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?

Just a quick update, if you’re following this blog via RSS: I’ve started a separate “journal” blog on micro.blog: journal.mackuba.eu.

Micro.blog is an interesting service: it’s a one-man indie business that’s sort of a hybrid between a blogging platform and a microblogging social network. You can write anything between full-size blog posts and tweet-sized single messages, and you can cross-post them to Bluesky, Mastodon etc. You can also follow people from the community that’s formed there and reply to them, all in the form of those mini-blogposts (there are no likes or retweets though). The idea, as I understand, is to use a network of blogs to build a social network that uses the web itself as the foundation.

I’ve been still pretty busy with various Bluesky- and social-related projects recently, so here’s a small update on what I’ve been working on since my November post, if you’re interested:

Skythread – quote & hashtag search

I was missing one useful feature that’s still not available on Bluesky: being able to see the number of quote posts a post has received and looking up the list of those quote posts. The Bluesky AppView doesn’t currently collect and expose this info, so it’s not a simple matter of calling the API. But since everything’s open, anyone can build a service that does this, they just need to collect the data themselves.

Since I’m already recording all recent posts in a database for the purposes of feeds and other tools, I figured I could just add an indexed quote_id column and set it to reference the source post on all incoming posts that are quotes, and later look up the quotes using that field.

For the past year and a half, I’ve been a pretty active user of Bluesky. I enjoy it a lot, and I’ve managed to learn a lot about how it works, what works well and what doesn’t, and also what’s likely coming next.

I’ve decided to write down some of the tips & tricks that I often give to friends when I invite them there, or the advice and answers that I sometimes give to people that I find in some feed asking about things.

This of course got much longer than I planned 😅 so if only have a moment, here’s a TLDR:

• there are official iOS and Android apps, but you can also use bsky.app in the browser, or try e.g. Graysky, deck.blue, Skeets (iOS) or Skywalker (Android)
• if your timeline feels empty, check out the default algorithmic feed called “Discover” – or even better, go to the “Feeds” tab, scroll down to the “Discover New Feeds” section and look for some feeds on the topics that interest you (on the top list or in the search); follow these feeds, and then if you find some interesting people posting in those feeds, follow them too. You can also search for feeds on goodfeeds.co.
• don’t be afraid to interact with people, repost good posts, like good comments, comment in threads and so on – that’s how you make friends! (but be nice :)
• if you see too much NSFW stuff, look for “Content filters” settings in the Moderation tab
• everything you post here is very public, so don’t share anything too private 😏
• if you own some cool domain name like “taylorswift.com”, you can set it as your handle
• hashtags, word muting, GIFs (from Tenor), DMs (simple version), videos, pinned posts, listing quotes, and thread composer are now available
• trends, 2FA and more DM stuff are coming, post editing is planned; some kind of private profiles for sharing to limited audience are probably coming at some point, but not in near future
• Jack Dorsey has nothing to do with Bluesky anymore ;)

And now the long version:

I had different plans for this year… then, Elon Musk happened.

Elon took over Twitter in October last year, which set many different processes in motion. A lot of people I liked and followed started leaving the platform. Mastodon and the broader Fediverse, which has been slowly growing for many years but never got anything close to being mainstream, suddenly blew up with activity. A lot of those people I was following ended up there.

Then, Twitter started getting progressively worse under the new management. Elon’s antics, the whole blue checks / verification clusterfuck, killing off third party apps and effectively shutting down the API, locking the site behind a login wall, finally renaming the app and changing the logo – each step made some of the users lose interest in the platform, making it gradually less interesting and harder to use.

Changes, so many changes… and things changing meant that I had to change my workflows, change some plans, build a whole bunch of new tools, change plans a few times again, and so on. My GitHub looks like this right now, which is way above the average of previous years:

Update 01.03.2023: Updated Mastodon address - my previous instance has been unexpectedly shut down and I had to make a new account. I’ve decided to set up my own server to make sure it won’t happen again.

Update 09.11.2023: I made a follow-up post which talks about the social media related projects I’ve been working on this year, and about Bluesky, where I’m spending most of the time now.

This is just a small update about Twitter and Mastodon, since things have been… very unstable and chaotic in the last few weeks, as you’ve surely noticed if you log in to these even occassionally.

Twitter has been my internet home for over 13 years now. I started using it when my colleagues from Lunar Logic showed it to me, and especially in the recent years it’s been my main source of information and news. It’s where I went to keep track of what was happening in the Apple/Swift world, find useful tips about UIKit, SwiftUI or Xcode, follow the news, rumors and dramas on the Crypto Twitter, and find out every day what important thing was happening in the world, including following the Covid pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine this year.