Rebel Tech AllianceMicroblogging / Social news
Alternatives to: Twitter/X
Since being bought by Elon Musk Twitter has gone downhill. The user experience is worse, and it's now a propaganda tool for Musk and Trump.
The main reason to get away from big tech (billionaire owned) social media is that the content you are served is decided by an algorithm. And how that algorithm works (e.g. skewed towards more shocking, more extreme, less true, more outrageous) is at the whim of the owner of the platform. You are open to manipulation - at best that's just buying stuff you don't need, at worst it's being radicalised and voting for extremists.
The solution is decentralised
To avoid algorithmic lock-in, move to a decentralised, open source alternative from the list below. Decentralised means that there is no central control point that dictates what content you see (unlike X).
Decentralised social networks run on a set of shared format rules called a 'protocol'. The two main decentralised protocols are ActivityPub and ATproto. Apps built on ActivityPub are sometimes referred to as the 'fediverse' because all those apps are 'federated'. This means you can see posts in one app that are posted in another app.
All the following are decentralised and open source:
| App name | Protocol | Best Features | # users start of 2025 approx | Year started | Country of Origin | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mastodon | ActivityPub | Real conversations with friendly people; no algorithm; chronological timeline; follow hashtags; federated with other fediverse apps | 8 million | 2016 | Germany | Join Mastodon |
| Bluesky | ATproto | Custom feeds; many journalists there; large userbase | 30 million | 2021 | USA | Bluesky app |
| Amethyst | Nostr | True decentralisation; Persistent Nostr ID; 'Zap' bitcoin micropayments to other people | 2 million | 2023 | USA | Amethyst github |
| Misskey | ActivityPub | Fun, anime-style interface; federated with other fediverse apps | 3 million | 2014 | Japan | Misskey hub |
| Minds | ActivityPub | Create your own social media app | unknown | 2011 | USA | Minds |
RTA's choice
Our team uses Mastodon for day to day conversations with interesting people - it feels like a friendly community. We use Bluesky for more like the old days Twitter feel - following news from big name journalists and bloggers.
How decentralised social media networks work
They are made up of lots of separate 'instances'. These could be though of like hosting servers (like for websites). There is always the original and biggest instance set up by the founders, and then lots of smaller onces set up by various other people. To start with you usually join the 'original' instance, and usually this has a name ending in '.social'.
In Mastodon's case it is mastodon.social. In Bluesky's case they still only have the original founding instance and this is called bsky.social. There are plans to create more instances on their protocol.
Why two fediverse protocols?
When they set up Bluesky they could have used the already existing ActivityPub protocol to build it on. Instead they chose to create their own. In some ways this is a shame, but ATproto addresses someonf the data portability and ID shortcomings of ActivityPub.
The two protocols can be 'bridged' due to an initiative called Bridgy Fed. You just have to follow one account and it bridges your posts across to the other protocol.
A third option
The third protocol listed is Nostr. This is totally separate from the other two, in both ethos and design, although there are crossovers in terms of differentiating itself from centralised big tech platforms. It's architecture is more akin to peer-to-peer, where the instances are 'nodes', and apps like Amethyst allow you to communicate with other people, hosted on various nodes, using the Nostr protocol. Nostr is the youngest of the protocols.