Table of contents
Open Table of contents
Goal
I don’t like social networks, and I’ve never used them in my life. However, I have some need to post my thoughts and contact with people.
Since Software Development, and Cybersecurity, and databases are my the main interests, it limits the selection circle.
I want to write some thoughts, speak with other people and avoid AI generated content, marketing, and clickbait.
Social networks in 2026
While the obvious choice would be X for developers, the amount of AI generated content, marketing, and clickbait is overwhelming.
Also, I understand the idea of paying subscriptions, but not in a pay-to-win model. You pay, and you get a better reach, identical to Pay-To-Win in games, that is not for me.
Amount of advertisements is also overwhelming, I’d say it’s much more than I’d tolerate.
Am I ready to pay? Maybe. But the price should be reasonable and with no pay-to-win model.
Not options for me
Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Threads, and similar platforms are not for me.
The reasons are mine, subjective, and personal:
- I don’t want to have a doom-scrolling across unlimited short videos, memes, and AI generated content.
- Similar point for overwhelming amount of images
- I want to have some place where technical people communicate, ideally not “influencers” and “content creators”, but people who are interested in the same topics as I am.
Mastodon
I’ve tried Mastodon a couple of times, it’s really nice. It gives reasonably good experience, but there are some catches.
- Fediverse is not ideally implemented
- History of posts from other instances is not available, I need to go to another instance to see them
- To be visible on other instances, I need to follow them, and they need to follow me back
- Sometimes caching makes posts inconsistent between instances
- Instances may have different configurations that leads to different user experience, and inconsistent experience across instances
- Clients are much laggier that for other services, web interface is only reliable option
- Experience of reading posts is different between clients and web interface
After experiencing significant amount of issues and limitations for searching the right instance, it did not feel comfortable for me.
And of the most interesting limitations I couldn’t explain, is that Mastodon claims to be a decentralized social network, but I did not own my own profile. If I decide to switch to another instance, I will lose my ID.
It means, I don’t choose a decentralized instance, I choose a centralized instance that is part of a decentralized network.
It could be simply fixed by supporting DNS records for user profiles, and assigning an “email-like” ID to each user. Users would have a chance to migrate between instances without losing their ID.
Bluesky
Bluesky looks promising, and an initial idea was nice, but the reaching part is tricky. After X and Mastodon in feels silent, maybe not entirely, but not as warm as Mastodon.
And tricky, not clear at first, Feeds feature and decentralization.
Anyway, I chose to use Bluesky, and I will see how it goes. I hope to see you there 👋
Updates
Update 2026-08-31
I have tried to use BlueSky for a couple of days. It was surprising how concentrated it was with politics and weirdly enough, screenshots from X.
Since the most of the people use X, it looks like BlueSky contains reposts from X.
I’ll try to use X in parallel with BlueSky, and give a chance to win only by one of them.