Look, just fucking use Mastodon already

Oh, Bluesky is getting a little shitty, you say? Oh no! Who could have predicted Bluesky could ever have run that risk? I mean, apart from everyone warning us that it was launched by weirdo alt-right blockchain-shilling AI-loving shitbird Jack Dorsey, and that their current CEO came from a weirdo alt-right blockchain-shilling AI-loving shitbird background. You know. Besides them.

Now quelle surprise, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber’s out there mocking people asking why they didn’t ban Jesse Singal, everyone’s favorite Just Asking Questions™ Transphobe, for violating their terms of service. They say he didn’t violate the terms of service. They’re right, because they keep changing the fucking terms of service. You’re probably in violation right now, fucko. No? Surprise! Permaban! And we’re not even getting into them desperately suppressing people saying bad things about Charlie Kirk—you know, awful, horrid things like quoting Kirk’s actual words—and cooperating with increasingly censorious governments.

And now, inevitably, half of my Bluesky timeline is like: oh, we need a service that’s resistant to this sort of shit, something that’s not beholden to capitalist pressure, something that’s queer-friendly and furry-friendly, quickly followed by but don’t say Mastodon!

Sorry, I’m saying it. Mastodon. We want fucking Mastodon. It’s run by an actual non-profit foundation, none of this “public benefit corporation” bullshit. It’s not subject to corporate enshittification. It’s not subject to creeping network-wide puritanism. Mastodon. Goddammit. Mastodon Mastodon Mastodon.

“No. Choosing an instance is too hard!” Have you chosen an email provider, fuckers? Yes? Congratulations! You can pick an instance.

“But how do I know that instance won’t implode in a giant cloud of drama?” You don’t. It happens, and it sucks when it happens, but it doesn’t happen all that often. Go find another instance.

“But what if the instance I’m on doesn’t federate with the ones my friends are on, or they change their policies to be more puritanical, or—” Go find another fucking instance. This is not rocket surgery.

“But if I move instances, I’ll lose my posts!” Yeah, you’ll lose your posts. You know what you won’t lose? Your entire group of followers. You know, the way you lost them when you moved from fucking Twitter to fucking Bluesky. With fucking Mastodon, you don’t have that problem.

“Having to use content warnings is annoying.” I used to feel that way, too, but you know what? I fucking got over it. Yeah, if you get it wrong, people are going to yell at you. And you learn. That’s the way life fucking works. But listen: it turns out that content warnings are fucking great. I see a bunch of posts that say “us pol” or “transphobia” or whatever, I get to decide if I have enough spoons for that right then, and take a pass if I don’t. I fucking wish Bluesky had that. You know what else I fucking wish Bluesky had that Mastodon did? Polls. And longer posts. And the ability to edit your posts. And awesome third-party mobile clients like Tusky and Ivory.

“But Mastodon doesn’t have quote posts.” It fucking does now. Next.

Is Mastodon perfect? Fuck, no! Mastodon has a history of blindness to anti-black harassment, and you can find instances—whoops, pun not fucking intended—of every other kind of harassment on it. Mastodon is made of humans, and some humans are assholes. Sometimes the assholes are running Mastodon instances. Sometimes they’re running your instance and you don’t know they’re assholes, or they started out fine then became assholes. Sometimes they’re running blocklists and trying to convince you that people who aren’t assholes are the real assholes. Mastodon will piss you off.

But breaking news: Bluesky will also piss you off. It’s pissing you off right now! There’s a key difference, though, and get ready for fucking buzzwords like “federated” and “decentralized” because, like it or not, they fucking matter.

See, what makes Mastodon less worse than something like Twitter or Bluesky or, god forbid, fucking Threads, is that it has escape hatches. You may not like being told “go find another instance,” but you can go find another instance, and that is fucking spectacular. Twitter started going into the shitter even before Elon Seig Heil Musk painted a big “X” on it with his dick, but did you all just say “sucks, man,” and fuck off to another Twitter instance? No! Why not? Because there were no other fucking Twitter instances!

Yes, smartypants: technically, Bluesky’s “ATProto” supports federation, too. But it supports federation the way a rope supports a hanged man. I’m hoping the few attempts I’ve seen to pull it off work, I really am—Blacksky is promising, I’m watching Northsky closely. But getting rid of all reliance on servers run by Bluesky, the company, is brutally difficult. While defenders say that’s not by design, it’s a consequence of the way ATProto works, which means it is, definitionally, by fucking design.

So, look. I’m not saying leave Bluesky right now, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. What I’m saying is, start playing with Mastodon, whether it’s for the first time or again. Find an instance you can tolerate. (If you’re reading this, you’re probably a furry, and we have our own fucking directory.) Find a client that doesn’t suck. Figure out which of your friends are on Mastodon and follow them.

Because let’s be fucking honest: we need to stop pretending we’re not seeing fucking big red flashing warning signs on Bluesky. We can tell ourselves that it’s not going to enshittify, but we can also tell ourselves that we’re going to shit rainbows. There is only one single solitary social network whose design, in all its fucking fiddly, nerdy-ass glory, offers any protection from corporate enshittification. Sorry. One. It’s fucking Mastodon. Just fucking join fucking Mastodon. Jesus.

Join Mastodon.

Fuck.