Bluesky is not trustworthy or sustainable. Mastodon is
I saw Dave Lee's post quoting James Ball's post about fears around Bluesky's lack of user growth, and therefore profitability and sustainability. It's a company with hundreds of millions of dollars invested into it - the platform will inevitably enshittify in an effort to pay back its investors.
To that, I suggest Mastodon. It's a social platform like Twitter, Bluesky, and Threads, but with a few key differences.
It's open source
This means there's no secret data exfiltration or surveillance taking place. We, the community, can audit the source code and provide feedback, features, and bug fixes. This leads to a more involved community and greater trust between users and developers.
Being open source also has huge implications for the long-term sustainability for the platform. If the developers behind Mastodon were to eventually get acquired by a corporation or prove themselves untrustworthy stewards, the application can be forked and development continued by more trustworthy people. In fact, there are already third-party alternatives like Sharkey, GoToSocial, and Snac. They all speak the same language, enabling users of Sharkey to interact with users of Mastodon, users of Snac to interact with users of GoToSocial, and so on. This is called "federation" and will be explained more in the next section.
It's decentralized
Because Mastodon is open source, with the right amount of technical know-how, anyone can host their own instance. An instance is just a computer running the Mastodon server application. Under the hood, Mastodon uses the ActivityPub protocol for federation with other instances. So even if you're the only person on your Mastodon instance, you can still talk to your friends on other instances!
Fun fact: Threads also uses ActivityPub, so people on both Threads and Mastodon can interact with each other!
This means that you can choose which provider you want to go with, from the biggest instance, mastodon.social, to any of the smaller instances with only a few users. You can pick and choose based on the existing community, or find an instance whose moderation rules and admin team you most agree with and trust. If you have the know-how, you can even host an instance for just you (and your friends!), meaning you'll only be subject to your own moderation rules.
This decentralization is also a big deal for data sovereignty. For example, if you want to avoid U.S.-based services, or you can find a Mastodon instance that is based somewhere else, like the EU or Canada.
And no, despite Bluesky's marketing, Bluesky is not decentralized. Like, at all.
There is no algorithm
Mastodon feeds are chronological, so there isn't an algorithm constantly trying to maximize engagement and overwhelm you. Instead, popular posts get shared by way of boosts (Mastodon's term for retweets or reposts). This has the downside of your feed feeling empty when you first join. However, you can find people to interact with and follow with the local feed (posts from just your instance), federate feed (posts from all federated instances), and by following hashtags for topics you are interested in. Plus, you can add users and hashtags to lists, letting you organize feeds by topic.
It's a nonprofit
You won't get force-fed ads, or bombarded with paywalls. Though, if you're able, you should definitely donate to Mastodon and the admin of your instance. There are some paid options, but most instances are run by volunteers and made available for free to anyone who wants to sign up. The vast majority of instance admins put donations towards infrastructure cost and improvement.
Closing thoughts
There are downsides to Mastodon. The initial onboarding can be overwhelming; figuring out what an instance is and which one to join is already a lot. Then there's the initial loneliness of an empty feed. Where most people are used to a centralized platform with quick onboarding and an algorithm learning their preferences and letting them jump in right off the bat, Mastodon requires initial learning and intentional usage and setup.
There are those in the Mastodon community who can be unwelcoming to users who feel overwhelmed by the onboarding requirements. However, there are even more in the community who are happy to welcome and help new users get started.
I won't pretend that Mastodon is perfect, nor that it's the right platform for everyone. It still has plenty of rough edges and asks a lot from its users. However, if you are tired of big tech's stranglehold on your attention and online connections, and you don't mind putting in some time and effort to see what this Mastodon thing is all about, then I say give it a go.