My take on Twitter alternatives:
Mastodon: For tech-literate conversationalists.
post.social: For people who go to social media for news.
Tribel: For liberals who need to rant about Trump daily.
Tumblr: For people who previously used Tumblr.
Hive: For people who don't have a computer.
CounterSocial: Mastodon for people who don't want to think they're using Mastodon.
Pleroma: Mastodon for problematic people.
Parler/GETTR/Gab/Truth Social: For dumb idiots and fascists.
Oops. By "post.social" I meant "post.news".
Gotta upgrade my instance and get access to that edit button someday.
@Alex I hadn't even heard of half of these!
@davidnjoku This is probably a healthy thing. I am too online.
@Alex You don't say which is your favourite, tho. Which do you use the most?
@davidnjoku Mastodon by a long shot! It took a while for it to become my primary network, but it's a way better experience than any other social media I have used.
@Alex Best description of Tumblr in the history of the internet.
@Alex I'm sad about Pleroma because every instance I've seen has been a raging dumpster fire, but as an admin its just way lighter to run than mastodon :(
@kizaing There certainly isn't anything problematic about the software itself. It just seems to attract admins with a different philosophy.
A lot of the Pleroma developers are free speech absolutists, while most of the Mastodon developers are free speech realists, and FOSS people care a lot about the philosophies behind the software they use.
@Alex That is very fair. I'm currently running my masto instance in a VPS because its a little heavy on my home gear, so I was considering using Pleroma in the event I can't use the VPS for whatever reason, I liked the software just not the other instances haha
@kizaing for a single-user instance, I have looked into microblog.pub, which is extremely lightweight, but it lacks a lot of the features I want to have for social interactions.
I also don't know how I'd migrate my followers over if I switched.
Otherwise, it seems excellent as a tool for FOSS projects that want to share status updates via ActivityPub.
@Alex Oh neat! Thanks I'll check out that one. That's probably the main thing that keeps me on Mastodon itself, it has a lot of nice features and probably the best App selection as well
Thought about including Cohost, but it doesn't pass the test of a Twitter alternative. It's its own neat little thing that doesn't deserve the comparison.
But if I had to define it: Tumblr for people who know that Tumblr sucks.