mastodon

Croissant, a social media cross-posting app

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A screenshot of the Croissant app on an iPhone 13 Mini

If you cast your minds back around three years, there was just one major public-facing text-based social media platform: Twitter. Now that Twitter is called X, and only Nazis and grifters seem to be left there, we’ve ended up with some people on Bluesky, some on Threads and others on Mastodon. And so Croissant makes it easy to cross-post to all three at once.

Although I mainly post on Bluesky these days, I try to keep my accounts on Threads and Mastodon active as well.

Once you have linked your accounts to Croissant, you get a nice big space to write your post, and a character count. Whilst Threads doesn’t seem to impose a maximum character limit, it’s 300 characters on Bluesky, and 500 on most Mastodon instances.

Below, there are buttons to @mention someone (which includes a search tool on Mastodon and Bluesky), add hashtags and add images. What I particularly like about Croissant is that, when you add an image, there’s a really clear prompt to add an alt text description of the image. Draft posts can be saved, and you can set how visible the post will be on Mastodon and Threads (public, unlisted etc.). You can also add content warnings if posting to Mastodon.

Although Croissant is free to download, to unlock most features you’ll need to pay an annual subscription of £20. Also, it’s only available for iOS 18 and macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later; my elderly sixth generation iPad can only manage iOS 17 so I’m only able to run it on my iPhone.

Bridgy Fed – linking Bluesky with the Fediverse

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Screenshot of the Bridgy Fed home page

As I’ve mentioned a few times recently, Bluesky is my preferred social media site; I’ve quit Twitter/X and I’m not spending so much time on Mastodon or Threads at present. This means that I can’t easily follow users on those platforms – unless they’re using Bridgy Fed.

Bridgy Fed is a bridge between Bluesky’s Atmosphere network, and ActivityPub, which is used by Mastodon and other Fediverse clients, including Threads if you enable that option. I’ve set it up to work both ways with my Bluesky and Mastodon accounts, as follows:

ServiceMy Fediverse profile URLMy Bluesky profile URL
Mastodonhttps://mastodonapp.uk/@neilturner (original)https://bsky.app/profile/neilturner.mastodonapp.uk.ap.brid.gy (Bridged)
Blueskyhttps://fed.brid.gy/bsky/neilturner.me.uk (Bridged)https://bsky.app/profile/neilturner.me.uk (original)

How to enable Bridgy Fed

To enable it for your account, all you have to do is follow @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy on Mastodon (or another Fediverse service that supports ActivityPub), or follow @ap.brid.gy on Bluesky. It’s opt-in – Bridgy Fed will not create a bridge username for you unless you follow it.

It works reasonably well, within the various limits of each service. Bluesky, for example, has a 300 character limit for posts (or skeets) whereas Mastodon has a 500 character limit for posts (or toots). Indeed, some other Fediverse clients don’t have character limits at all. What this means is that any posts from the Fediverse that are bridged into Bluesky which are over 300 characters will get truncated by Bridgy Fed when cross-posted. You’ll get the first 260 characters or so, and then a link back to the original Fediverse post.

Re-skeeting and re-tooting will also work, if you’re re-skeeting or re-tooting someone else who uses Bridgy Fed, which is quite cool. Otherwise, Reskeets won’t be shared on the Fediverse and Retoots won’t be shared on Bluesky. Remember, Bridgy Fed is opt-in so people who haven’t consented to use it won’t find their skeets or toots being broadcast elsewhere.

As for Threads? Threads users who share their post to the Fediverse can be followed by Mastodon users, but it’s not fully integrated. I don’t think it’s possible, at the time of writing, for Threads users to follow other Fediverse users, and so it presumably isn’t possible to use Bridgy Fed with Threads. I haven’t tried however; whilst I post to Threads occasionally, I’m not a significant user.

Joining all the Brits and Brazilians on Bluesky

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The tl;dr version of this post is that I’m now considering Bluesky to be my primary public social media presence, with Mastodon a close second and Threads a distant third, and here are the links to my profiles:

Last month, Elon Musk basically tried to incite civil war in the UK on Twitter (which he calls ‘X’). This seems to have been the last straw for many Brits who were still active over there and who don’t consider themselves to be right-wing, and so there’s been another exodus. This time, Bluesky seems to have been the main destination, and so I’m now reconnecting with lots of people that I used to follow on Twitter before I basically quit almost two years ago in November 2022. Since then I’ve been mostly hanging out on Mastodon.

Now, I like Mastodon; especially its decentralised nature and that many servers are run by the community with donations. It’s also got some good and mature third-party clients like Ivory, which I use. But it still feels like a niche social network that attracts a more technical audience. And it’s notable that, given the choice between Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads, most Brits leaving Twitter haven’t chosen Mastodon.

The Brazilian Twitter exodus

Over the past couple of days, there’s been another mass exodus from Twitter, this time in Brazil. However, this is because Twitter is now blocked in Brazil. In a nutshell: Brazil’s previous right-wing president, Jair Balsonaro, was ousted in an election; there was an attempted coup by his supporters, and then a Brazilian Supreme Court judge demanded that Twitter suspend the accounts of those suspected of being involved in the coup whilst they were under investigation. Instead of complying, or even challenging the court order, Elon Musk closed Twitter’s office in Brazil and sacked its staff. So, the supreme court judge gave Twitter an ultimatum to appoint a representative in Brazil; Twitter refused, and so it’s now blocked. As in, the whole web site is inaccessible from within Brazil.

Consequently, Twitter users in Brazil have been looking for a new home, and most seem to have landed on Bluesky (although some have gone to Mastodon too).

If these statistics from Statista are right, then Brazil made up the sixth biggest audience on Twitter, just behind the UK. Which means that Elon has alienated two of his top ten biggest markets in the space of a month.

Oh, and it gets worse. It turns out that Brazil was home to many large fan accounts on Twitter; many of these posted in English and so it wasn’t immediately obvious that they were based there. So they’re gone from Twitter too. At this rate, Twitter is going to become like the alt-right social network Gab, just with some brands wondering where all their engagement has gone.

Galaxy brain

Before his purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk had a reputation for being a forward-thinking successful entrepreneur. Tesla was a pioneer in all-electric cars, SpaceX has contracts with NASA, and his Starlink network allowed people living in remote areas to access satellite broadband internet.

But he’s completely ruined Twitter. I’m not sure whether it’s some kind of galaxy-brained scheme that mere mortals like myself are unable to comprehend, or whether he’s actually not that intelligent but has lots of money to throw around to see what sticks. Or somewhere in the middle. Either way, he seems to keep making unforced errors that seems to make no kind of sense business-wise. It’s worth noting that, despite being probably one of the world’s richest people, he took on a lot of debt to buy Twitter, and those loans will be accruing interest. It can’t be long before Twitter goes bankrupt, can it?

As for my Twitter profile? It still exists, mainly so that I don’t lose my username. But my profile is private, and I’ve deleted my avatar and background. I haven’t had the Twitter app on my phone for over 18 months now.

Business models

My only worry about Bluesky is its business model. In the long term, how is it going to make money? Are we going to start to see adverts, like on most other social media? Will there be a premium tier?

On Mastodon, I pay small monthly contributions via Patreon and Ko-Fi to the overall project and server owner respectively, and that suits me well. And Threads is part of Meta. I’m assuming Blueksy is backed by venture capital money, but at some point it’s got to be able to make money on its own terms. I just hope it’s done in a way that won’t massively alienate its user base.

Being more or less social

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A screenshot of my profile on the Bluesky social network.

Good grief, has it really been almost 6 months since my last blog post?

I mostly dropped by to link out to a couple of additional social media profiles that you can follow, should you wish to. I appreciate that many people are leaving Twitter/X/whatever Elon Musk decides it’s called this week, and not everyone is leaving in the same direction.

Firstly, I’ve just signed up to Bluesky. It’s invite only at the moment, so I doff my cap to a work colleague who gave me her first invite. I’ve just made the one post there and I’ll see how I get on with it.

I managed to – eventually – get my account verified there, which is how I show as ‘@neilturner.me.uk’ and not a bsky.social address. It should have been straightforward, but over the years my DNS settings have seemingly got out of sync, and this has required some fixing. Hopefully everything works now.

And I’m on Meta’s Threads, which I joined on launch day back in August. Again, I’ve just made the one post there. It doesn’t look like many people that I followed on Instagram are active on Threads – my feed seems to basically be the same 5 people.

My primary social media presence is still on Mastodon. So, if you want to hear from me in between my massive gaps in blogging, that’s probably your best bet. I joined Mastodon back in November 2022, and I feel most-settled there.

Perhaps if Bluesky and/or Threads open up a bit more, I might cross-post things, but we’ll see.

WordPress in the Fediverse

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A screenshot of the settings page for the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress

If I’ve set up everything correctly, then you should be able to subscribe to this blog in your favourite Fediverse app, such as Mastodon, by following @nrturner@neilturner.me.uk .

You’ll need to install the ActivityPub plugin, and then it should just work where your fediverse username is @your-wordpress-username@your-domain.tld. If you’ve used a plugin to disable author archives, such as Yoast’s SEO plugin, you’ll need to re-enable it for this to work.

I found this guide particularly useful, as it links to Webfinger to test that you’ve set it up correctly.

(Update: since this post was written almost 12 months ago, the ActivityPub plugin has been formally adopted by Automattic and so enjoys wider support)

Good intentions and Mastodon

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Screenshot of my Mastodon profile

Well, here was me promising to blog here more regularly, and then completely ignoring the blog for 5 months. Go me?

The main purpose of this blog post is to include a link to my Mastodon profile. As I write this, Elon Musk has taken over Twitter and looks to be unleashing his libertarian hellscape vision very quickly. Whilst I don’t intend to leave Twitter, I’ve decided to keep my options open and have set myself up on Mastodon.lol, which is an LGBTQ+-friendly server that doesn’t integrate with any servers that host fascists.

Whilst we’ve been here before with Ello, App.net, Google+, Clubhouse and innumerable other sites that have tried to compete with Twitter and failed, Mastodon seems to be the most popular ‘non-fascsist site’. Good, lord, what a thing to have to type.

We’ll see what happens, eh?