Threads have been gaining traction recently and I’m actually enjoying the atmosphere there. However it’s clearly on a growth phase where they don’t show any ads or paid content. This obviously won’t last, so I’m wondering if there’s a platform which I could recommend?
I tried Mastodon a couple of years ago but it felt a bit too technical even for me, so I’m a bit hesitant to explore that. Thanks for any input and my apologies if this has been asked too many times already.
Mastodon has definitely improved, but more to the point, there’s really nothing else. Particularly not anything that anyone is using. Unless you widen your definition to include Bluesky.
Honestly, I’d say that Mastodon’s perceived complexity in the past was kind of an illusion anyway. The problem of choosing a server was really made out to be this huge hurdle, when in fact it was no big deal at all; I was a member of several different servers over time, and I didn’t feel like my experience was substantially different on any of them. Just join one that seems interesting or is near you or whatever, and you’ll be fine. After that, it operates pretty much the same as Twitter did. Following people on other servers can be a little bit trickier on web, but in the app it’s pretty seamless.
One thing that’s really clunky is checking the list of followers and followed accounts: depending on which instance is each account, these lists are either incomplete or empty. I don’t know if I do something wrong, but I was trying to get up to speed with Mastodon by discovering interesting accounts to follow- which is not trivial - and found the aforementioned problem. I use a third party app and various web front ends, including the “official” ones (you are forced to when you look for the list of followed/followers)
I wish these un-federated things would do API calls to get the full data. I think they just recently started doing this with replies.