Not really. Blue Sky is the most promising replacement I've seen, but it's just another for profit company, so it will follow the same pattern eventually. I think an official government Mastodon or similar would work, but it really needs to be something hosted by a competent IT dept (meaning federal, in the US), with strict and well considered policies (who gets an account on it?) and with massive buy-in at all levels of government. So... no. Not really.
Twitter had a brilliant brand (which is now tainted). Chirping birds, positive visual. BlueSky shortens to BS and mastodon is an extinct animal. Lemmy, on the other hand, is kinda cool.
fwiw, Bluesky is fully federated (well, will be, it's in development, but it's well on the way, they just launched the federation sandbox the other day), and identities are portable, so it shouldn't be susceptible to the same dynamics as twitter. Plus, the dev team has stated a number of times that "the company is a potential future adversary" is one of the principles they keep in mind when designing the protocol. Plus, it's a Public Benefit LLC, for however much that's worth. And I really do trust the good intentions of the current devs and leadership (mostly the same people), based on my somewhat extensive interactions with them—I think their hearts are in the right place.
So of course it definitely could go badly fo a variety of reasons—but I think there's good reason to be optimistic that it will go well.
The issue I see is that the Tech Community, that form and influence opinions, is going to be cautious about investing time in another private social media company.
Mastodon has the mind share already as the de facto Twitter replacement.
Bluesky looks suspiciously like it’s dead in the water.
> Mastodon has the mind share already as the de facto Twitter replacement.
It did, until it got infested with far-left refugees who started banning entire instances whose users their have political disagreements with. Between that and the lack of ease of signing up or setting up your own instance, Mastodon is not taking over from Twitter anytime soon, although it has formed its own community that I'm sure will continue to use it. If Mastodon becomes even as popular as Tumblr now, let alone at its peak, I would consider that a surprising success.
As for the "tech community", some hackers did go over to Mastodon. That's great, but they didn't cause IRC or mailing lists to take over the world back in the day, and Mastodon is even more technically dysfunctional than those (making it so easy to completely block instances is a major issue). Call me when VCs start moving en masse to Mastodon.
On the VC moving to Mastodon bit: I guess that’s a very SV centric perspective?
I live in an obscure part of Australia, and the less VC posts I see the better. If I saw a post from @jason I’d know it was time to leave ;-)
But seriously, for me, I have zero interest in any of those VC posts or commentary. The value is in more local individuals and other interest groups being active. YMMV :-)
