A Threadful plot twist in the race to displace Twitter

Eight months ago, when Twitter was already starting to spring self-inflicted leaks in the first few weeks of Elon Musk’s chaotic mismanagement, I wrote here that I didn’t know how I’d replace it. Musk’s incompetence at social media has only grown more obvious since, but now that multiple plausible candidates have emerged to replace a sinking Twitter–each with a flaw or flaws that can seem fatal in the least-flattering light–I still don’t know how this ends.

The first one is Mastodon, the federated, open-source social network on which I’ve built the largest following (well, in relative terms, since the nearly 1,200 people following my @robpegoraro@journa.host account there is a small fraction of the nearly 19,000 people/bots following me on Twitter). After months of daily use, I’ve realized I love having an edit button more than I thought I would and don’t mind the lack of a quoting feature as much as I’d feared. And I’ve found the discourse to be remarkably less toxic than on Twitter–I think I’ve only blocked one person for their annoyingness.

But the lack of full-text search makes Mastodon borderline useless for following the news or just looking for reports of the same bug in an app. And although Mastodon management says such a feature is coming, the clunky UX required to follow people on different instances makes Mastodon a tough sell to people whose eyes don’t light up at the phrase “open source”–which, I hate to admit, is most people.

And while many of the people whose words I most enjoyed on Twitter have shown up on Mastodon, that migration has been uneven across different professional sectors. For example, while information-security professionals have largely made themselves at home there, few political types have. And almost none of the #brands have shown up, perhaps because there’s no formal advertising support on Mastodon. And does a social network even exist if you can’t @ an airline on it while you sit out a flight delay?

The second one is Bluesky, a project launched by Twitter in 2019 and spun out in 2022 as a public-benefit corporation. It offers most of Twitter’s features, including full-text search and quoting, and adds more flexible feed-filtering and content moderation otions. Its decentralized “AT Protocol” lets you take not just your handle and followers (as allowed by the ActivityPub protocol Mastodon employs) but also your past posts to a new server. And since you can change your original [name].bluesky.social handle to your domain name–for instance, you can now find me there as @robpegoraro.com–you can get a handle that won’t look out of place after you swap servers.

Bluesky now seems to be drawing more of the people whose banter I valued on Twitter–while some of the people who had first latched on to Mastodon as their Twitter escape pod now post more on Bluesky. But since joining Bluesky still requires getting through a waitlist or getting an invitation code, it’s not going to grow that big or grow that fast for now.

(While I’m making feature requests, I need to see Bluesky support two-factor authentication and would very much like to see it add an edit button and ship an iPad app.)

Wednesday night brought a third major option, Meta’s Threads. It launched with the gargantuan advantage of an enormous potential installed base consisting of most Instagram users–European residents excluded until Meta can make this app comply with EU privacy regulations. They only have to install the Threads app for Android or iOS and tap through a few screens and dialogs to sign in with their Instagram account and copy over their username, profile pic and bio before surfacing on Threads with their old social graph already developing as if it were a Polaroid picture.

As of Friday, that jetpack-boosted onboarding had resulted in Threads exceeding 70 million accounts. The people I knew on Twitter have arrived in force and so have the brands, since so many of them were already using Insta for marketing.

But even though Threads comes closest to replicating the membership of Twitter, it feels less like it than either Mastodon or Bluesky. Because at the moment, it only offers an algorithmic feed that regularly spotlights accounts I don’t follow and often overloads me with posts from some of the more prolific people I do follow. It feels like I joined a party where I expected to meet up with friends, then quickly found myself outnumbered by loud-mouthed strangers. Threads can seem inspired not so much by Twitter as TikTok… which I don’t mean as a huge compliment.

Threads also suffers from being confined to iOS and Android apps for now and also lacking an edit button. But my biggest objection to Threads can’t be solved by Meta shipping any new code–it’s the fact that this platform is owned by the same company behind Facebook and Instagram, on which I already spend too much time, to which I’ve already provided enough of my data, and which has shown itself inept at dispatching fake accounts. And even more so than Twitter, Meta’s history of launching features and products for journalists and creators and then smashing the Undo button on those ventures has stained it with a record of faithlessness unmatched in the social-media business.

As my friend and former Yahoo Tech colleague Dan Tynan wrote on this Substack Friday: “when our hope for salvation is Mark Zuckerberg, we may already be doomed.”

To its credit, Meta does plan to add ActivityPub support to Threads–meaning you could follow the people you like on Threads in any Mastodon client, avoid being force-fed all the #influencer #content and keep more of your data safely distant from Meta’s gravity well. That might be the post-Twitter solution that checks off my major boxes (those being “not be under the whim of a billionaire,” “help make me smarter by introducing me to experts,” “let me indulge my taste for writing punny ledes and headlines,” and “not make me feel dirty for being there”). But in the meantime, the prospect of having to tend four different text-based social platforms is making me question my life choices.

#ActivityPub #ATProtocol #Bluesky #decentralizedSocialMedia #ElonMuskTwitter #federatedSocialMedia #Instagram #MarkZuckerberg #Mastodon #meta #socialGraph #Threads #Twitter

Rob Pegoraro

2023-04-07 04:55:36

The value of my Twitter checkmark is just about zero now

It cost me nothing but a little bit of my time to get a then-coveted verification badge for my Twitter account in the fall of 2014, and lately that checkmark icon seems worth nothing–if it isn’t already worth less than nothing.

In the latest of a long series of own goals by Twitter overlord Elon Musk, he’s skipped from offering verification as a new perk for people who pay $8 a month for “Twitter Blue” to dissing people with “legacy verification” badges with a “May or may not be notable” label to saying those “legacy blue checks” will go away “in a few months” to setting an April 1 date to start that expiration process to changing the label for both old-school and new-school verification badges to this uselessly vague text: “This account is verified because it’s subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a legacy verified account.”

So now those of us who got our verification badges the old-fashioned way have nothing to distinguish ourselves from the chumps who handed over $8 a month ($11 a month if you paid in Twitter’s mobile apps). And the people who voted with their wallets have nothing visually setting them apart from the unelected elites who had won favor among the old regime. And random Twitter users have no way to tell an account that was subject to some human verification from one that provided a working credit card. We are all losers now.

I have less room to complain than most badge holders, having obtained this status via some in-person schmoozing of a Twitter rep at the Online News Association’s 2014 conference. I followed up over e-mail, providing links to my work at five different news sites, and 11 days later got a “Congratulations! Your account has been verified” e-mail from Twitter.

I know many other people who should have met the nebulous verification guidelines never got awarded that “blue-check” status. (Fact check: As anybody can see, the icon consists of a white checkmark inside a blue circle.) It wasn’t a fair fight then and it isn’t one now.

It is, however, now comical that Musk has managed to make both legacy and paid verification worthless with that new label, perhaps because technical debt makes bulk-deleting legacy verification too difficult. As the Washington Post reported: “Removal of verification badges is a largely manual process powered by a system prone to breaking, which draws on a large internal database — similar to an Excel spreadsheet — in which verification data is stored.”

So far, the only notable check mark that’s actually been pulled has been that of the New York Times’ main account, which Musk apparently had yanked to show off that he could. That stunt is one more reminder–since followed by Musk applying a “state-affiliated media” label to NPR’s account, a move he now seems to be having second thoughts about–that Twitter has become the vanity project of a shitposting billionaire suffering from delusions of social-media competence.

#blueCheck #ElonMuskTwitter #legacyVerification #Twitter8 #TwitterBlue #TwitterCheckmark #TwitterVerification #TwitterVerified

Twitter’s old blue checks are finally gone — sort of

The ridiculous but important Twitter check mark fiasco, explained.

^{Sara Morrison (Vox)}