The Great Social Media Wars of 2023

Here we are, in a landscape of digital turmoil, scrambling around like bees looking for a new hive. I’m feeling nostalgic about lots of things, like Myspace (which there is now a dupe for) and something I can’t remember the name of which was present on websites in the 90s: a lighthouse you could click on that would take you to a random website. This was the way the online world first opened up to me as a young child. Click on the lighthouse. You’ll see something new. I’m not sure if it was a webring or something slightly different, but I found the lighthouse theming quite captivating. The imagery of the guiding light at the edge of a vast, moving sea. It was perfect for what the web was, and how wide open and personal it felt.

Perhaps something a bit like this.

You can do the same sort of thing on Wikipedia, and it’s so fun! Just click on a random page, learn about Frontiers of Science (a comic strip about - you guessed it - the frontiers of science). Great! Remnants of exploration are around, but more hidden than they were. Stumbleupon was another way to discover things online, popular around 2010, but it bit the dust finally in 2018. The web had become more insular.

The internet has come to be a much more ordered, corporate space as it has evolved across the past few decades. It’s often portrayed in movies that explore it as a physical space as an uninspiring, futuristic, clinical mall (e.g. Wreck it Ralph 2, Ready Player One, The Emoji Movie). This alone speaks volumes. Oh to wander the Pinterest and Spotify and Snapchat skyscrapers. Oh to suck up the empty space.

Wreck-It Ralph 2's Amazon zone.

So the internet is in large part, a shopping zone. It’s Times Square. It’s nasty. And now we have our dedicated posting apps. Clean and white and empty (the influence of the iPhone is insurmountable), and filled with ads that feel increasingly random and esoteric, despite the grand accumulation of data to “personalize” them. Wow, I didn’t know I needed… a kind of odd graphic tee. Thank you Twitter. Thank you for serving me five thousand bra ads a day. I am ready to buy now.

Ok ok, that’s the landscape. We all know about it. The built-in creative fun of Myspace and Livejournal has been drifting away from us on a makeshift raft for a long time (although Tumblr, maintaining some relic status as the prime social media type thing for weird art girls of the past 10 to 15 years, still has some of this). Part of my personal response to this lately has been to jump into Neocities and to revive this gorgeous blog (you’re welcome). And I’d like to encourage other people to get over here and get into this kind of “personal site/blog/hub” way of posting, but it’s certainly not a one-for-one replacement for social media, and this is an essential part of the weird problem we’re facing here.

The Jonathan Richman page of my website (important).

There are some unique pros to enjoy about modern social media. Obviously one huge reason it came about was because the phone became our primary way of getting online, and our websites and blogs weren’t and still aren’t really suited for that format. There’s also so much breezy simplicity in browsing a ton of short-form content and having a feed for that. It is a shame, I think, that feeds for long form content have been starved out (I used to use Bloglovin’ a lot and now that thing is a hollowed out corpse sitting there, impossible to log into, repulsive to see), but it’s simply not a replacement for the short-form feed we’ve come to know and adore. Short form content is different, fun, wild. It is not your noodling blog post, nor your meticulously crafted HTML nightmare website with a thousand blinkies. It’s its own thing, and it needs its own home.

So here we are at the crossroads between all the new Twitter-likes, and it’s clear now, looking at them all, that Twitter was (is) monumental. It was instrumental in making the short text post a content king. It made it so we can harangue celebrities at will. It took us to new oversharing heights, and it made communicating with your online pals easier than ever. I have met, at this point, most of the people in my life via Twitter. I’ve found countless artists and Final Fantasy podcasters and Jar Jar Binks freaks on there who have inspired me a huge amount. And while I would absolutely follow their weird blogs where they post regular 1000 word posts about medieval cross sections of frogs or whatever, there is no replacing the Twitter format. We need the little posts.

So what’s it to be? Let me run through all the platform options I am currently aware of and give you my Big Thoughts on all of them. It’s hard to say which will come out on top. Maybe none of them. Maybe we’ll just use all of them forever.

Tumblr

Tumblr lives under the looming shadow of its past, and this is both a deterrent and a selling point. It’s somewhat nostalgic, and honestly I love it for a lot of complex reasons. To me, Tumblr was always sort of an art place. The people I follow there are very funny and creative. But there certainly is a culture there (and this is an issue with every Twitter alternative here - there is a certain vibe to the userbase which may or may not be to your liking).

There is a sense on Tumblr of being in some sort of secret den. It’s also always felt like more of a female-heavy place to me and I do enjoy that. The feeling of just being surrounded by feral, creative girls. It’s good. I think there are some small UI issues that linger and could go a long way, if changed, towards making Tumblr feel smoother. For example, I notice the images there being slow to load much more often than on other apps. I don’t wanna see those placeholder gradients anymore. I banish them.

Mastodon

I have a soft spot for Mastodon. There is something relaxed about it. I never personally had any onboarding problems, but I think even a small amount of unsmoothness ends up amounting to a big issue just because people will go to whatever platform offers them the easiest signup experience and integration into the app/site culture. Immediately this place gained a reputation for having USER RULES (uh oh!) and I think this will probably linger. I also have experienced some annoying technical issues, usually images not posting (which I tend to only notice when I come back hours later and see an error message). This may be more to do with Tusky (the app I use to do Mastodon posting on my phone), but it highlights another issue of complication, which is the fact that there are multiple proprietary apps to choose from - so you’re faced with another decision to make. Not necessarily a big problem for the individual user, but an issue for swathes of people who just want to download an app and join a platform swiftly.

I like the culture on Mastodon - it’s a lot of people who are interested in minute tech details, literature, old web stuff, their favourite 1993 video game, etc - but it clearly has not gripped the masses and has instead ended up as a hub for different varieties of nerd. It’s quite a relaxing place, but it feels slightly clunky and empty. It feels at once exactly like Twitter, and yet somehow also too different. For whatever reason, I rarely browse there.

Bluesky

Bluesky to me is the technical best of the bunch. It doesn’t have gif or video posting yet, nor direct messaging, but it feels solid. It has alt text. It has some good moderation options. It feels more populated than Mastodon despite being invite-only. This is essentially my favourite one at the moment, but the major downside for me is that much of the prominent userbase on there currently are not the sort of people I’m interested in following. There’s quite a lot of sexual content on there, and while a lot of people have referenced the lack of that sort of thing as a major negative for them on other apps, I personally prefer an app where you simply can’t post nudes. Not just because I don’t want to see those things (which Bluesky is currently ok at moderating via user controls), but I find it fosters a wider user culture that I don’t really like. A pervert culture. lmao

Nevertheless, I’m very interested in Bluesky, and curious to see what things will be like when the place opens up fully (it’s still invite-only at the moment). It feels like a really direct Twitter alternative (thanks in no small part, I’m sure, to a Twitter founder building it), it feels responsive, and it feels relatively alive.

Cohost

Cohost is web-only, which is a huge detriment to its use as a true social media replacement. After trying it out for a while I stopped, partly for this reason, but also because it feels the most barebones. It feels clunky and underpopulated, it doesn’t give you notifications, and it’s essentially a worse version of Tumblr. It’s cute but it doesn’t really work for me.

Threads

Ok. Threads is the new big fella in town. Meta swooped in with a pretty decently structured app. It feels a lot like Hive (which I will touch on next), and it feels a lot like Bluesky (albeit without some of the neat features there). The huge advantage of this one for me was that I could slam all my Instagram followers (and following) over onto Threads, which gives me a nice built-on audience and immediate connection to a bunch of people I already know and follow. That’s huge for the ease of onboarding. If you have an Instagram account you are almost already there.

The downside here is that it feels corporate. There’s a strange algorithmic feed which will inevitably show you some BRAND and INFLUENCER posts that feel aimless and intrusive, but it’s also filled up immediately with tons of users comparitive to other platforms. As an art poster, it was immediate for me to see my feed populated with tons of artists who already used Instagram, and this is the natural platform for them. There is a somewhat sanitised feel here, but at the same time people are not shy about bringing in their shitposting, and it’s nice to see people I have followed on Instagram and seen mainly image posts from in the past from letting loose and going textpost crazy.

Another tragedy, for me, is that because your username is linked to Instagram, I have to have an underscore in my name here. This is true violence.

I’m writing this very soon after the launch of Threads, so the excitement of something new is still pretty palpable, but so far I like the intensely populated, party feel of this one. Also, Limmy is there and his posts are golden.

Hive

Hive is most certainly done for, especially now with Threads coming in, but it was interesting how quickly art and game dev types scrambled to get onto this one. I don’t really know how it happened, I just woke up one day and everyone was on Hive. Then a little while later the whole thing shut down in response to security concerns and that was that. It was unusable for a good while, but it’s still up now and a very small amount of people are still using it. A very curious relic, and for a moment, it could’ve been something. Threads is a technically superior version of this one in any case.

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For now, Threads and Bluesky are the options I’m most interested in, and I’m curious to see how they evolve as time goes on. I hope that at some point we’ll settle into some stability, but whatever happens, long live posting, I suppose.

EDIT: Since writing this a few days ago, interesting things have happened on both Bluesky and Threads. Bluesky has gotten into hot water with the userbase for failing to implement preventative measures against usernames including racial slurs. Meanwhile, Threads has forced users within the EU out, blocking them from using the app even with a VPN. It seems that the Twitter-alternative world is still staunchly in its infancy, with every alternative possessing some glaring issues, whether lack of features, annoying glitches, or more complex and unwieldy user culture problems. 

It seems to me, ultimately, that we're facing a huge shift, and that perhaps none of these alternatives will be enough to replace Twitter wholesale. None of them appear to be able to reach its heights.