My Totally Unbiased Ranking of Five Social Media Platforms

Mar 18, 2024 | About 9 min reading time

I mentioned in my last post that I planned to try out some different social media platforms due to the Tumblr CEO going full mask-off as a raging transmisogynist.

This is a big deal, since I've been on Tumblr for nearly a decade now, and while I've considered leaving before, they've never fucked up quite badly enough to make me want to leave. They did delete my blog a while back with no warning and then quickly gave it back, but even that wasn't enough to make me leave.

I never did get an explanation for that. The only thing I can think of is that apparently a lot of BIPOC were getting their blogs randomly nuked at the time and I had been more open than usual about reconnecting to my Indigenous heritage on that blog...

But eventually, Tumblr went too far with their fuck-ups:

• They wrongfully marked my partner's blog as mature (she is a trans woman), but when I posted about it, the @humans account quickly messaged me to help, and by the time they messaged, the blog was unflagged for some reason, so me and my partner moved on.
• A month later, my partner's blog was wrongfully marked as mature again. I made another frustrated post, with a screenshot of my DMs from the @humans account attached as proof this had already happened before, because I wanted evidence of the situation. The @humans account messaged me telling me, in a passive aggressive way, to not post about this and to simply message them instead. I apologized despite feeling quite suspicious of them at this point, and the blog was unflagged.
• A popular transfem blogger by the username predstrogen had her blog nuked on Tumblr, and the Tumblr CEO decided to publicly respond to the asks he was getting from confused users, which immediately made everything worse because his answer was just... so bad. He responded to criticism by privately messaging transfem users to argue with them, reblogging posts from and following TERFs, and following predstrogen onto Twitter to not only harass her, but to list the usernames of sideblogs she had that were not linked to her main blog (so, revealing private information without her consent), in order to argue that her sideblogs having NSFW URLs was somehow a reason to suspend her.
• He also vaguely threatened legal action and getting the FBI involved over predstrogen making a laughably cartoonish "threat of violence" against him (search up "car hammer explosion" on Tumblr, there are now so many memes about it).
• They also decided to partner with AI companies, and made choosing to not let your posts be used for AI an opt-out system, rather than opt-in. Also, the scrape already took place before the opt-out system, and included private blogs and people's messages! So who knows if the AI companies will even respect it!

This and the rampant toxicity on Tumblr (you don't want to know how many anons I've gotten telling me to kill myself, and I'm not even a popular blogger) combined finally pushed me to decide once and for all that I'm, at the very least, going to move my main social media presence off of Tumblr.

So, who are the contenders for my new social media platform of choice?

Out of all the options, Mastodon is the one I have the most experience with. I moved from Twitter to there in November of 2022 and never looked back (technically, I do still have a Twitter account, but it's gathering dust as we speak). Unfortunately, I also eventually forgot it existed a little, so I haven't used it consistently in quite a bit.

• Decentralized and open-source, which means I can find an instance that suits my specific needs (and I have, in the form of mastodon.art), and I could also make my own (but I won't)
• Since instances are generally small, I can trust the moderators of my instance to moderate other instances that are harmful (hate speech, etc.), and to moderate bad actors or toxic folks fast (so fast, in one instance, that I submitted a report about someone being ableist towards me and got a response from my instance admin within a minute letting me know she'd banned them from our instance)
• Engagement is pretty high, and it's usually actual engagement, not bots
• Adding alt-text to images is highly encouraged, and if your image lacks alt-text, people often won't boost it - which resulted into me getting into the habit of adding alt-text on other platforms, too, not just Mastodon
• You can ask for help if you can't think of alt-text for an image and other people will suggest stuff for you!
• Lots of furries
• Mutual aid posts do well on many instances (though some instances are weird about them or will report them, unfortunately)
• Tumblr-style discourse isn't really a thing, though there is still drama
• No "quote-tweets" or anything similar - if you want to add your two cents, you'll have to reply directly

• Not very much fandom presence
• Age ranges seem to tend to skew higher, which might be an issue if you're a younger person and want to socialize with people who are mostly your age
• There is still discourse, the major one I've seen being that a Black user made a blocklist of instances he'd received racist harassment from or that he didn't think were safe and those instances... instantly proved him right. My instance gets flack as well because it sided with the Black user and happens to be relatively large, so if another instance is blocked by it, that limits their reach. But, like... maybe instances that don't deal with racism well (or are run by racist admins) should have their reach limited... just a thought...

I joined this platform more recently, mostly because my partner likes it a lot.

• Alt-text on images is encouraged
• User-created feeds that you can bookmark and follow
• User-created blocklists that you can subscribe to
• Looks pretty good for artists and creators, honestly
• One of the bigger, less niche sites
• You can set your website to be your handle (so for instance, instead of my handle being @punkwasp.bsky.social, it's @punkwasp.neocities.org)

• Feels a little more... corporate, compared to other alternatives
• I've seen posts with clearly non-sexual nudity (ex. a butt) get marked as pornography by moderation
• Haven't seen anything about their plans to monetize the site yet, which makes me a little worried because a site of that size HAS to be expensive to run
• One of their selling points was that they would eventually be a decentralized platform and be able to connect to the Fediverse - still no word on that yet, though, and I believe to run your own instance you have to get approval from them

I joined this one in December 2023, back when there was a big issue with funding, and I'm happy to see it seems to be doing much better now!

• Communities for different interests, so you can reblog stuff like your art to those communities to get it seen by more people
• Commenting on stuff you like is pretty common!
• Very fandom-focused
• I haven't seen any major discourse yet (fingers crossed)
• Messaging system exists
• You can put cool little badges on your profile
• NSFW content is fully allowed
• Blacklist and blocking system is pretty good
• There were a lot of worries about funding when I first joined, but since the end-of-year fundraiser they raised enough to stay online until summer of 2024, and interestingly, unlike previous times fundraisers took place, the site is continuing to raise a bit more each month (they have a monthly progress bar showing how close they are to covering operating costs for the month)
• Premium exists, and you can pay for features you want individually (avatar frames, ability to upload multiple avatars, image upload size doubled from 2MB to 4MB), plus you can add a one-time or recurring donation
• You can edit a post, and those edits will be visible on reblogs too.
• No way to reblog a post with commentary - you have to comment on the post, which I honestly prefer.
• No AI allowed

• Because they allow NSFW, they have to use a payment processor that charges them higher fees - which makes me a little more concerned about long-term viability of the platform
• Posting system can be a little weird, and making image posts is somewhat janky
• I've seen a lot more "fiction doesn't affect reality" types on here, and while blocking is a great solution to that, Pillowfort's site culture seems to be very against DNIs/BYFs. Which isn't a bad thing, those do definitely have their issues, but for my issue of wanting to stay far, far away from those types of people, it introduces an additional issue, because it's harder for me to check before following a person without digging through their profile (and I also don't want to do that). People don't seem to take blocking personally, but I am a little worried about befriending someone, then realizing they're that type and having to block them and then... feeling bad that they won't know why they got blocked. My solution so far has been to make a "Fort brochure" (a post listing some info about my "fort" or blog) which is then linked to in my profile and mentions that I try to block and not interact with those types. Hopefully it helps...
• No way to add alt-text to images that I've seen.

This is the most recent platform I've joined, and I had high hopes for it, but...

• You can use HTML, CSS, and markdown in posts! Which leads to you being able to do some pretty neat things, often referred to as "CSS crimes".
• You can add links to your profile and customize their visibility to be only visible to people you follow, or to your followers, or to everyone.
• You can make pinned posts.
• You can send people asks, including anonymous ones
• You can make multiple pages, which you can follow and comment from, and you can change your primary page
• People make userstyles and userscripts to customize the site, which is pretty cool
• You can bookmark tags and have a feed of tags you've bookmarked

• Apparently tag capitalization is determined by... the way the first person to use the tag capitalized it?
• Platform is losing money at a rate of anywhere from $10k to $40k USD each month (I believe there was only one month that they made net profit, and that was one of the Twitter exoduses)
• Staff have created a sort of weird, parasocial relationship with their users, to the point where criticizing them often gets you yelled at
• A member of staff bragged at one point about how Cloudflare forgot to start billing them for hosting after a free year of services they got and how they essentially cost Cloudflare money by never mentioning this... which is wildly unprofessional and also... I don't think they realize that Cloudflare can absolutely come after them for that money. Like they still owe Cloudflare money. They might even be in legal trouble for bragging publicly about how they never reached out to Cloudflare to correct this. Dear lord.
• Staff pays themselves salaries of $94k USD a year (adjusted from initial salaries of $87k USD a year, to account for cost of living increases). There are four staff. This adds up to $376k a year, or a bit over $31k a month, just spent on their salaries. They justify this by saying that the standard salary for their job titles is much higher, but... that doesn't exactly apply to a startup that is hemorhaging tens of thousands of dollars each month.
• The above is while users who make much less than staff does talk about putting themselves in a bad spot financially in order to pay for Cohost Plus and try to help staff keep the website afloat.
• Staff seems to refuse to accept any sort of volunteer labour.
• There is only one moderator for a site of currently 30k active users, meaning many reports haven't been responded to for weeks.
• To delete your account, you have to email support and wait for them to get around to it.
• Staff has repeatedly prioritized implementing features that make no difference in the financials of the site (asks, for instance), over features that would bring in revenue (eggbux, which would be a subscription service similar to Patreon or Ko-fi)
• Staff says they want to be transparent about financials, but then goes months between financial updates and reports financials in such a weird, inconsistent, confusing way that it's hard to actually get a clear picture of the financial situation
• Honestly just read this and this because this person explains the issues much better than I could

I joined this one around when I joined Mastodon, and honestly, I have a... pretty strong bias towards it.

• Accepts NSFW art
• Any NSFW or gore art needs to be behind a NSFW or gore filter, as well as having a minimum of three descriptive CWs so people know what it is before they click
• No AI allowed
• There's a creator's spoiler, for when your art isn't NSFW or gore but you feel like it should be filtered anyways - you also need to add a minimum of three descriptive CWs for this
• Communities are a thing
• You can make commission posts
• You can customize your profile quite a bit
• They've got a feature similar to Ko-fi and Patreon rolling out soon, called Instar (commissions, shops, tipping, etc.)
• Very transparent about financials
• They have a volunteer team, and when paid positions open, people on the volunteer team or from within the company are given preference, which is cool
• No sexualized art of minors or of "dubcon/noncon" allowed
• You can customize your page
• Ability to blacklist certain tags
• It's clear that everyone involved in running the platform has a lot of passion for it

• Technical issues sometimes, like the home feed outage
• Some people struggle a lot with finding descriptive and not-redundant CWs to put on their art
• No way to add alt-text yet that I know of

So if I had to rank these sites (in order of most liked to least liked, top to bottom):

1. InkBlot Art
2. Mastodon
3. Pillowfort
4. Bluesky
5. Cohost

Really, the only one I flat-out dislike at the moment is Cohost, and it's more because of how it's being managed, because I really like everything else about the site. You know when you see something and you just know it could have been amazing if the people running it had made better decisions? That's how I feel about Cohost, which is why I dislike it so strongly. I want to see it succeed, but I don't trust the people running it to actually make that happen.

I could have also included Spacehey, but honestly, I haven't used it enough because some of the vibes from people on there are just... off. That's the best way I can explain it.