twitter, mastodon, threads, what a confusing mess.
i've used all of them at this point. here's what i see as the real differences.
the "algorithm" gets talked about a lot; on social media it amounts to how the particular platform decides what to show you. algorithms are all over the place. classically they're biased towards maximizing profit for the media platform, but they also have the potential to biased towards the views of major figures at the platform.
we all know that Facebook's algorithm is erratic on its good days, and it's also not even remotely consistent across platforms; i deleted the app from my phone because it started shoveling hate speech items at me relentlessly, which the web app has never done. i have no idea what was going on, but there appeared to be no way to turn off the spigot of bile.
twitter's algorithm has changed a bit since the Musk acquisition. it is now heavily based on Musk's own notions about what people should see, most obviously the fact that twitter now promotes heavily Musk's own tweets. but even pre-Musk, it interspersed a lot of ads and promoted some things for its own reasons.
Threads, being a product of the Facebook/Instagram axis of social media companies, certainly leans heavily into its algorithm. but it seems better tuned, i don't really see much objectionable coming from the algorithm, but do see quite a bit of stuff i wouldn't miss if it went away. the feed is innocous, and the main concerns here are Meta's obsessive collection of info on users for ad tracking and potential resale. this collection issue is why Meta has kept Threads out of Europe; european regulators don't have a sense of humor about GDPR violations and Facebook is currently in some trouble about this. i can give threads a not totally awful grade, but not a really great one because there doesn't seem much control allotted to the individual user. but i may have missed some useful settings.
i'm not going to talk much about bluesky. i'm not on it, i've not been invited. folks who know more than i suggest that while some of the owner/management team are odious, there are some very good communities nonetheless. in this rapidly shifting landscape it's hard to say how bluesky will ultimately play out. it offers a significant contrast with threads - while threads has made joining really easy - if you have an instagram account, you have a threads account, which is why the threads user count blew up in the first week, bluesky is all about invites and release of invites has from all reports been erratic and inconsistent (and no, i'm not fishing for an invite.).
so this leads us to mastodon. mastodon is the product of a developer with a very old time way of thinking. this has resulted in a system that has a lot of interesting ideas and features, but it is hard for a non-techie to get their heads around, and needs learning to even figure out how to get on. additionally, your mastodon experience can vary wildly depending on what onramp you choose. mastodon is not a monolithich social media entity; rather it is a lot of smaller social media platforms that talk to each other. they aren't necessarily administered the same way and a lot of people have bad experiences because of administrative bias. so you need to pick an instance, and choosing poorly can result in a bad mastodon experience. the tools to aid you in picking one aren't well developed. so where bluesky is limited by a decision to control invitations, mastodon is limited by being hard to figure out.
on the other hand, mastodon is mercifully algorithm free. you see postings from the people you follow. a number of SF writers for whom i have great respect - John Scalzi, Ann Leckie, and Charlie Stross to name three - post on mastodon. there are various computer security notables. and the stuff they post doesn't get buried in "promoted" articles.
threads is threatening to join the "fediverse", which is means it will become an alternate interface to mastodon - but it would be the freak client with ads and an algorithm and promotion. when that happens, i expect to direct my friends and followers to track my mastodon account and i will stop using threads directly (the account is
nfgusedautopartsen.osm.town ). i have my own mastodon instance, because as a cranky old Un*x/Linux admin, how could i not resist doing that? it's
stamps.town (the original intent was a stamp collecting theme), but anyone is welcome. i'm quite hostile to hate speech and that's how i admin my server. so don't come over to spew bile. you'll be toast in a split second.
