Starting a new thread because I don’t have any interest in discussing “he who must not be named” like the other thread…
What I am interested in is what other alternative venues you have been trying and for what purpose (personal vs professional??)
Mastodon? Pros/Cons? Others?
Again, let’s not talk about you-know-who.
I do not post tweets. I follow a handful of professional blogs and orgs, so I just shifted my focus to their sites and LinkedIn presence.
You are probably right that if you aren’t actively in the “serve and return” - interaction on social media, websites/blogs/LinkedIn might serve your purposes. I have never latched onto LinkedIn…
You should give it a try! You can follow companies and orgs and individuals. Very professional content.
I’m also seeing some people mention Post.
Twitter Alternatives-
There are some of us who actually use Twitter in a productive and professional manner. I do all of the above in some manner as well during my off time.
I don’t expect anyone to participate in this thread who has not been active on Twitter.
I was joking (see #4) in apparently non humorous way. I am extremely sorry!! Have a great holiday.
Sorry to have fallen short of your expectation, perhaps you should edit the OP accordingly as you specifically ask about personal use.
One can use social media for vital personal information as well that can still make social media time well spent. Perhaps following info/research from reputable sources on a personal health situation for instance.
I get that some people see this particular social media site as not vital, “extra”, waste of time or whatever. That’s cool. Proceed on. Just not the case for everyone.
Twitter is pretty important in my profession (academic science research). Most academic scientists that I know have a twitter presence of some sort. Some people have LinkedIn profiles but no one is active. I don’t see us realistically pivoting to LinkedIn.
For some professions, Twitter is THE place to be. It helps me enormously in my job (by providing information) and with networking.
If Twitter implodes, I think Mastodon could take off, but I don’t know. Something else will eventually take Twitter’s place for my profession, but it’s annoying to have to change. Twitter was easy and drew a lot of busy people in with its ease of use – made it worth their time.
Scientists often like things with the kind of vibe that Mastodon has (free, open-source, demcentralized). But it’s also a little confusing and I can see some less tech-savvy people avoiding it because it’s not as straightforward or glossy as Twitter.
It will be a real loss for people in my line of work if there’s not a good alternative that people latch onto soon.
President Biden has tweeted 3 times today already. If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.
Appreciate this response.
I haven’t really explored other sites like Mastodon. You’re right that one site might not “work” for all purposes like Twitter has been able to (not a catch all, but you could be on Twitter for academic reasons or you could be on to follow your favorite sports figures).
I guess I’d also be interested to hear - just to gather info on a more “local” level (CC), what people have found, liked, what is simple/complicated, etc.
Maybe nothing ends up changing in the end and “dust settles” and Twitter continues. Just thinking proactively!!! 
And that is too bad. Industry scientists have a big presence on LinkedIn. You can have DM and open professional discussions etc., post jobs, and various links like this one:
The only potential downside of LinkedIn is that it is not anonymous.
I help with social media professionally for some folks and Twitter is not important for them so we are just letting it die quietly. We get more traffic on Facebook and Instagram and some other venues anyway.
As others (and OP) have noted, Twitter has a lot of different facets to it, and the right tool to replace it will probably look different for each of those facets. And with so many facets, I think it’s going to be impossible to summarize all of the options here, but I’ll share a couple of thoughts.
I was an early adopter on Twitter, creating my account in 2007, but took several intentional breaks over the years, and haven’t posted on it since early 2021. It was at its best, for me, when it was a vehicle for “ambient intimacy” — being aware of the various things that my friends* (some online, some real-world; some were one-sided relationships, some mutual) were doing. I wasn’t following too many people, and the chronological timeline meant that I could dip in, get caught up, then go about my day. That usecase maps pretty well to Mastodon, and I was able to get an account on a server with others with similar “early days of the web maker vibes”. I think getting on one of the large Mastodon servers would be significantly less enjoyable.
For those new to Mastodon, a good metaphor is that it’s like a bunch of backyard parties, with everyone at the party slightly aware of some of the other backyard parties. Occasionally, folks in your backyard party will share something they’ve overheard from one of the other parties. So if you’re in a massive party, with lots of people sharing stuff you don’t care a ton about, it might not be that valuable. On the flip side, if your party is too small, there might not be enough interesting stuff getting shared to make it valuable. So there’s a balance. I was lucky to find a backyard party that worked well for the facet of Twitter I valued. (You can see a not-comprehensive list of Mastodon servers (the backyard parties) here, but I’d be wary of any of the ones where membership is just unmoderated.)
Unfortunately, one of the amazing things about Twitter was how messages and ideas could disperse widely, and I think it’ll be some time before we see whether something similar evolves at Mastodon. For example, I learned so much about the lives and experiences of Black people via Twitter, and it had a profound impact on how I see the world. I’m not sure that those messages will be amplified as easily on a platform like Mastodon. Another facet … a friend mentioned how Twitter had utility as a place for collective grieving, when appropriate. I’m not sure that Mastodon will offer a similar experience. So it’s not a 1:1 replacement for Twitter, but I’m enjoying it so far, and it does feel like the early days of Twitter in that regard.
A friend has a small business, and her usecase for Twitter looked very different from mine. She used it to share news about new products, or deals, or relevant news to her small business, for people interested in that. If I were her, I’d be working to develop an email newsletter — something I controlled, where I had the email addresses of my audience and could reach out with my own messaging. I’d consider doing a monthly (or whatever cadence) newsletter, to keep my business in peoples’ minds, and to share those same bits of relevant news. I’d also create a blog where I could capture that same content, or write even more frequently. And, yes, having a signup for the newsletter on the blog, so more people could opt-in to the mailing list.
Similarly, if I were a journalist, or other person who made a name professionally by analyzing things, I think I’d be focused on trying to establish some means of communicating directly with the people who want to hear from me. Kevin Kelly wrote about the idea of “1,000 True Fans” … I’d be thinking about how I could connect with those people.
I guess the summary take is this: Relying on tools made by corporations like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook makes sense at first, because the posting experience is easy and the network is part of the value they provide. Over time, corporations’ incentives are going to diverge from most peoples’ incentives. The more that individuals can do, then, to own their own content and means of distribution, the less beholden they’ll be to platforms and the decisions those platforms make. I recognize, though, that people are busy, and nobody wants to have to maintain their own server if they can avoid it (and many people aren’t able to). So it’s tricky.
I don’t think there’ll be a true replacement for Twitter, but I think as people consider the facets of it they got value from, they’ll be able to cobble together approximations. I suspect the primary value people got from it, though, was “the network”, and it’s going to be hard to figure out how to reconstitute that. And I think it’s good that you’re thinking proactively; it’s sort of like preparing for an earthquake or tornado … you can’t know for sure what services will go down, but it’ll be a lot easier if you’ve put in thought and prepared ahead of time.
Email is in a slow decline. The folks I have been working with for decades have seen their email list continually decrease even thought they only email about once a month. Nobody wants more email and people (me included) are quick to unsubscribe when their email box is overwhelming.
Facebook and Instagram and some industry-specific options work much better for us. I think at one point my client’s email list was around 20K, but now it’s down to around 14K. Facebook and the others have continued to increase over the same time span and are around 50K up from 30K. We also have a heavily-vetted Facebook Group. It’s not heavily moderated, but I do go through and manually look at each new request to post (not each request, but the requests from people who haven’t posted before) and make sure they are a real person. There are a lot of fake accounts out there.
I agree with you about owning your own content and platform and we have had a website and all forever and everyone definitely should. I still see a few restaurants and businesses that point you only to a Facebook page and that is a bad idea for sure. Never know when that will implode!
Also not a fan of the “1000 True Fans” thing. I read that awhile ago and it just didn’t jibe with my experience. 50,000 fans, yes. That works. You don’t need to be Taylor Swift to make a living.
For your writers, Medium seems like a good place and LinkedIn.
I have a very well known scientist friend who is very active on Twitter and he is posting on Mastodon now, too. He sometimes posts on Facebook, but not all of his pieces and his more personal stuff goes on Facebook. He also posts on LinkedIn.
I follow several historians, government and security officials (past and present), military folks, and overseas journalists. I also follow professors in related areas, as well as independent bookstores (for promising book releases, etc), and cute animal or kid videos.
I like getting a quick glance of trends in my area and the world at any time of the day, and that seemingly has been impacted acquire a bit.
I’ve not figured out mastodon yet but have started following many on LinkedIn and IG.
But it’s not the same.
Will defer to you on it! Thank you for sharing your experience there.
I’m sure it does depend on your audience and your field. For my clients their audience is in Facebook’s demographic. For a younger Gen Z or Millennial audience it would probably be a pretty awful choice.