 2016. (You can turn off their adding “tweets you are likely to care about most”, but they still insert tweets “we think you might be interested in” into your timeline.)
Instagram stopped chronologically listing posts in 2016.
Google Plus has fussed around with its home feed algorithm for several years, but it doesn’t matter because — and I wish this wasn’t true — Google Plus is dead.
Here are three reasons SM channels do this. Feel free to add more in the comments. They:
Want to add sponsored paid content (aka advertisements) so they can make money.
Want to create incentives (like “boosting” your Facebook posts) to pay them to let more people see your posts.
Know that some of their users — the ones who “friend” or “follow” everyone — would quickly withdraw from their service if the resulting torrent of requested posts were actually provided.
No one likes reason #1 but we understand why SM platforms do it. They need to make money to stay in business. Fair enough.
Reason #2 is really damaging to the concept of a SM channel as a reliable communications tool. Old media doesn’t have this option: when you buy the paper or watch TV you receive the same content as everyone else. But today, two users who follow the exact same people on Facebook may see very different feeds, thanks to Facebook’s secret and ever-changing algorithm. Essentially, Facebook makes the feed unreliable so the company can make additional revenues. I find this unreliability infuriating, and it’s why I use Facebook as little as possible.
Reason #3 is understandable — but what’s annoying is there’s no way to turn this behavior off! It would be easy for SM channels to default to their algorithmic filtering but provide an option for users to say, “Just give me everything I’ve said I wanted to see. Yes, I know I’ll still get all the ads you insert, but I’d really like not to miss anything else.” I guess that they worry too many people would choose to see everything, and the incentive for organizations to pay them to boost content eyeballs would be reduced. In fact, I suspect that only a small percentage of users (like me) would pick this option.
Ultimately, I want a social media channel that doesn’t filter. I suspect I’m not alone. Let me pick what I want to see, and let me see it. All of it.
Is that too much to ask?
A reward for those who’ve read this far — an unFUBARed SM feed!
I know one way to get an unFUBARed SM feed. From Twitter, no less — use Twitter Lists! If you create a private Twitter list of people whose tweets you want to see, you can view the resulting stream on Twitter at https://twitter.com/YourTwitterID/lists/NameOfYourList or via other Twitter clients like TweetDeck and the list is chronological and unfiltered! (Please don’t tell ’em; they’d probably FUBAR it immediately.)
Do you know other ways to get unFUBARed SM feeds? Feel free to share in the comments!
Everybody likes me, nobody tweets me, guess I’ll post on LinkedIn.
The effectiveness of Twitter as a connective social media channel is declining
In July I wrote about why 2017 is a tipping point for Twitter, noting that the rate at which users follow established accounts has slowed dramatically. As the year draws to a close I’m seeing further evidence that conversations in the Twittersphere are drying up too.
The evidence for my observations comes from my own Twitter account. My experience may not be representative of other Twitter users. But, as in my tipping point post, there’s a wealth of corroborative evidence from other sources.
The evidence
Here’s what I’m seeing. First, here’s a graph of my cumulative retweets over the last seven years.
Notice the fall off over the last eighteen months?
Second, the same graph for mentions.
Here we see a gradual decline in Twitter mentions for the last three years, one that has become increasingly severe recently.
Unfortunately, what I don’t have is a corresponding graph for the number of Twitter likes over time. If I did, based on my regular observations it would show a significant increase in likes over time. I estimate that the increase in likes is approximately the same as or slightly greater than the decrease in mentions and RTs combined.
To summarize, my tweets are getting just as much or more engagement than before. But much more of the engagement is in likes (“I’m interested in this and approve/agree/will mark it for later study”) at the expense of mentions and RTs (“I want to share your tweet with others/respond to what you said“).
What are the implications for social media marketing and branding?
To me, these findings mean that people are still reading my tweets at the same or higher rates. But they are less likely to interact with or share them.
The effectiveness of Twitter as a social media channel that fosters connection and conversation is declining.
In addition, I doubt that the recent doubling of maximum tweet length from 140 to 280 characters will make any difference to the trends I’ve noted. In fact, it may exacerbate them. I find that I’m less inclined to fully read the longer tweets increasingly showing up on my Twitter feeds.
An alternative channel to consider
Although it is not an especially interactive social media channel, I’ve been finding that sharing my website posts on LinkedIn has led to an increasing number of views and comments recently.
I have three caveats, however:
I don’t recommend posting to LinkedIn Groups anymore, since policy changes have severely limited their effective reach.
Also, I don’t recommend publishing an article on LinkedIn. That’s because your content is now tied to their platform, rather than one you control. This is a mistake.
Finally, when you share a post, be aware that LinkedIn counts as a “view” when the post summary displays on the viewer’s screen. The “viewer” doesn’t have to click through to read the post in order to be counted! So be aware that the number of post “views” reported by LinkedIn exaggerates the number of people who actually see your entire post.
Are you noticing trends that are affecting social media engagement? Share your observations in the comments below!
After years of predictable behavior, Twitter analytics reveal that something strange is going on with how Twitter is used.
Something is happening to Twitter, but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?
I started tweeting 16 years ago. Though I didn’t know it at the time, Twitter would turn out to be the most important way for people to discover my work and for me to connect with thousands of kindred souls all over the world who share my specialized interests. Over time, Conferences That Work grew into a website with ten million page views per year.
But as 2016 drew to a close I noticed that something was changing in the Twitter world. Here’s a graph of my follower count over time:
What I’ve noticed about my Twitter analytics over the last nine months
Since I began posting in June 2009, the graph shows that I consistently added between two to three followers per day — until around September 2017. At that point, highlighted by the red circle, there was an unusual increase to ~six followers/day for the remainder of 2016, followed by a sudden flattening that has persisted through the first half of 2017 to less than one follower/day.
In 2017 I’ve also noticed a dramatic reduction in the number of retweets I’ve been receiving. Though I haven’t had time to develop quantitative statistics, it looks to me as though in 2017 retweets have been replaced to a large extent with likes, (though the frequency of mentions seems more or less unchanged).
Why are these changes happening?
I’ll begin with a caution that everything that follows is ultimately speculative. I can’t say definitively what is going on, and can think of multiple plausible reasons for these significant changes. For example:
My experience may not be representative of other Twitter users. A sudden surge of engagement with my posts during Q4 2016, was followed by a rapid loss of interest.
The US election results caused more people to visit Twitter for a few months, but attention eventually shifted to the continuous torrent of breaking news at the expense of general engagement.
Twitter user growth has been flattening for some time as per the graph below; my 2016 EOY bump is reflected in the graph’s Q1 2017 bump, but future official statistics will show little continued active growth.
Taken from statista.com on July 14, 2017; click on graphic to see current stats
In retrospect, 2016-2107 will be seen as a period when late adopters continued to join Twitter, but a critical mass of active users concluded that engagement on the platform was not for them and moved to other social media platforms (I’m thinking Instagram for one). Although Twitter seems to be doing well in percentage market share of social networking site visits, as per the statistics below, it’s becoming more a site that users visit for breaking news — engagement is moving to other platforms.
Taken from dreamgrow.com on July 14, 2017; click on graphic to see current stats
What do I think is actually going on?
I’d put my money mainly on #4 above. Perhaps this Twitter analytics trend has been accelerated by #2’s associated flood of U.S. breaking news (61% of my followers are in the United States). It will be interesting to see if the trend continues, which may help to shine more light on what, to me, are changes that are interesting and important for anyone who uses Twitter for connection, content marketing, and engagement.
What do you think is going on? Add your ideas in the comments below!
Are you attempting to build social media followers by drive-by following—i.e. following a batch of new accounts every day, waiting a day or two, and then unfollowing the accounts that don’t follow you back? STOP THAT! You are trashing your brand on social media.
Many people with social media bios designed to project a professional image destroy their credibility by using this “strategy”.
I suspect these are people who would never stoop to buying followers or likes. And yet ~30% of my daily new Twitter followers are drive-by followers.
Why drive-by following doesn’t work
Drive-by following backfires because it ensures that I’m extremely unlikely to want to have any kind of social media connection with you.
Here’s how it works on Twitter, my most important social media platform. I do my best to read the profile of every new follower. Rarely will I follow back right away unless you’re someone I know. Birdbrain, the excellent app I use to track Twitter followers, also shows anyone who’s unfollowed me. That’s where I get to notice that you’ve drive-by unfollowed me, typically within 48 hours of your initial follow. [2023 update: Twitter’s API changes no longer allows services like Birdbrain to do this.] That’s when I make a mental note that you’re not a serious user of social media, just someone chasing a high follower count.
Instead, follow for a bit and post interesting stuff (I admit that mentions and RTs of me are nice too!) I may well follow you back.
What’s worse than drive-by following? Repeated drive-by following! I routinely see accounts commit multiple drive-bys, usually a week or so apart. My conclusion: either you are using a second-rate automated drive-by service, or you have a memory even worse than mine (which is saying something). Either way, your attempt to get me to follow you back is even less likely to succeed.
So, stop trashing your brand on social media! If you want to use social media as an effective marketing platform, don’t broadcast stuff about yourself all the time. Don’t implement elaborate plans solely designed to maximize your followers. Instead, post interesting stuff (both yours and others) and interact with people. Keep doing this. Over time, if you’re doing a good job, your followers will grow and be genuinely interested in your social media presence, and your brand recognition and value will increase.
“What does matter, however, is how many people notice you, either through retweets, favorites or the holy grail, a retweet by someone extremely well known, like a celebrity.”
—Jenna Wortham
She then laments: “Twitter is starting to feel calcified, slowed down by the weight of its own users, cumbersome, less exciting than exhausting“.
Most of the comments on her post go even further than Jenna, smugly dismissing Twitter as a waste of time—unless you’re a narcissist.
“I can handle Twitter because it is irrelevant.” “…this writer sums up exactly how I feel about social media in general, not just Twitter. This whole idea of likes and followers — it’s like setting up one’s business based on some vacuous high school popularity contest. Are we grown ups or not?” “Brevity may be the soul of wit, but I find little soul in twit. (er)”
—The three most popular comments on Jenna’s article
I disagree
When you see Twitter solely as a broadcast tool, you are overlooking its most important use: as a tool for discovery, conversation and connection.
On this site I write about a niche topic: participant-driven and participation-rich events. For me, Twitter has turned out to be the most important way for people to discover my work and for me to discover and connect with thousands of kindred souls from all over the world who share my specialized interests. When I began this website 16 years ago, I discovered that traditional search engine optimization was useless because no one was searching for the new ideas I was writing about. Today, with ten million annual page views, I’ve found that the core value of Twitter comes from its ability to discover and connect with geographically dispersed individuals with whom I have something important in common.
How to use Twitter effectively
If you’re not a celebrity, you need to use Twitter effectively. Twitter becomes powerful when you use it for appropriate two-way communication and connection, not broadcast.
You can’t have a conversation with a million people on Bieber’s antics. But you can have a valuable conversation with smaller numbers of people who are interested in a more specialized topic, and who find each other through appropriate use of hashtags.
For example, there is a community of event professionals on Twitter who tag their tweets with #eventprofs. This community also uses a host of other hashtags related to their interests, professional affiliations, upcoming events, etc. This soup of appropriately tagged tweets provides a great way for those interested to discover what is happening and talk about it. One beauty of Twitter is that all these tweets are public and searchable. So it’s easy for newcomers to the profession to discover interesting information and peers on their own schedule.
Yes, over the years the #eventprofs hashtag has been used increasingly by people who view Twitter as a broadcast medium. They pump out “listen-to-me” tweets while rarely or never responding to anyone else or retweeting interesting material. So Jenna is right that the amount of noise on Twitter has increased. That’s the inevitable tragedy of a social media commons where posting costs nothing but the poster’s time. I don’t dismiss this noise lightly. It makes finding interesting tweets harder. There can come a point when you decide that the effort to filter is just not worth it any more.
The power of the hashtag
What has happened in the event community as a result of increasing noise is the creation of more specialized hashtags for smaller niche groups. Because anyone can create and use a new hashtag, it’s possible for a community to coalesce around a useful hashtag. Hashtags are flexible Twitter tools that anyone or any group can use.
I like that I get to decide how Twitter works for me. Unlike Facebook there are no secret, ever-changing algorithms deciding what I should see. Yes, it’s work to filter the fire hose of information that Twitter serves up; the daunting collective output of currently over 200 million monthly active Twitter users sending 500 million tweets per day. But when you use Twitter effectively, you can reap the benefits of meeting and connecting successfully with people who are of value—value that you get to choose.
Now searches include ads.
Since 
In the early days of Twitter, the famous “Fail Whale”, indicating that the service was down, was a common sight. For the last few years, the platform has been very reliable, with only a few glitches per year. Whether this will continue after Musk’s firing of a majority of the company’s employees is an open question.
Something strange is happening in the world of Twitter. For well over a year my average Twitter impressions count has hovered at 2.0K impressions per day. (Twitter defines an impression as anytime a Twitter user sees your Tweet.) I’ve never seen that figure deviate by more than 5% (i.e. between 1.9 — 2.1K) for a long time.
