Six months on, and I still can’t shake myself from Twitter

A little under six months ago, Elon Musk oficially bought out Twitter for the eye-wattering value of 44 Billion USD.

Twitter went wild with people vowing to leave the platform and never come back – But then, they hit a pretty big issue, pretty quickly – To what? Facebook is dead at this point and is a friends only platform and well.. I can’t think of any others,
The social media game has a number of famous casualties – Most notably Bebo and Myspace, and to a degree, Tumblr with the number of times it’s changed hands. Can we resurrect any of them to their former glory?

Mastodon gained traction like there was no tomorrow, people vowing it was their new place. I’ve tried Mastodon myself, and ye it’s alright, but it’s no Twitter replacement. Mastodon has great potential, but it’s still some distance from being a full blown Twitter. For one – Retweets. Mastodon has ‘Boost’ but it doesn’t serve the same purpose, I can’t leave comments on my ‘Boost’. For two, there’s an odd split of people having moved to Mastodon and come back to Twitter, or have just stuck to Twitter – I don’t want to be stuck between two systems :/

Lists – On Twitter I have a number of lists, and on those lists are people I’m not following (Why should I see their tweet twice) – So I have lists, DK, NL, F1 etc etc – But on Mastodon, I can only create lists of people I actively follow.

Finding users also isn’t as easy as it should – Thanks Elon in part for that..

Twitter is blocking links to Mastodon

You might have trouble tweeting about Mastodon.

Oh and this also didn’t help…

Finally – The apps. The Twitter (Or is it Titter now 🤔Or even Xcorp?) app is beautiful, let’s be real – Timelines are smooth, getting access to your lists is just a swipe along or back. Trending topics are right under search, and you know what, as much as I thought it was terrible to start with, ‘For You’ isn’t half bad.

There is hope on the app front though, Tapbots who brought you the famous Tweetbot app, have created Ivory for Mastodon, and while it looks great, there is the small problem that it’s a paid app. There’s also an official Mastodon app, which again, is great, but is let down from the key missing features from Mastodon itself – The ability to Retweet, the ability to see who in your timeline is interacting with what content – I like seeing what devs I follow like and comment on, it helps me find new people to follow! Instead I’m stuck with a single page timeline, that each ‘Toot’ takes up nearly my whole screen.

So here I am, still using Twitter on a daily basis – Still getting notifications from my favorite accounts and breaking news – Still following my own build lists and still watching the fire build even bigger on Twitter. Will I be moving on? Maybe at some point in the future – Mastodon has the building blocks to be a great replacement, but as Steve Troughton-Smith (Over 85K followers on Twitter, but only 10K on Mastodon) points out, engagement is tricky on Mastodon – And isn’t that the whole point of Social Media?

Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social)

I find myself so much less inclined to boost anything without native quote posts on this platform. It makes it very hard to share anything interesting that scrolls across my timeline without laundering it and making it ‘mine’. I don’t want to have to take complete responsibility for every neat thing…

If we want Twitter back, then Elon, finally, needs to live up to his promise.