Late on Friday afternoon, Justice Alexandre de Moraes – who has been engaged in a dispute with X’s owner, Elon Musk, since April – ordered the “immediate, complete and total suspension of X’s operations” in the country, “until all court orders … are complied with, fines are duly paid, and a new legal representative for the company is appointed in the country”.
Rogero, T. (2024, August 30). Brazilian court orders suspension of Elon Musk’s X after it missed deadline. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/30/elon-musk-x-could-face-ban-in-brazil-after-failure-to-appoint-legal-representative
On top of the many other issues Elon has caused for Twitter since his purchase of the social media service in 2022, this latest faux paus has led to yet another “Great Twitter Migration”. This time, over one million users set up accounts on the alternative micro blogging service Bluesky.
wow… welcome to the ONE MILLION new users in the last three days!!! 🎉 uau… bem-vindos ao UM MILHÃO de novos usuários nos últimos três dias!!! 🎉
— Bluesky (@bsky.app) Aug 31, 2024 at 5:21 PM
I’ve stayed with Twitter throughout all of these issues as I continue to follow the many drum corps, marching arts, and sports accounts which are still active there, but I have also looked at what my options are should Twitter finally go belly up and shut down completely. Fortunately, there are a few choices for those of us who prefer this type of social media.
Bluesky
Since I’ve already mentioned this service, I’ll start with it on my list. Bluesky first appeared as an invite only service in October 2022, right around the time Musk took over Twitter. The service now has iOS and Android apps for mobile, has released its code as open source, and is now publicly available, allowing anybody to create an account on the service for free. As the Bluesky post above stated, the service recently grew in a big way thanks to the influx of Brazilian accounts created with the impending shutdown of Twitter in the country. While Bluesky is currenlty more barebones than Twitter, the basics are there and it is similar enough to Twitter that making the switch to Bluesky is easy. There are even projects in the works to make the Bluesky service federated and visible to other services, including…
I am listing these two services together as they are both similar. Both Mastodon and Pleroma are free open source micro blogging platforms, similar to Twitter and Bluesky. The difference is that these services are decentralized and federated. What this means is that, unlike most major social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, which are their own “walled gardens” and won’t play nice with others, there are many Mastodon and Plerorma servers on the web which CAN talk to one another. This is similar to how email works, but for micro blogging. For example, my Mastodon account is hosted on a server called twit.social, but I can see and respond to posts from other Mastodon servers such as mastodon.social, writing.exchange, social.coop, and others. I can also see and respond to other services on the “Fediverse“, including Pixelfed (photo sharing), Diaspora (Facebook alternative), Bookwyrm (book and reading social sharing), and others.
All three of these alternatives are free to sign up for and use, though Bluesky has received seed funding and has yet to explain how they will continue to raise money to cover operations expenses. Since Mastodon and Pleroma servers are run independently from one another, the administrators of these servers usually pay for expenses out of their own pocket. I have access to twit.social through my Club TWiT membership, which helps pay those operations costs. These are factors you may need to consider when choosing where to move to from Twitter.
Do you have a Twitter, Bluesky, and/or Mastodon/Pleroma account? Post your account info in the comments. My accounts are located at:
- Twitter – https://x.com/kevingamin
- Bluesky – https://bsky.app/profile/kevingamin.bsky.social
- Mastodon – https://twit.social/@kevingamin
