Hey everyone, Bit here. Time for another blog post, this time about something going on with Twitter (X) and its current owner, Elon Musk.

This morning (Sunday, August 11, 2024), a new hashtag suddenly hit the trending bar. It was #BlockMusk. Apparently Elon Musk has done something horribly wrong and people are on a rampage of blocking his Twitter profile. It seems like most of the controversy surrounding Elon is related to him giving some negative political opinions, as people cite British politics and right-wing thinking.

Well, one way you can criticize Musk is by blocking him, but why are people still wanting to remain on the platform owned by the person they now hate? There are other networks you can join if you feel like Twitter is on a downward spiral.

We’ll go from other big tech socials to smaller networks to onchain networks.

These socials are owned by other big tech companies.

Meta Threads (threads.net) is a Twitter-like social network owned by Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram.

Threads is pitched as an app adjacent to Instagram, as Instagram is Meta’s only other “social” network app. (Facebook is a “personal” network app; only for people who know you in real life.)

These networks aren’t owned by big tech companies. They may or may not have a large user base.

The Fediverse, including social networks powered by Mastodon (joinmastodon.org), is a network of decentralized servers that all contribute to one large network through a protocol called ActivityPub. My Mastodon name is @littlebit670@mastodon.social, but there are other servers (some general-purpose, some dedicated to one app). That’s why a Fediverse name has the second at sign; the second at sign dictates what server your profile is on.

https://bsky.social is a social network also designed with an open and decentralized nature, around a protocol called the AT Protocol. One great feature of Bluesky is its insanely accurate content filter; if you tell it to hide a form of content you don’t want to see, it will almost certainly fulfill that request. It was one social network that received a lot of buzz around its release.

These social networks are within the Web3 ecosystem, and require payment to join. If you want to learn about how to be onchain, visit https://web3.littlebitstudios.com.

https://farcaster.xyz is an onchain social network. Just like the Fediverse and Bluesky, Farcaster is designed around an open and decentralized philosophy. It only costs $5 to join, and it supports all features a modern Twitter-like social network does, including direct messages (called direct casts). There are some idiosyncrasies to deal with such as storage units, and I attempt to explain them on the LittleBit Web3 site.

Farcaster is also highly extensible through features such as frames and Sign in with Farcaster (SIWF). Apps can bring profile information in from Farcaster with SIWF, as well as provide an interface for interaction with an app from within a Farcaster feed using frames.

https://lens.xyz is another onchain social protocol, with some extra features beyond Farcaster. Lens has a collection feature, where any post can be made into a collectible on the Polygon network. This is great to allow you to make moments that people can keep forever; collection can even be given a time limit or be made limited edition (only a certain number of iterations can be collected). Besides that, most of the functionality of Lens and apps that work with it such as https://hey.xyz is similar to Twitter and the rest of the networks here. Joining Lens costs $10 by card payment or 8 MATIC in crypto.

While many people choose to remain on Twitter, there are other networks to choose from. Pick the one that you like the most. There are some apps out there like https://yup.io (another web3 app) that can crosspost; meaning you can send posts across platforms. (Yup is compatible with Twitter, Bluesky, Lens, and Farcaster.) Anyway, this has been Bit, and I will see you next time.