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== Lura ==
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Complaining website for complaining

The State of Microblogging

Table of Contents

About a month ago, Twitter made the very smart move of making it so that nobody can actually use their site. It was reverted in a few days, but it’s a bad omen, especially with the porn site rebrand, the approval by the site administration of right-wing actors posting child porn, and potential ID verification features in the pipeline.

So here’s a quick overview of how the “microblogging” world stands, as of August 2023. It only goes downhill from here.

Twitter

Pros

  • Everyone’s on there.
  • If you use an extension to undo the recent changes, and install an old APK, the UI is good enough.

Cons

  • Pro-child pornography.
  • Filled with neo-nazis.
  • It’s definitely not going to get better any time soon.
  • About four months away from bankruptcy. (2024 update: Still true, somehow.)

Blue Sky

Pros

  • Great UI, pretty much identical to an older version of Twitter.
  • Custom algorithmic feeds are a cool concept. I use one for film stuff.
  • Federated. Kinda.
  • Surprisingly, open-source from top to bottom and not actively hostile to outside devs.

Cons

  • The entire userbase is made up of a mixture of retarded millenials and future sex pests.
  • Reading any of the popular feeds feels like being forcibly injected with pure 2018.
  • Missing essential features like muting words, seeing who you know follows, or muting notifications.
  • It has like three people working on it, so none of these are going to be added any time soon.
  • Invite only.
  • Multiple times a week somebody pops up in the hot feeds with either a penis picture or “saying stupid is hecking ableist!” tweeet.

Cohost

Pros

  • Can’t think of any.

Cons

  • The UI is fucking incomprehensible.
  • It’s like if Tumblr was ran by Tumblr users.
  • The userbase is also full of the Tumblr people who think they’re too smart to use Blue Sky.

Fediverse

Pros

  • Actually federated, albeit in one of the worst protocols invented behind IRC, ASN.1, and SOAP.

Cons

  • Every frontend has a UI designed by people with anencephaly. Only marginally better than cohost.

  • Insert some nonsense about instance blocks here. Nobody knows how it works, only that the subject pisses everyone off.

  • The userbase is a mixture of:

    • People who got chased off of Twitter
    • The least interesting accelerationists in the world
    • The least interesting FOSS devs in the world
    • Tumblr people who think they’re too smart to use Blue Sky
    • ActivityPub webshits

  • Barrier of entry is 10x higher for no real reason.