ap.lep.wtf

While I can't be anything close to comprehensive with the amount of time I've spent here and on Bluesky I still want to talk about some early impressions, and perhaps come back here later and see what's changed, if any predictions I've had were close or off or what have you.

Twitter

Twitter is a large city in the middle of decay, people are leaving, crime is rising, urban blight goes unaddressed while unfinished paint jobs create eyesores where they weren't needed.

While the site has been somewhat of a cesspool for as long as I can remember (for varying reasons), it's gotten noticably worse in recent times, including pre-Elon; spambots invading DMs, promoted tweets for drop shipping businesses with 5000000 aliases, random things just not working (viewing QRTs has been broken for me for months now)

There's also a pervasive culture that, as far as I've seen, is unique to Twitter: quote dunking, it's engaging in the worst way and more often than not, is either a waste of time and energy or causes problems and just makes everyone look bad. Personally this is not how I want to engage with social media, it feels like I just want to get from point A to point B while pretending to ignore the attempted stabbing taking place right next to me as I walk by it.

There's another thing I despise that I have yet to see elsewhere; replies from people you don't know with macro images like "DELET THIS" and I just find it...incredibly rude, particularly when people who post those forget that language and cultural barriers exist. It's nothing I can't live with, but I'm just so much more at ease in spaces where behavior like that is much less common, which brings me to...

ActivityPub/Fediverse/Mastodon

Is it odd for me to say people are more well-behaved here? Maybe it's knowing you're in a space ran by your peers, maybe it's the CW culture (which I will get to in a bit), but that cultural stuff I complained about above seems to just not be a thing here. With the higher barrier to entry it feels like anyone here really wants to be here, and wants this experience to be pleasant.

I have to say something about CWs though; when I first joined in 2018 they were a huge turn-off from ever wanting to post anything, and even now I'm still hesitant to post things here that I would elsewhere that aren't just shitposts (and I know it isn't just me); I don't think there's any winning in trying to accommodate as many people as possible with CWs and the current interface does make them very annoying to deal with, but that latter problem can be fixed down the line.

What further soured me is learning that the first instance I made an account on got deleted after being involved in drama; maybe people have learned better since then, I dunno. Petty admin drama is why I made my own instance (and also because I thought it would be a fun project)

Even now I see people scared to touch anything related to Mastodon, a newcomer getting scared off partly because of an admin's misunderstanding of the tools, and I do have to say, the experience here really is clunky; I find myself leaving the comfort of my home client a lot just to be able to view threads and bios and such, though again, I feel that that's something that can be better handled in the future.

On the flipside, I see a lot of potential with different AP software; FireFish has galleries (how do these work!?), art and social media really can work well together. And, uh... that's about all I'm familiar with (GTS is in alpha, stuff doesn't work, I don't have anything to say about it)

Cohost

I don't really have much to say about Cohost. As a self-contained platform I trust the people running it more than on others, but I don't like how the site feels (usability-wise).

Bluesky

I don't have an account here but have been able to view the site through a shared account, and I think right now, it kind of does live up to the hype (for people who just wanted Twitter 2.0), but the problem is not knowing what's in store for it in the future. Lots of features don't exist, federation I bet will be a complete mess and bring about the same things people complain about with Mastodon.

I'm also a tad concerned about privacy; block lists are public, the algorithmic feed stuff I think is pretty cool and while it allows you to see people you don't follow... it allows you to see people you don't follow. Mastodon prevents that (I think), which I appreciate, but there is a trade-off between discoverability and privacy; on the surface, one platform requires more "work" than another.

With ease of use/discovery and basic functionality of Twitter being replicated well, it feels like a lot of people who want to be there just really like Twitter, and I can see those same cultural issues popping up again. Plus the site is still invite-only; no matter what the early adopters try to make it into, there are zero guarantees once (or if) it goes public.