Nobody is leaving X apparently. If anything, I see people using it more now than ever before. I also see non political people using it more.

I need X for work but I don't really enjoy posting as it feels like you have to shitpost constantly to get engagement. That's not how I want to spend my energy.

Meanwhile, the non-Facebook Threads alternatives (Bluesky / Mastodon) are edgy spaces where furry, kink, and progressive DSA content reigns. Nothing wrong with that, but it's a bad first experience for newcomers when content like that is worn on the sleeve, shown as the first experience, and used to exclude outsiders.

Paraphrasing, but seeing profiles that say "If you're not [8 acronyms I don't understand], go to hell" - why is that even on my feed? What is this? I don't get any of this.

I remember when I signed up the main feed was full of horny anime profiles, sex toys, and death wishes for politicians intermixed with an occasional tech post. I'm pretty sure they didn't have that tracking data on me to tailor my feed.

There's nowhere middle of the road average. (Maybe Threads is that?) The other alternatives have certainly niched down and become unattractive to the mainstream.

It's like Reddit with Voat a decade or so ago, except Voat attracted people that were banned from Reddit for typically valid reasons.

Building an all inclusive social network is hard, because it depends on who the first users are. It sets the stage for growth and limits the ultimate appeal if it over-indexes on one type of user.

I wish this was all a protocol like email, but everyone building a protocol makes it weird and exclusive and ruins the vibes before users even arrive.

Plus they all insist on federation, when P2P is the way to go. It's scalable if people use super nodes to publish and gulp down content. The problem is Mastodon and Bluesky effectively have super nodes run by people that want to exclude mainstream. You can't do that and hope to get the world on board.

Yeah, I call my friends on some platforms "my furs" but of course I have a shtick that attracts them. [1]

On Bluesky in particular you have to put some effort into having a good feed. You just can't follow the people who posted about Donald Trump 20 times a day. If you use the "more like this" and "less like this" buttons on the discover feed consistently #uspol will fall away and you will find the people who are into cat pictures, #bloomscrolling and maybe even Jacobin/Joan Williams/Catherine Liu instead of the cultural stuff.

[1] ... in real life there was that day I got off the bus as-a-fox and there was somebody waiting for me wearing an animal ear hat and holding a chicken purse