[rsynnott]

Well, there's Mastodon, of course.

I'm kind of surprised that whoever owns Tumblr this week isn't pushing it harder; Tumblr is, when it comes to it, more or less twitter without the character limit and with a much worse mobile app (most Twitter features were effectively copied from Tumblr).

That said, I'm not sure that there needs to be a single direct replacement for Twitter; historically, when a social network dies, generally it isn't replaced by a direct clone but by different things.

[r0bfelty]

Actually, Tumblr has been hard at work promoting itself as an alternative to Twitter. Did you know that you can buy 2 blue check marks on Tumblr for only $7.99?

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/elon-...

[metadat]

Have you actually tried mastodon? It's really slow. I want it to be good but the UX just sucks. I hate to say it, but so far it's a different nature of beast which is not a viable Twitter replacement,

Note how few HN submissions point to masto posts, it's ~ 10,000:1 Tweets:Masto.

[rsynnott]

> Have you actually tried mastodon?

Yeah, I've largely moved over to Mastodon; most of the people I was most interested in following on Twitter are now there, so...

> It's really slow.

That's very instance-dependent. The one I use is pretty fast, certainly faster than Twitter these days (I note that loading timelines is no longer as snappy as it used to be.) I did previously use mastodon.online, and it was borderline unusably slow, granted.

> I want it to be good but the UX just sucks.

The UX is a mix of good and bad. It has a linear time-based feed with no helpful "suggestions", like Twitter a decade ago, which I would consider good. The UX around following people on other instances is bad (button to redirect you to your own instance) to comically bad (link to paste into your instance's search box) depending on instance setup...

> I hate to say it, but so far it's a different nature of beast which is not a viable Twitter replacement,

It is different, and it's certainly not a replacement for _all_ Twitter usecases, but it's largely good enough for me; I'm mostly now using Twitter just to observe the implosion of Twitter.

I doubt that, in five years, Mastodon will be the Twitter replacement. There may not be a single Twitter replacement. But it solves a decent subset of the things that Twitter solved for people, in a way that is in some ways nicer than Twitter (it never suggests that I follow weird Nazis, for instance).

[metadat]

Thank you for the thoughtful and informative reply, sincerely.