Twitter, Threads, and Mastodon: Where should you go?

These days, big techs are ruining platforms up in order to compete against each other.

We all know that not all social media platforms are created equal. Some platforms may have better features, users, monetization, and approach to free speech and privacy than others.

In this article, we will compare three different social media platforms: Twitter, Threads, and Mastodon.

TLDR

To save your precious time, we have summarized the differences on various aspects in the table below:

Let's discuss in detail about all of these platforms.

Twitter: The Giant losing its grip

Twitter is one of the oldest, well-known and widely used social media platforms in the world. The main advantage is it has over 330 million monthly active users and over 200 million daily active users. Twitter makes money mainly from advertising, data licensing, and now with premium features.

Twitter’s reach and influence is a reason for staying on this platform because it is used by celebrities, politicians, journalists, activists, and other influential figures to share their thoughts and opinions with millions of followers. It is also a source of breaking news and real-time information on various topics and events.

Twitter has also been involved in several scandals on a bigger level involving data breaches, privacy violations, misinformation, manipulation, harassment, abuse, and hate speech.

Musk has also made some changes to Twitter’s features and policies that are unpopular or controversial among users such as allowing longer posts and videos removing verification badges enabling live audio rooms and of course these are premium services and charged $8 per month.

Threads: The newcomer with same purpose

Threads is a new social media platform launched by Meta (formerly Facebook) in July 2023 and hilariously claimed to be copied from Twitter. Yet, It reached over 100 million sign-ups in its first week.

Threads is very closely linked to Instagram, its sister social networking service. It can be great opportunity for creator. Users can only log in using an existing Instagram account, and posts can be up to 500 characters long and include links to photos and videos up to 5 minutes in length.

Threads is likely to inherit some problems and criticisms that Meta and Instagram have faced over the years regarding privacy, security, moderation, content quality, and user behavior. Meta has also faced several lawsuits and investigations for violating user privacy security and trust.

According to App Store listing, Threads collects a large amount of user data across 25 different categories, including critical information that Twitter does not collect. These include financial info, search history, health and fitness, browsing history, purchases identifiers, location data, contact info, contacts diagnostics, user content like images, videos and more.

Mastodon: Freedom, diversity and few compromises

Mastodon is a free and open-source social media platform that was launched in 2016. It is based on a decentralized model of federation. This means that instead of a single central service that all people use, there are multiple services (called instances) that any number of people can use.

Mastodon has over 10 million registered users across more than 4,000 instances and does not implement any monetization strategies in the software. Users can post short messages (called toots) of up to 500 characters as well as images, videos, and polls.

Mastodon’s user interface is inspired by Twitter’s but offers more customization options. Users can also choose from four different layouts for their timeline: home, local, federated, and lists.

Mastodon’s main advantage is its freedom and diversity. It gives us more control over everything. Users can pick an instance that suits their preferences, needs, and values. Users can also create their own instance if they wish with their own rules, policies, and moderation practices.

Mastodon may be confusing or intimidating for new or casual users who are not familiar with the concept of federation or the technical aspects of the platform. It may also have less reach and influence than centralized platforms like Twitter or Threads.

Interested in joining Mastodon? You can find an instance that suits you at joinmastodon.org. Learn more about Mastodon at docs.joinmastodon.org.

Conclusion

At this point, we hope you can now choose a Social Media platform for you. Due to decisions of tech giants, the internet is facing some serious challenges and threats that may affect your privacy and free speech, so it is our moral duty to pick the right platform which allow you to express yourself to the world.

We hope that this article was helpful and informative for you. Thank you for reading!