I have accounts on Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky. I can get an okayish experience on any of them by being selective about who I follow, but they vary in how much I have to fight the software.
On Twitter, I have to fight it the most. It’s possible to get a reverse-chronological feed via search, using the realtwitter redirect. Also, once you get past the the actual replies to a post, it adds random crap, so you have to look for that and stop reading there. I expect it to get worse due to the people running it having terrible taste. (For example, Grok integration.) But there are still some accounts I like reading, so I put up with it.
I couldn’t figure out which Mastodon server to join and ended up on mastodon.social on the third try. I follow a few people I like. It’s pretty chill. I don’t put much effort into it anymore.
I like where they’re going with the Bluesky software and sometimes the people who run it are funny. I sometimes think about writing software that builds on it. Yes, the political activists are annoying, but I don’t find them all that hard to avoid. The replies to popular accounts used to be pretty bad, but they shipped an update that helped. It’s still hard to find new people worth following, but I’m slowly finding a few. There is a new “For You” feed that some guy runs on his gamer machine that is okayish, at least for the top few posts.
On Twitter, I have to fight it the most. It’s possible to get a reverse-chronological feed via search, using the realtwitter redirect. Also, once you get past the the actual replies to a post, it adds random crap, so you have to look for that and stop reading there. I expect it to get worse due to the people running it having terrible taste. (For example, Grok integration.) But there are still some accounts I like reading, so I put up with it.
I couldn’t figure out which Mastodon server to join and ended up on mastodon.social on the third try. I follow a few people I like. It’s pretty chill. I don’t put much effort into it anymore.
I like where they’re going with the Bluesky software and sometimes the people who run it are funny. I sometimes think about writing software that builds on it. Yes, the political activists are annoying, but I don’t find them all that hard to avoid. The replies to popular accounts used to be pretty bad, but they shipped an update that helped. It’s still hard to find new people worth following, but I’m slowly finding a few. There is a new “For You” feed that some guy runs on his gamer machine that is okayish, at least for the top few posts.