It’s been a few weeks since I last posted on social media and there have been developments. Twitter is now officially gone, replaced with X. For some reason, the symbolism of this move seems to have convinced a lot of people that the old Twitter is gone in a way the last several months of changes haven’t. I’ve noticed a definite falloff in engagement there, with some fresh high profile defections, like John Scalzi’s.
The question remains of course: where to go?
Threads got some updates this week. It introduced the much needed Followed tab, providing a bare minimum of usability. That said, I personally still badly need a web version, or at least something I can use on a PC, before it’s going to get a lot of use from me. And I’ve noticed that few of my follows are currently posting there, which matches the news that most of the people who signed up for it have stopped using it, at least for now.
I mentioned in the last post that I was on the waiting list for Bluesky, and someone generously sent an invite code. After a couple of weeks there, I can say it’s a pleasant playful environment, although the main reason may be its current exclusivity. A couple of weeks ago someone managed to create an account with a racial slur in the name, and there was a lot of dissatisfaction with the response, a harbinger I suspect of what will happen when the service opens up to the general public.
(By the way, I have an invite code available if anyone is interested. Looks like we’re getting one a week now. If you’re a regular or periodic conversation partner and interested, DM me on X / Twitter or Mastodon, or drop me an email.)
There’s also been some recent soul searching in the Mastodon community, about why many people seem to give up on the service. Mastodon, and the overall Fediverse, remain my preferred solutions, but they’re definitely not without issues, so I’m glad to see this. Some of it is about the current community there, which can be unwelcoming to newcomers who don’t follow the expected norms. (I personally haven’t encountered this, but I’m fairly small fry.)
But the bigger issue I hear from most people is the difficulty in signing up and finding people. There have been improvements in recent months, and reportedly big ones coming in the next major release, but I wonder if they’re happening fast enough given the competition. Still, in terms of overall feature set, Mastodon remains far ahead of either Bluesky or Threads, for now.
Mastodon does eschew an algorithm for your personal timeline. The idea being that you get to choose what you’re going to see. Many people love this, but others have complained about the tediousness of wading through all the posts from those they’re following. Mastodon does have lists, which can help, but lists only isolate people, not the posts from those people you’re most interested in.
So you may follow someone for their thoughts about a particular topic, but you have to wade through all their other posts about their garden, dentist visit, job advertisements, politics, live commentary on the show they’re watching, etc. Not that some of this isn’t interesting or entertaining at times, but collectively it puts a burden on getting at the information we’re most interested in.
Hashtags have a problem on the other side, isolating posts but not users. So if I want to see what people are saying about consciousness, I can follow the #consciousness tag, and see what’s out there. However, these aren’t just the posts from people I follow, but anyone anywhere who has an opinion on the subject, with the result that much of it is dross.
That’s largely why the algorithms were introduced in social media to begin with, to put the stuff we’re really interested in in front of us, and hide the rest. The problem is, as currently implemented, they only partially serve the interests of the user, often showing things the service wants us to see rather than what we want to see. It doesn’t help that they’re opaque. The result is that many people with large numbers of followers on Facebook and similar platforms, can’t reach those followers anymore. (At least without paying to advertise to them.)
Bluesky is trying to improve on this situation, offering a choice of algorithms, and the tools to construct your own. However, building your own is currently a fairly technical endeavor, requiring coding abilities and somewhere to host the feed. They’ve indicated they eventually hope to give non-technical users the ability to do it, but it’s not there yet.
I like the way the Bluesky people are thinking on this. It reminds me of something Jack Dorsey once said, that he regretted focusing on trying to curate content for Twitter users, rather than giving them the tools to curate for themselves. And this gets to my personal beef with social media, all of it, including Mastodon. It doesn’t do enough to allow us to do our own curation.
What am I talking about here? A robust search capability, and the ability to save that search. This is a feature my favorite RSS aggregator, InoReader, provides, and I love it. I used to use it to curate Twitter feeds. But having it in the service itself would have been a major boon. Ideally, we could even be allowed to name and publish complex searches that others could then subscribe to. There are admittedly scaling issues associated with this, which InoReader appears to solve by having the results built in the background.
I’d actually pay for this capability. (In fact I do for InoReader; it’s a premium feature.) But it could also be a goldmine for advertisers, who often want to target their audience as tightly as possible. The search terms are telling them exactly what I’m interested in. Google makes a lot of money with this model.
Will Bluesky ever give us something along these lines? We can only hope. I also hope that their AT federation protocol (which in some ways sounds superior to ActivityPub) eventually gets incorporated in the Fediverse. But only time will tell.
Anyway, I wanted to get that off my chest. Any thoughts about it? Or on any of the changes underway?
SelfAwarePatterns 
You are still my blue canary in the outlet by the coal mine. [how many references there?]. I’m still exclusively on Twitter (still have the blue bird on the app, so still twitter).
I’ll switch when something else emerges as the next thing, but the features you describe are definitely what I’m looking for (follow specific people, ideally w/ ability to screen out cat pics, etc.).
Actually, maybe I’m waiting for someone to leverage ChatGPT to do that for me. Across multiple accounts?
*
[still wish I could have got more “still”s in there]
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The bird app on my phone became the X app over the weekend. Unless you’re running an old version of iOS (pre ver 15), you’ll see it soon. Although everything else pretty much seems the same, for now.
But you’re probably being the smart one. I’m not sure how much all this playing around in different platforms is really helping me.
And this canary might have just inhaled some fumes. The main sysadmin of my Mastodon instance revealed a little while ago that he’s throwing in the towel due to all the infighting in the Fediverse. He’s supposed to hand the instance off to a successor, but I just reserved my preferred account name at the big mastodon.social instance, just in case.
Right now I still think the race is Threads to lose, unfortunately. If they can get minimal functionality in place and their EU issues straight, they’ll have all the advantages that matter. Doesn’t mean they won’t screw it up. I just hope they keep to their commitment to integrate with the Fediverse.
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[I spoke too soon. The logo on the app is now X. Hate it.]
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Yeah, that seems to be the consensus. John Scalzi actually deleted the app from his phone rather than see it.
I also heard dark mode will soon be be the default and dim mode will be removed. I’ve had mine set to dim mode for years (when it was the darkest mode available), so I don’t mind. Reportedly Musk announced he wanted to do away with light mode too, but was apparently convinced by the responses to keep it as an option.
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What is it you want? Regarding the various platforms?
I disengaged with Twitter years ago. Now, I only have 3 platforms. Goodreads (2006); FB (2007), & WordPress (2019).
Wordpress is best. But, that is because they are not as commercial as the others. Yet.
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If you understand the business model (keep you on the platform) – curation is possible. Via SEO, tags and categories.
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What is it you want? Pick the platform that most meets your need/want. They are different. And there is no perfect platform.
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I like WordPress. However, that may change. I like face-to-face communication best.
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For me, it’s exposure to ideas and intelligent conversation about those ideas. WordPress does work pretty well for that. I’d be totally happy if everyone used it, or just went back to blogs in general. But a lot of the people with interesting ideas post on Twitter (or did historically). So in the end, I’m going to go where those people are. Which for the immediate future, probably means being in multiple places.
I’ve actually tried to think of a way to make the old blogsophere as easy to use as many of these social networks, because I think the difference in ease is its Achilles heel. It’s why I’d really like to see something like the Fediverse take off. Imagine WordPress and many other services being interoperable, where you could interact with those people on other services from right here? Unfortunately a federated system is itself more difficult to use than a straight centralized one like X/Twitter, Threads, or even the WordPress Reader system.
I can take or leave face to face communication. Although I’m sure if I went long enough without it, I’d end up craving it.
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I tried Twitter years ago and couldn’t really get into it. I don’t do Facebook so I’m pretty much off the major platforms.
Do you have any thoughts on WTF Musk is thinking? Has he lost his mind?
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You’re probably happier for staying off the platforms.
On Musk, he’s either a genius playing seven dimensional chess, and we’ll all see his master plan come to fruition eventually, or he’s a guy who got lucky and struck it rich, and has now pushed that luck too far. Right now I have to lean toward the latter explanation, particularly when reading that he’s had a fetish for the letter X for a long time. (Which fits. He did name his rocket business SpaceX after all.)
https://mashable.com/article/musk-x-twitter-paypal
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It looks like we can stick a forX in Twitter – it’s done.
I’m beginning to wonder if he is also destroying SpaceX too with Star Ship. If he gets it to work after backing out a lot of bad ideas he tested in the first launch, I wonder if it will turn out to be the equivalent of the Titan submersible when I read about the thin stainless steel hull. There was also probably a good reason NASA never tried to put 33 engines in a single stage. I think they are also exploring some novel concepts with heat shields and reentry.
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Yeah, I don’t know. It’s hard to argue that SpaceX hasn’t injected a lot of much need innovation into the space business, which had become so risk averse that little to no real technological progress was happening. SpaceX has always been willing to take risks, which is how they got where they are. The whole company was in fact one giant risk from the beginning.
Which makes it hard to square with Musk’s performance at Twitter. Has SpaceX succeeded because of his leadership? Or in spite of it? In both cases he’s taken risks. Maybe the difference is there’s always been a corrective feedback loop at SpaceX, something that appears to be mostly missing with Twitter.
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Bluesky? Sure.
I got on the list but …
I recall back in 2004 or 5 when Gmail was invite only, I had to beg a friend to get in.
Threads is without intimacy. Just more noise from the Din of the Dumb.
Slack for friends? (I started my own slack, wasn’t hard. Limited # of people though.) GithubBuddies? Discord? I started my own STOF team too…
It all feels like highschool is over. Time to put away those childish toys and grow up. But… I hear aging men are the least likely to find new friends and most likely to put a bullet in their ear.
Club name The Bullet in the Ear Club.
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Awesome. It’s yours. I’ll email it to you.
I remember the early Gmail days and working to score an invite, with everyone promising to invite each other if we scored first. I also remember wondering in the months or years afterward if they were ever going to move it out of beta, or decide to yank the whole experiment (as they’ve done with other services).
Threads adding the Following tab helps on the intimacy thing. (Tap the logo to get it as an option. You might have to force quit the app and restart to see it.) But they really need a big screen version. And a decent search capability.
I know a lot of people who love Discord, but I’ve struggled to make it work. I suspect it’s just a learning curve. I don’t know why these services don’t all offer a tips and tricks page to get people on the right foot.
Yeah, finding and keeping connections as we get older is the thing. I sucked at it even in my younger days, and I’m worried what happens if I finally do make it to retirement without work to force interactions.
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I like the idea of being able to build your own algorithm for whatever things you, personally, want to see. I don’t have the technical skills to do that, of course, but if BlueSky (or somebody else) can dumb it down enough for people like me to use, that could be really great.
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Even for someone with the skills, it currently looks like a fair amount of work (and expense if it has to be hosted somewhere). More than I’d want to sink in for the result, even if my own skills weren’t hopelessly rusty. Ideally it should reach the point of being no more complicated than following a search on Google News.
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