When Elon Musk bought Twitter he signed the start of the Social Media giant’s implosion. A decade earlier Murdoch had done the same thing to MySpace. In the end he sold MySpace for a fraction of what he had bought it for. We could cry, and bemoan the loss of Twitter but we could also look around, and see what has happened. For years I said that I wanted to leave Twitter, but no one else did, because despite all of its flaws, it had critical mass.
For years I felt comfortable tweeting as myself for two reasons. The fist reason is that we met up so often than tweeting under my actual name made sense. The second reason is that it was a network of friends of friends and we were seldom, if ever trolled. That changed during the pandemic so I chose to tweet under one pseudonym, before another, and then another. The reason is that I felt that I was going to be attacked by people online, if they knew who I was.
Within the last two days I saw a headline that is either amusing or tragic. The headline is that Instagram is creating a twitter clone, or even a Twitter competitor. This is amusing, or tragic, because Twitter and Facebook have always been competitors. You had the network of strangers that became friends, with Twitter, and the network of uni friends that became estranged years after graduating with Facebook. Chronological
Both of them had chronological timelines with people conversing with each other.
Mastodon is a federated social network where people can join a server, based on their interests in tech and more. Most people join the servers that are open and easy to join but in doing so we have communities that grow, without becoming communal. I am on at least three different Mastodon servers.
Instances I am on Mastodon.social, Techhub.social and Calckey.social and so far my favourite is Calckey.social because that’s where I got the strongest sense of community.
When I heard about Substack Notes I felt an interest in the project. I liked the idea of a site where we could write long form posts on one side, and short form posts on the other. I liked the idea of having conversations with people and creating new connections. That’s why I use social media and that’s what makes social media social, rather than a news website or some other form of website.
It is the turn of the Washington Post to discuss whether people are happier after leaving social media. As with every other article I have skimmed on the topic it discusses addiction and more without discussing the reason for which social media might be bad for one’s mental health. Remember that social networks, discussion groups, and collaborating with people in different rooms, countries, timezones is normal, and has been for decades.
The Goal of the BBC is to Inform, educate and entertain. The aim of Public Service Broadcasters is to provide people with reliable, accurate information that is not biased, that is neutral, in so far as is possible. Recently with the Far Right getting into positions of power, to control the Radio Television Suisse, the BBC and many other broadcasters and media outlets the need for theory of knowledge, history and Media Studies has become essential.
The web was decentralised for a long time. The internet and social networks were designed around different niches. We had niches for people that did sports in the same area of Switzerland, that wanted to discuss a variety of topics, for music lovers and more. The change brought on by MySpace, Twitter, ICQ, Facebook and other projects is that it centralised all those communities so that everyone was in different communities, on three or four social networks.
Around a decade and a half ago I grew tired of seeing blog headlines that said “The top ten blah blah”, “Three signs that …” and more. It grew tiring to see all those headlines, to a point where it generated the term clickbait. The idea of a headline being written to attract people to a click where there was no content behind it.
Today I worry that the juvenile behaviour and attitude of social media, and to some degree mainstream media, is making it hard to have meaningful adult conversations.
Twitter went down and I didn’t notice, yet again. According to The Verge it has been down five times in five weeks. It goes down so regularly that it feels as if they have allowed the Netflix Chaos Monkey to run freely around Twitter code. They say that they need to rewrite the entire site.
Twitter had plenty of downtime many years ago but these were growing problems that were eventually resolved.