Now that an X has officially been placed over both of poor Twitter’s dead eyes, here’s my current assessment of the three leading “successors”:

Bluesky: Filled with top-quality shitposts, and I love being able to quote (unfortunately and intentionally still not a thing on Mastodon). Invite-only though at the moment, and their support for account portability isn’t quite ready yet. Some people also can’t get past the Jack Dorsey affiliation.

Mastodon: Still feels the most like home (or a comfortable pair of sweatpants), with a mix of the best middle-aged nerds and Twitter refugees, along with reliably great conversations. That said, I’m definitely clear-eyed about many people finding things a bit confusing, especially when it comes to choosing a server/onboarding, although it’s been getting easier over time as more and more great new clients emerge.

Threads: If you “miss” banter between brands and celebrities mixed in with Twitter-scarred journalists desperate for engagement and awkward text posts from high school classmates much more comfortable posting selfies and filtered food pics, then your ship has come in, friend.

So, where does this leave us?

Threads is at some point (in theory at least, we are talking about Facebook here) planning to integrate with Mastodon, which would lead to a pretty solid scenario in which the lovely world of decentralized Mastodon weirdos could keep an open channel with normies, and Threads users could then graduate (and, crucially, move their data/followers) to a relevant Mastodon server once they’re ready to ditch the training wheels.

Throw in some potential bridges between Mastodon, Bluesky and other smaller alternatives (Spill, T2, etc.) and things could start getting super interesting. Here’s to the death of Twitter resulting not in the rise of another centralized replacement, but in millions of connected flowers blooming!