Why I’m choosing Mastodon over Bluesky, Threads and X

It’s been more than 25 years since I first started regularly using the internet, and some of my previous experiences explain why I’m choosing Mastodon over Bluesky, Threads and X. Both for work, and as an information junkie, Twitter was my main social network of choice, but it’s a less pleasant and appealing option every day.

Disclaimer: Everyone has their own individual priorities, preferences and opinions. I’m not suggesting that anyone is wrong if they choose to focus on other social networks, try to juggle all of them, or stay on X because they have a community there. I just wanted to share my thought process and decision making, in case it’s informative for anyone. And so I can look back in 10 years and see if I made the right decision (ironically, some of the most press attention I got was by being wrong about the growth of 3D printing back in 2011)

Many years ago, I loved ‘microblogging‘ so much that I started a reasonably popular site devoted to it, during the first boom period in the 2000s. And I saw Twitter and Tumblr grow, Plurk survive as a weird outlier for Western internet users, and the likes of Jaiku, FriendFeed, Pownce and more fade out of existence. Often after being acquired by the likes of Google and Facebook. Or more recently in 2023, Ello.

I’ll still play around with other social networks, including Threads, Bluesky and anything else which appeals. But along with this blog, you’ll mainly find me here. I’m not quitting X cold turkey, as I still need to use it for client work, but I’m slowly building up my personal projects on Mastodon as well and transferring my focus.

One positive benefit of Elon Musk taking over Twitter has been a resurgence in interest in microblogging, and the rise of credible alternatives beyond the alt-right. So we’ve seen Threads launched by Facebook, Bluesky Social by people including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and a sudden re-emergence of Mastodon, which actually originally launched in 2016.

I did sign up with Mastodon and play around when it originally went live. But for various reasons I didn’t feel like I had the time to start building up profiles on a new social network. After all, we had Twitter, and there was no need for an alternative. What could possibly go wrong?

Why Mastodon now?

Unlike the onboarding experience, it’s pretty simple. We’ve seen what happens when a platform is bought by another company or individual. We’ve also seen what happens when microblogging is a spin-off from the main business (Google Buzz and Google+ for example), so that’s a concern for Threads. And while Bluesky is a Public Benefit LLC, that’s still a for-profit corporation. So out of all the main options, only Mastodon, created by Eugen Rocko, is maintained by a non-profit (Mastodon gGmbH).

It’s also crowdfunded, which means it doesn’t need advertisers or sponsored content. While I have nothing against advertising in general, and continue to use it on some of my personal projects, or for client work, it often creates issues within community-driven projects which differ from publications or business, for example.

And part of the reason Mastodon feels a little more complicated initially is that it’s an open source federated service. This means that anyone can offer their own ‘instance’ on the platform, with their own rules. But you can still interect with everyone across the whole network, and indeed any other service using the ActivityPub standard.

In plain language, that means I could easily move my profile from the Mastodon.social instance where it’s currently located, and onto a .danthornton instance if I wanted. All my content and followers would transfer with me, and I’d then be able to set whatever rules I wanted for anyone wanting to join me. That seems a lot easier if I disagree with the decisions of my current community than switching to an entirely new network.

And along with that, I’m also able to easily export, back up and archive all the public information from my profile, or any instance I run, so if it ends for any reason, I can re-establish it elsewhere. Looking at the comments on my Ello blog, it’s so sad to see how many people have potentially lost years of art, photographs, and words. Especially for the historian in me.

I can also integrate activity elsewhere, including from WordPress, Pixelfed (a federated image social network similar to Instagram), Lemmy (similar to a Reddit aggregator), or any other existing or new service which uses ActivityPub to allow cross-publishing and interaction.

It’s similar to WordPress, which I use for all my personal projects, and the majority of client work. There are valid and effective alternatives when it comes to blogging, publishing and eCommerce, such as Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, etc. And they all generally have less time overheads to run, in exchange for a monthly cost.

But they’re also platforms owned by businesses who may change ownership, make changes or cease trading. With a self-hosted WordPress blog, it’s on a server I rent and have access to. And as long as I run regular backups, I can move at any time to a different location, or even run my own server.

Being open source, or indeed being federated, doesn’t mean a platform or service is guaranteed to be successful. But it does provide some insurance for the end user if it’s not. And after investing 16 years in Twitter, I think it’s worth having some kind of reassurance when I’m choosing a new social network to spend time and energy on.