Twitter's open source replacements of the future

So with the immense amount of talk about yeeting away from twitter because of ElonMusk I have finally taken the time to look into some of the other cool alternatives that exist.

A couple cool ones are {{< fa fa="fab fa-mastodon" >}}Mastadon and Pixelfed.

Mastadon is a direct replacement for Twitter

It has Favourites(Likes) and Boosts(Retweets), Polls, Unlisted and Follower only posts, Built in drawing... for some reason and it even has it's own "tweetdeck"

Mastadon is Open Source and Federated and Decentralised. A lot of Decentralised things in 2022 use Crypto which really isn't a great experience, Mastodon servers just run on the normal internet without any ties to Crypto or NFTs which means no hexagonal profiles.

Even though it is Decentralised you can access all other communities from whatever instance you sign up on.

Mastodon's official video explaining the platform very clearly and cutely: {{< fa fa="fab fa-youtube" >}}

Learn more about mastodon and see a list of different communities here: joinmastodon.org

You can sign up for the official instance here: mstdn.social

Pixelfed; Instagram but with Twitter's features

Next we have Pixelfed which is more like a mix of Twitter and Instagram with the same concepts as Mastadon, federated, open source and decentralised, But with a focus on Photos and images even providing an option to choose the license you want for your images when you post them.

Pixelfed is a lot less used then Mastadon but it is still a very nice platform if your primary content is images. Both Mastadon and Pixelfed can communicate with each other because they use the same protocol so you can follow Mastadon accounts on Pixelfed and vice versa.

Learn more about mastodon and see a list of different communities here: pixelfed.org

You can sign up for the official instance[here: pixelfed.social

Extras

an amazing video explaining Distributed social media and federation: {{< fa fa="fab fa-youtube" >}}

links to my own profiles that I made while researching these platforms:

{{< fa fa="fab fa-mastodon" >}}Mastodon

Pixelfed

The Twitter thread

This post actually stared out as a Twitter thread I made, it is my longest Twitter thread to date and I wrote it over a couple hours while I was looking into these platforms for myself.

_{For some reason while converting this post for my website I made major changes to my site; Added AwesomeFont icons, Created 4 custom HUGO short codes, Fixed the social icons in the bottom left, modified how the template embeds links for socials so I can verify that I own this website on Mastodon. I tend to go a little overboard I guess}

This is a Lottie image

What is the difference?

The 640x640 GIF image is 2.53MB while Lottie image is ajust a 124KB .json file which when served with gzip it becomes only 13KB and even better when served with zstd(Speed 9) becomes only 9KB. That is a massive saving for a detailed and smooth animation.

Of course you can't really converting a normal gif to a Lottie because it is on the most basic level an animated svg file it is still a very valuable resource for having animated vectors on a website.

Another thing you can do with this file format is easilty animate it based on the scroll of a website, have the animation only play once, have it play at different speeds

Easy customisation

The official website has a very simple and easy tool to modify the Lottie's colours to fit your website better, here is one I changed to be sligthly closer to this website's colours: