So now we are exploring the next wave of social media life. Twitter is about three weeks from going full $8chan. Instagram remains as compromised as ever by Facebook’s ongoing attempt to cram it full of ripoffs of everything they couldn’t buy. And yet, when most people announce the diminution of their Twitter presence, they point to Insta to find them. Not Facebook or Snapchat, not Mastodon, not any other legacy service or quickly-promoted alternative. And it drives home the point that six years ago, as I recoiled from the arrival of revanchist Confederacy, Insta was the only social medium that felt safe or desirable.
The problem is, now it’s a junk heap. Way too many ads, algorithmic timeline, a constant effort to force their TikTok ripoff on you now that they’ve given up on trying to make their YouTube ripoff happen and their Snapchat ripoff has become table stakes for everybody…and honestly, that ripoff as table stakes in Signal has inadvertently created just what I wanted. Cross-platform, ephemeral, no ads or algorithms, just stuff from your friends…the only problem becomes getting your friends to install Signal and then to use the Stories feature. So far, I think I have maybe two other people posting to Stories and at most maybe three or four more even looking at it.
This is the problem: we use social media for different things. Thing one is to keep up with friends – the group chats in macro. This is what Stories is for, what original recipe Insta did better than anything, and once you limit it to friends and not influencers or celebrities or what have you, it can still do the job. So could Signal, or maybe even Pixelfed, or iCloud Photo Sharing, or…the problem, as always, is getting all your friends to that one thing, and it’s been a decade since it was possible to get everyone on something new. But let’s put a pin in that and come back.
Second thing is entities you don’t know but want to follow. I’m thinking mainly of sports teams here, and not big ones – the San Jose Giants or Santa Cruz Warriors, or my second division Scottish football club (Mon Ye Ton!), or the community of Vanderbilt fandom that I fell into a decade ago. It’s almost the sort of thing you could replace by piping their Twitter feed into RSS, because you don’t necessarily interact as such…but then, you don’t want to open your phone on Saturday lunchtime and be hit with 120 unread tweets in your RSS either.
Then there’s the news. Like it or not, the media lives for Twitter and as such, it’s the first stop for rip-and-read on anything that’s happening. Sometimes this is amazingly fun, especially when it’s of the “from the jaws of Hell will we get these jokes off” variety. Sometimes it’s just depressing AF. And it can go from one to the other very quickly (e.g. the Best Of Dying Twitter account) but rarely goes the other way.
And this is where I run into the problem with Mastodon: it’s way too much of door number 3, none of door number 2, and not nearly enough of door number 1. My friends aren’t there. Oh, some of them have accounts, and some even post, but they aren’t there as the primary social media outlet. There are some people I could keep up with in a satisfactory fashion just from Twitter, or just from Insta, or even just from Signal (barely) but right now, maybe one person I know is pig-committed to Mastodon, and that’s not enough.
Thing is, the ship has sailed on Twitter. I wasn’t kidding about s4ep5 of Man In The High Castle: the war is over. We lost. The Nazis are in control, and they literally own the battle space. The only question left on Twitter is how bad it has to get for you to leave for good, and I guess we’ll find out in the next few weeks. But in the meantime…who’s going where? Tumblr is owned by the same folks as WordPress and more people have it than remember, although I haven’t posted there in literally years and I don’t know if ActivityFed would be enough to make it viable again (maybe? It always seemed like the natural replacement for LiveJournal, with options for long form text or quick posts or pictures or all manner of microblogging). Instagram is mostly almost viable if you go through a browser rather than the app, although it’s a pain in the ass to post that way. I’m spreading the good news of Signal to almost no avail, and I’m still too old for TikTok or Snapchat…
I guess at some point I need to make a list of who I really need to keep up with, where they are, draw the flowchart, and then try to press people into just a couple of things. It might be a fool’s errand, but then we have established what kind of fool I am.