Twitter didn't become big by being almost exactly like something that came before it. Learning something new was not a burden for all the users that jumped on to the Twitter train.

Elon has weakened Twitter substantially and now it's leaving the door open to newcomers with ideas in a different direction.

It's the churn. Platforms rise and fall. But this time the power vacuum is so big a non commercial platform might have a fighting chance.

There was almost nothing to learn on Twitter: Sign up, write about anything in 140 characters or less. Replies/tagging, hashtags etc. augment the experience, but aren't necessary (and weren't even natively supported in the beginning/were just convention anyway).

For Mastodon? I need to:

- pick a server and remember it (I've actually lost my own handle a couple of times between months of giving it a try!)

- manually copy-paste the handles of people I want to follow back on my server, since there is no native single-click way to just follow an account I am looking at on my own server

- do the same on mobile, because all Mastodon apps can't possibly be associated with all server URLs on iOS and Android

- remember to follow people I care about, since otherwise there is no way to discover interesting posts outside my bubble

- give up on the idea of global search entirely, which is one of the things I miss most from Twitter: "flight delays XYZ", "MTA line X delay", "<bandname> <cityname>" would allow me to find content by people about any topic of interest in a way that web searches don't.

All of these are annoying but doable for me, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're a major deterrent for many non-sophisticated users.

I never used Twitter and I don't use Mastodon directly because I abhor the idea of Twitter: forcibly shortened messages which emphasize nonsense and make it hard for people who actually have something to say to get their message across by having to split it in tens of threads. I've always hated Twitter.

So I can't compare the platforms at this level of detail but I have used Reddit and Lemmy a lot. And I think Lemmy is really great and just as good as Reddit. No issues with follows across instances following my mobile apps, having searches work etc.

And Voyager allows me to be signed into many instances (and in fact have multiple accounts on the same instance)

> - remember to follow people I care about, since otherwise there is no way to discover interesting posts outside my bubble

And this really is a feature for me, I hate algorithmic feeds. I just want to see who I follow and no other suggested or promoted stuff :)

I used to use both Twitter and Reddit (until they both succumbed to an Eternal September of their own, in my view, although for different reasons), and at least to me they serve very different purposes:

Twitter was great for following the updates of a given person/company/group etc. It allowed me to keep up to date with various topics of interest (cryptography, engineering, my city's public transit system etc). The 140 character limit was always a red herring, in my view: People can just link to their blog or start a thread (which I can both easily follow and ignore).

Reddit was more useful for researching and discussing a given topic. Discussions are way more meandering, and the tree-based interface made that both acceptable (whereas spamming somebody's replies would be considered rude on Twitter) and ergonomic.

In that sense, Reddit was always the spiritual successor to self-hosted bulletin boards, in the same way that Discord has replaced IRC for many groups. (What makes me sad is that it's now seemingly also replacing discussion boards, which sucks because it's not anonymously searchable at all, but that's a different complaint.)

In that way, Reddit seems like a very low hanging fruit to decentralize: Its predecessor already was decentral, in a way! In contrast, there was never a successful decentralized microblogging service before Twitter (and no, RSS doesn't count).

> I hate algorithmic feeds. I just want to see who I follow and no other suggested or promoted stuff :)

That's very fair! I believe this is what ultimately got me quite hooked on Twitter, but in the long run has made me very unhappy while there and prone to doomscrolling.

>there was never a successful decentralized microblogging service before Twitter (and no, RSS doesn't count).

You say RSS doesn’t count, but the way you describe your use of Twitter sounds exactly like the purpose of RSS.

>Twitter was great for following the updates of a given person/company/group etc. … The 140 character limit was always a red herring, in my view: People can just link to their blog

I don’t see how this is appreciably different than reading headlines and the first sentence in an RSS feed and clicking through to the blog that backs it, if it seems interesting.

Twitter always felt like RSS for people who didn’t know what RSS is. Hence its popularity, as most people don’t know what it is, but the concept is very useful. A lot of people use Facebook for the same thing.

> Twitter always felt like RSS for people who didn’t know what RSS is.

Yes, but that’s a lot of people!

Other than that, RSS doesn’t support commenting somebody else’s post.

> (What makes me sad is that it's now seemingly also replacing discussion boards, which sucks because it's not anonymously searchable at all, but that's a different complaint.)

An anonymously searchable alternative to Reddit's search function is PullPush, an archive site independent of Reddit.

It has full-text search and will even search through deleted and removed content.

Main site: https://pullpush.io

Frontends: https://search.pullpush.io, https://ihsoyct.github.io

That was in reference to Discord, not Reddit. Reddit is searchable ~fine via Google and its internal search (but I wouldn’t be surprised if they at some point break that in exchange for more forced signups and to prevent “AI content theft” like Twitter).

> - manually copy-paste the handles of people I want to follow back on my server, since there is no native single-click way to just follow an account I am looking at on my own server

> - do the same on mobile, because all Mastodon apps can't possibly be associated with all server URLs on iOS and Android

these are all possible with the official app on Android and the web interface. You don't need to copy the handle, you can just open their profile page on your server's interface and click to follow.

At least apps instead of the web browser can handle the copy/paste a username thing.

But, I stopped using Mastodon because there is no algorithmic feed (either of my own follows or in terms of surfacing things)—-sorry I massively prefer something lightly curated to just a chronological firehose. Most-recent-first is an algorithm of course. One that’s biased in favor of constant posters and those in your own time zone.

Wasn't Twitter based to be an SMS-based social media? And that it was almost exactly like SMS, text-only and very limited in characters, to a point that you could use it via SMS?

Mastodon, Bluesky, Post and whatever else do just that. And they are not really successful at scale. So maybe people actually don't need those artificial protocol and GUI limitations?

There is an old adage about MBAs and CEOs - if we a pick a successful company in some period, can we really say that CEO helped it become successful? Or maybe he instead impeded its growth and company could have been x10 times more successful without him? Who knows, can't be tested repeatedly.

Same with Xitter clones. Maybe copying Xitter quirks is not the best way forward?

Mastodon does not "feel like Twitter" in the way that Bluesky does.

Maybe it's the fact that it's so server-centric: I've never felt like I could just enter a handle in the search bar and be confident that if the search comes back empty, that person is not on Mastodon. The same is true for search by hashtag or topic.