What Can Replace Twitter for Me?
With everything going on with Twitter, I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do. I’ve been thinking about what I get from Twitter. I mostly lurk, using it to stay in the loop on programming stuff, but I also have those 3 or 4 people that I interact with regularly. Once or twice I’ve used it somewhat successfully to promote some things I’m working on.
Really, a lot of my usage can be replaced with blogs and newsletters. Over the last few months, I’ve been subscribing to more and more feeds, but not newsletters. I think I’ll try a couple newsletters. One nice thing about Twitter is that there’s opportunity to be exposed to articles, comments, sources, etc. from a wide variety of people. In theory a good blog or newsletter could also do that?
Discord is another alternative people have been throwing around. I’m active(ish) in two Discord servers. One is just a small group of friends, and the other is for Club MacStories members. Both are fun and engaging, but not very noisy. I belong to a couple larger ones, but find them too large for me to keep up with and contribute, so I ignore them. I like the smaller more focused ones.
And then there is Mastodon. I created a Mastodon account like many others this past week, but it honestly feels like a fad. Lots of people joined, but not really anyone is engaging with it. Maybe I’ll be wrong. I haven’t used it enough to talk intelligently about it, but I’ll say it doesn’t quite feel like it has the same draw that Twitter does. But maybe that will change. I’m currently crossposting from Twitter to Mastodon and keeping my eye on it. So who knows.
Unoriginally, I’m thinking I’ll stick on Twitter until it becomes unbearable. But I’m going to keep shifting more to following blogs and newsletters.
I follow quite a few indie devs on Twitter, and my fear is that the conversations they have out in the open on Twitter will move to private or much harder to find channels. I’ve learned a lot from seeing those conversations, and it would be a shame if they stopped happening in a place others could see them.
We’ll see what happens I guess 🤷🏻♂️.