MacKuba

So here we are, halfway through 2025, a bit over 2.5 years after the Eloncalypse… For better or worse, the Twitter as we knew it in the 2010s and the communities we had there are mostly gone. But it doesn’t feel like we’ve all settled on anything comparable.

If you’re a software developer who was active on Twitter before, by now you’ve almost certainly tried at least one of the alternatives – Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads, and you’re probably posting actively on at least one of these, but probably not on all of them. The problem is that nobody has enough mental space to be active on 3-4 similar social networks, so we’ve split into different camps which only partially overlap. You’re probably still missing some friends from Twitter and some interesting content. It’s all a bit in flux and a bit of a mess.

Myself, I’ve basically left Twitter; I haven’t spent much time on Threads (among other reasons, it was unavailable in Europe for a long time); and I’m mostly hanging out on Bluesky and somewhat on Mastodon.

So where do we go from here?

Obviously everyone has their own take on that, this is just mine. But I really think we should all try to make an effort to focus on the widely understood “open social”, or what Laurens Hof from Fediverse Report now calls “Connected places”. That means Bluesky and Mastodon/Fediverse (with emphasis on “and”), and to some degree maybe also Threads, although that depends on how their integration with ActivityPub progresses (and it’s looking more and more like they aren’t very serious about it).

My advice:

→ If you’re currently cross-posting or bridging between Mastodon and Bluesky: awesome! ❤️

→ If you’re active on Mastodon, but currently ignoring or forgot about Bluesky: please reconsider it. I know that these two communities have a lot of differences between them, and we love to hate each other (I fully admit I’m guilty of that myself). It’s likely you prefer one or the other of these for various reasons, and you might not be a fan of the other one. But I think it’s clear at this point that none of them will disappear in the near-term at least or replace the other for everyone.

It would be great if we all made some effort to connect to the other side, for those who like it more there. What are the options? Depending on what’s more convenient to you:

• there are some native apps which let you post to two or more services in parallel, e.g. Croissant, Openvibe or SoraSNS
• most social media management services like Buffer now support both Fediverse and Bluesky, so you can use that to post to both, including scheduling etc. There are several others like this, and they usually have some free plans.
  • e.g. Fedica was one of the ones that had support for Bluesky from very early on
  • also my friend from my first job, Peter Solnica (known from some Ruby libraries like DataMapper/ROM, dry-rb, Hanami, and now some Elixir libs too) is building his own called JustCrossPost
• I use a little tool in Ruby I wrote for myself named tootify, which lets me selectively cross-post relevant posts to Mastodon, almost effortlessly: I post on Bluesky and then “like” my own post if I want it to be copied to Mastodon (which clears the like). So this way I can cross-post e.g. cat photos or iOS related posts, but skip Bluesky-specific content.
  There are probably similar tools going in the other direction, although it’s a bit more complicated this way because of the post length limits (usually 500 on Mastodon vs. 300 on Bluesky).
• I know some people have also written some iOS Shortcuts, scripts, browser extensions etc. (I don’t have any links at hand)
• and last but not least, there’s Bridgy Fed: basically enable it once by following the bridge account, and you can forget about it. It creates a “mirror” account of yours on the other side, but when people interact with it there, the likes/reposts/comments go back to you (as long as that other person also has the bridge enabled).
• there are probably other options too, let me know in the comments :)

→ If you’re active on Bluesky: wonderful! ☺️ But again, all of the above applies. Don’t forget about the friends and strangers who prefer the elephant site 🦣. At the very least, enable the Bridgy bridge.

→ If you do have both Mastodon and Bluesky accounts, but you’ve decided that you want to use them for different kind of content (e.g. tech vs. non-tech)… please reconsider, in light of what I wrote above. Most of the people who know you online would probably prefer to follow you in one or the other place they like more, not to have to follow you everywhere in parallel. (Though nobody says you can’t have e.g. two different accounts which are both bridged.)

→ If you had a bridged account, but turned off the bridge because you prefer to be posting there directly, but you don’t really post there directly (you know who you are 😛) – I am begging you, please either figure out some cross-posting solution (see above), or enable the bridge 🙏🏻

→ If you’re mostly active on Threads (is that a thing?…) – turn on the fediverse sharing option (it might not be available in the EU though, according to the support article?), and follow the Bridgy account to enable bridging to Bluesky (there aren’t many accounts connected like this, but it should work, let me know if you have any problems).

→ If you’re still mostly active on Twitter (I see you 👀 and I am kinda judging you)… please rethink it. I mean… you really don’t mind helping Elon and his buddies? I know, there’s more content there, more engagement (maybe), big accounts are still there, news is still there, more people talking there about startups, AI, indie dev or whatever. But wouldn’t you want to change that? Wouldn’t you prefer to use and build on a network with an open API that isn’t controlled by one rich American far-right guy1) who thinks he’s the president of the world?… Where you don’t see a full screen ad every few posts, and don’t need to pay a fuckton of dollars to build some fun tool on it? We need to make an effort to move away from there. Someone’s gotta start, and then maybe others will come.

→ If you’re posting both on Twitter and on Mastodon/Bluesky, then, well… it’s ok I guess 🙃 I think the most important thing is to let the people who do want to move away from Twitter completely, have the content they want to follow in the new place. That’s the first step. A natural second step is then to start decreasing the amount of content that there is on Twitter, so people have more incentive to look for it elsewhere, but I understand if not everyone is ready for that step yet.

→ If you tried Mastodon and/or Bluesky before, but you felt like it was too empty there, you didn’t have enough content to read or you felt like you were shouting into the void – please give it another try, and please give it some time. Twitter also wasn’t immediately the place you remember from the first day you signed up, was it? You need to put in some effort, like you did everywhere else. Some tips:

• on Bluesky: find some good custom feeds and/or starter packs to follow
• on Mastodon: follow some hashtags, and use hashtags when posting to get more reach (but within reason!). On a private instance, this gets a bit more tricky due to the ActivityPub architecture, so it might make sense to start on a larger one at first.
• on both: try to find some people you recognize from Twitter, and then look who they follow or repost, and recursively look through their profiles too. Also, interact with people, give likes/faves, good replies, and so on.

→ If you’re on Nostr, there are some kind of Nostr ↔ Fedi bridges or gateways, and you can use those + Bridgy to reach Bluesky too (e.g. here’s a Nostr account “double-bridged” to Bluesky).

→ If you’ve moved to something like Micro.blog, or just blogging – that’s also cool! But I hope you’re somehow posting the links to Bluesky & Fedi too :)

→ If you’ve just given up on microblogging or social media in general… I understand. It’s probably not a bad choice in the current times. I hope we somehow meet again someday, digitally or in person 🩵

So let’s connect, let’s build bridges. But also, let’s finally help the X-shaped zombie die 🧟‍♂️

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(You can find me on Bluesky at @mackuba.eu (I have my private PDS at lab.martianbase.net), which is my main account these days, and on Mastodon at mackuba@martianbase.net (also a private instance), where I’m cross-posting a good chunk of the posts from Bluesky using Tootify. If you want to see everything including some shitposting, politics and ATProto-specific posts, the Bluesky account is also bridged as mackuba.eu@bsky.brid.gy. Twitter account @kuba_suder is left as an archive, because I don’t like deleting useful content from the Internet, but I don’t use it anymore. Lately I’ve been also blogging somewhat more regularly than here on my new “journal” Micro.blog.)

1) If you now want to write a comment mentioning someone with the initials “J.D.”, don’t even think about it! 🫠