In 2022, Bleeding Cool got the word that DC Comics had encouraged its talent pool to make accounts on the social media app Hive and to build their audience using the hashtag #comicstwitter rather than on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, in the wake of Elon Musk taking over Twitter. Basically, no one listened. And Hive frittered away fast. Mastodon has stuck around a bit. Threads is basically Instagram and Facebook, and it may prove to be a contender. But newcomer Blue Sky or Bluesky seems to have taken the lead in Twitter/X alternatives in the last year or so. And with the recent election results and more changes to X regarding blocklists and the like, more people are looking for alternatives. We mentioned JH Williams III the other day, but Greg Pak has recently set out the state of play.

Greg Pak posted to X after a long time having not. He writes "this has been my Twitter profile image for months. Please feel free to use it yourself if you’re locking down and walking away. And on his website, he writes, “Twitter is now run by someone who regularly platforms bigotry and transphobia and shares unconscionable lies and conspiracies. The site is also becoming less safe all the time, allowing harassers and even literal neo-Nazis to post and, most recently, promising to deprecate its block function. So almost exactly a year ago, I deleted most of my posts and stopped using the site for anything other than pointing folks to other, better sites to use instead. The best of those alternative sites? I don’t generally love cheerleading for corporations and realize that any product can fall apart at any time. But after a couple of years of trying almost everything, I’m pretty sure the best Twitter alternative for me is Bluesky — by a long shot.”

He also lists a number of prominent comic book creators, journalists and the like on BlueSky, and talks about the advantages the site has, such as the Nuclear Block.

  • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝OPA
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    11 days ago

    It’s an easy replacement. It has a lot of the same features with some improvements, plus you don’t have the additional step of figuring out federation (no matter the spin). That means it has got momentum and subsequent waves will go where the numbers are.

    Pak does explain his decision:

    Bluesky vs. Mastodon

    Mastodon has many of the positive features of Bluesky, but the interface remains kludgy. The fact that folks are spread over different servers on Mastodon is a feature, but it’s also a bug that can make it hard to follow or see the posts of folks on other servers. Mastodon also does not natively allow or display quote posts, which decreases conversation, and its direct messages have a quirk that sends the message to anyone who’s mentioned in it, which can result in messaging folks when you’re just talking about them behind their back (which no one reading this would ever do, of course, lol).

    Even though it earlier looked so promising when he said:

    Mastodon – my preferred social media home these days. It has its quirks, but it’s not owned by a billionaire and seems less subject to overnight destruction on a whim. For what it’s worth, I use third party apps like Ivory for iOS and Elk for the browser – they make the Mastodon experience much more intuitive and smooth, in my opinion.

    They seem to overlook the fact that there’s nothing to stop enshittification.

    And if features on Mastodon are an issue, then he could try a *key fork as they’ve got far more. It’d be easy enough to spin up a comics Instance if there was demand.