Social Media in 2024

I joined Twitter in 2007. I used it until 2019 when I deleted my account. I made some friends, had some laughs, and generally didn’t take too much of it too seriously. I’m glad I left when I did, because the change of ownership changed things irrevocably. If I hadn’t quit then, I definitely would have in 2022.

I’ve been on the fediverse for two years now. I’ve been running my own little instance of GoToSocial, a small Golang application that implements ActivityPub, the protocol used by Mastodon and other fediverse tools. I’m currently following 78 people, and 54 people are following me back. My timeline is not too busy, as I’ve been pretty intentional about who to follow.

I’ve been on Bluesky for a little over a year. I follow 48 people there, and 48 people follow me. Even with this small number of poeple, my timeline is overwhelming. Hundreds of new messages every day, as poeple repost stuff. I was less intentional about who to follow, initially. I really should stop following a few folks, as there are a few high-volume posters and re-posters that constitute the bulk of the messages I see.

The folks on the Fediverse really seem to like complaining about Bluesky. And the folks on Bluesky really seem to like complaining about the Fediverse. It would be comical, if it wasn’t quite so tiresome.

There have been a lot of words published by people a lot smarter, and more involved, than me on the relative merits and drawbacks of both the Fediverse and Bluesky. I don’t have super strong opinions about these things, and am largely uninterested in discussing the implementation choices, social constructs, or governance concerns.

Which do I prefer? Which do I recommend? I actually don’t have a preference here.

I like the concepts driving the Fediverse: open, standards-based protocols and a plurality of tools that permit experimentation. Federation and de-federation are good ideas, if sometimes a little coarsely applied. I like owning my own data, and running my own instance, to control what I do and what happens. It’s not as polished as Bluesky, in many ways, but it’s more than good enough to facilitate useful communication with people. It was through the Fediverse that I learned about the job opening to which I applied that got me where I am employed today!

I like the concepts driving Bluesky, too: composable moderation, starter packs of people to follow, custom feed algorithms, and more. Bluesky is still a centralized solution, which is the big complaint many in the Fediverse have. The control of Bluesky, and the decisions around what to do to monetize it, are in the hands of a few people. Currently those people are on the up-and-up, and all indications are that they’re working hard to build something that will resist hostile internal activities should a new controlling body get involved.

The more I use both networks, and the more I think about what I have to say, the less I really care about either. I don’t really have a need to communicate with the whole world at the push of a button. I’ve had this blog for a quarter century, and I contributed for a while to TechCrunch, so the novelty of wide reach has long worn off for me. Bluesky is far too busy for me to feel motivated to engage. By the time I load up my feed, any interesting post to which I may want to contribute already has enough comments that I’m not adding anything to the conversation.

I dislike scrolling through long comment threads, each entry less than 500 words. Respondents break up their thoughts, sub-threads break out which complicate the reading flow, and discussion is either super in-depth or extremely superficial. Because folks are reading at different times, using differnet client software, all threads get bogged down with many people saying the same things. It’s all just very taxing to me.

Some people really want “engagement”. Some folks want news. Some folks want to be connected. All of these are perfectly valid ways to use modern social media. For myself, I’ve been treating all social media as kind of a giant cocktail party: there are far more people than I’ll ever have time or energy to connect with, so I choose to have a small chat with one person, overhear an interesting comment, move on to a different chat with a different person, and keep flowing through the crowd.

I am acutely aware of the parasocial nature of many relationships on social media. I don’t actually know many of the people with which I might be interacting. Their online persona may not be their true self. I treat many of these interactions as very superficial, or even transactional.

And of course, humans are wildly variable creatures with different conversational styles, senses of humor, and personal motivations. There’s no shortage of trolls and bad actors on all social media platforms: people looking just to disrupt or anger, because the cost of doing so is so small. This is one of the reasons I’m so picky about who to follow. I don’t have time or interest in dealing with trolls or spam (one of the reasons this blog long ago stopped accepting comments), so keeping conversations to people with whom I have a modicum of a real relationship keeps things more civil and more useful to me.

For now, I’ll keep casually participating in both the Fediverse and Bluesky. If either venue gets too loud, or the population gets too annoying, I’ll simply leave.