Two quieter rooms

Some while ago I came off the big social platforms, chiefly Facebook, Instagram, and what was then Twitter. I never wanted TikTok or the rest of the crowd that followed. The reasons were not complicated. The direction of travel bothered me, the owners bothered me rather more, and underneath both sat the same quiet machinery: a steady push towards clicks and division, because outrage is what holds attention, and attention is what gets sold.

What I kept were the two that, at the time, seemed built on better foundations: Mastodon and Bluesky. One was open-source and run as a commons; the other was new, friendlier, and at least talking the language of open protocols. Both felt a long way from the tech-bro playbook. Then, as these things go, I drifted off and barely touched either for a year.

This week I went looking again, partly out of curiosity and partly because I wanted to know whether my old instincts still held up. They mostly did, with one or two corrections.

Mastodon

Mastodon has stayed truest to the version I liked. It is run by a non-profit, with no ads, no billionaire at the top, and no algorithm quietly deciding what will wind you up next. The timeline is just the timeline, in order. It has grown slowly rather than explosively, and it still asks more of you: discovery is harder, and a following has to be built rather than handed over by a recommendation engine.

What it gives back, though, is the people. The amateur-radio, archaeology and technical corners are genuinely good company, full of the kind of person who will answer a niche question properly and at length. It feels less like a shopping mall and more like a public commons, which is exactly what I went there for in the first place.

Bluesky

Bluesky is the more interesting case. A year ago it was simply Twitter without the nastiness. Now it has real momentum: journalists, scientists, hobbyists and a great many ex-Twitter folk have all arrived, and if the question is where people are actually talking, Bluesky often wins. It is easy to find your way around, and on a good day it feels like the early years of the old place.

The instinct to be a little wary still holds, though. It is a company with investors behind it, which means the question of how it eventually pays its way is still unanswered. The open protocol is real, but in everyday practice almost everyone goes through the same front door, so the decentralisation is more on paper than in the room. And the old dynamics, the pile-ons and the tribalism, are starting to creep back in. I have already caught a fair bit of unpleasant discourse there myself, which rather makes the point.

Where I have landed

For now I am keeping both, but their jobs are different. Mastodon is home, the slower room for the conversations worth having. Bluesky is the louder public square I will still look in on, because that is where a lot of people are. If I am honest, the looking has tipped me back towards Mastodon more than I expected.

None of this is a grand statement. It just happens to sit neatly with how I try to do everything else here: a personal aim, no pecuniary interest, and a preference for the quiet, useful corners over the loud, profitable ones. If that points anyone else towards a better room, all the better.