The news that Elon Musk may be in the process of essentially gaining outright control of Twitter has, unsurprisingly, led to a lot of uncertainty by Twitter users as to whether the platform has any medium-term viability.
I could write thousands of words trying to explain the many issues with social media platforms, and Twitter specifically. They act as (mostly) non-discriminatory amplifiers, so for every interesting idea, concept or thought, there are dozens of cockamamie, confused, deceitful or anti-social ideas that also get amplified. No matter how bizarre and warped your worldview may be, you will be able to find somebody or a support group that will tell you that you are not crazy, the Earth is flat, the Moon is made of cheese, and Donald Trump is still the President and all of the people in the White House are androids. Or some such nonsense.
Elon Musk has a track record of making stupid and incendiary comments on social media, and he has a well-documented bullying and capricious nature. Many Twitter users are justifiably concerned that he intends to indulge fascists and assholes on Twitter in future.
The big question that may Twitter users are asking is; if I am not going to use Twitter, which social media platform shall I use? Many Twitter users have already abandoned Facebook for similar reasons, so they are reluctant to move back to that platform.
I migrated to a next-gen social media network 4 years ago when I decided to stop using Facebook. The network is counter.social.
The history of counter.social is complicated. It is a social network built on Mastodon, which was created as an open-source federated social media platform. The Big Idea behind Mastodon was to move away from a single monolithic instance of a social network, which was deemed to be vulnerable to hacking and subversion, and move to towards a collection of federated instances. This would allow (for example) Mastodon instances to be created for specific niches like gaming, and for those instances to be federated, or possibly not federated, instead existing as stand-alone instances.
Because of a policy decision by the founder of counter.social that in order to prevent bots, trolls and disinformation agents from gaining a foothold on the site, he would not allow users from several countries, including Russia and China, Counter.social was “voted off the island” by Mastodon not long after it started, being banned from federating with other Mastodon networks. That ban exists to this day, although counter.social is still based on Mastodon. So if you are trying to find counter.social from elsewhere on Mastodon, you will probably fail. However, the founder has added a lot of additional functions not normally found on Mastodon instances, such as media feeds, feeds from police and fire departments, and Virtual Reality spaces.
Access to counter.social is via either a browser, or (for smaller devices) any client that supports Mastodon. For my Android devices, I use Tusky. I also have a paid membership, which provides superior functionality. I am also additionally donating money to help the founder to improve the network and keep it running.
Counter.social is not Twitter. The length of postings is however longer, at 480 bytes, which gives more room for expression. The UI is very different. Some folks will find there is a learning curve.
Right now, a large number of people are setting up counter.social accounts as a hedge against Twitter becoming unattractive if it changes ownership. I have an account over there under the ID of rupertramsgate.