It has already become a tonic. Elon Musk is wreaking havoc on Twitter, and many users are wondering what the alternative could be. The most common option is to name Mastodon, but the truth is that several months have passed and the number of users has not managed to explode. Despite its growth, Mastodon is far from being the Twitter alternative that many seek.

Avoiding Musk’s wheel spins. This weekend, Twitter has limited its visibility, from discontinuing unregistered users to creating the maximum number of tweets we can see. Wide-ranging changes announced based on a simple tweet. It’s a chaotic way of progress and a place where users can do little.

With Mastodon, we have a decentralized social network where we are not under a single administrator or algorithm that decides what and how we see other people’s messages.

What is missing from Mastodon is this great global conversation. The biggest advantage of Twitter is that it’s an excellent gateway to find out what’s being talked about, what the conversation trends are, and to have a good picture of what’s going on in the world in general, or at least what’s being produced the most. argument. .

In Mastodon you have to choose a specific instance and although we have more control over the messages we receive, it is also a more private reading. There is less reading feeling on Mastodon day by day, as it is not as heavily used as Twitter, where we receive messages from everywhere. It has the advantage of having a healthier timeline, but that global informative aspect has been lost.

They made changes for the better. While it’s true that Mastodon has made changes to evolve and get closer, it’s still not that much of a face-to-face competitor with Twitter. One of them is that, while breaking with the original philosophy, the app redirects users to the same instance by default: mastodon.social.

“If we only attract people who are interested in decentralization, then it will be much harder to popularize decentralization,” said Mastodon’s CEO, publicly making one of their internal discussions.

Bluesky is more recognizable, but not yet launched. More like Twitter, Bluesky is the decentralized social network backed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey himself. It is so similar that even aesthetically it looks like a carbon copy with those white and bluish tones.

The app still needs an invite as it is in closed beta. Like Mastodon lately, Bluesky redirects all users to the same main server. Although users can always open their own servers or implement their own moderation system.

The rise of decentralization is putting many competitors to Twitter. Mastodon and Bluesky aren’t the only ones looking to position themselves as Twitter’s big rivals. For example, we have Damus based on the Nostr protocol, and even Project 92 is close, the social network created by the Instagram team and will be based on the same ActivityPub protocol as Mastodon.

For now, Twitter remains unique. Musk continues to present arguments to his detractors to seek alternatives, but the truth is that the social network continues to keep up and remains the main way to learn about the global conversation of the moment. We don’t know if these decentralized competitors will be able to achieve their goals, but even as Twitter continues to change overnight (including a new CEO), a whole army of users continues to resist.

on Xataka | Thousands of users are jumping from Twitter to Mastodon. There they encounter unexpected surprises.