Where are we all in the social media world?
It’s not at all clear where the social media drip feed is at these days.
Here’s where you can find me on the web these days:
- Parking Lot (this weblog published since 2002)
- You can subscribe to this blog by entering your email in the window on the right hand sidebar.
- The RSS feed for Parking Lot.
- Linked In
- Mastodon
- Bluesky.
It’s all coming apart isn’t it? The social media landscape has become fragmented and disjointed. The main sites that still dominate the global system are starting to lose functionality. I have a love/hate relationship with social media, but these days the love is waning quickly. And so, I’m wondering where everyone is and what you’re using these days. Here’s my setup.
I have been on Facebook for a long time. In 2010 I worried that Facebook was becoming my blog as it was easy to cross post there and the discussion was much more engaging and robust. My primary concern was all of the great discussion happening there was happening inside a walled garden and that these great conversations were REALLY hard to find again as Facebook’s search and non-existent archiving systems meant that I could probably never find what I was looking for. I go to comment threads on my blog all the time, even some that are decades old. In 2019, I saw the fruition of Facebook’s ever more tightening of its control on content and the disastrous results of the algorithms that have guided fascism and hate into the mainstream all around the world. I can no longer automatically cross-post to Facebook, but I still have a presence there and you will find a link to this post there, with a general plea that you come back to the blog to discuss it.
The only real reason I still use Facebook is to keep up to date on my community’s Facebook group. But that is becoming a tiring litany of a few shrill voices complaining constantly about things with hardly any community building going on. A much better use of my time would be to show up at the pub once a week and catch up with friends. So I’m thinking of purging Facebook completely from my diet and just posting blog links there.
Twitter was tailor made for me. It was started by the guy that started Blogger and it took me a while to understand it as a micro-blogging platform and a marvellous source of real time news and experience. My use of twitter has changed through the years and I acquired about 4500 followers without really trying. It was a marvellous place to follow marginalized voices and for the past five or so years I only added feeds from BIPOC folks, queer folks, or women and that has radically shifted the view of the world I get. Sadly most of those voices have fallen silent in the past year as Elon Musk’s destruction of the app has resulted in the amplification of the voices I was trying to hear from less. Hate is now ubiquitous and reporting and blocking is a futile waste of time. Alos, many news organizations pulled away from twitter in the past year and the algorithms have destroyed it. My main twitter account is @chriscorrigan and there I post links to the blog and still amplify some interesting things, but since twitter disallowed the automatic positing of content from WordPress, my interest there is also waning. I have other accounts I run for a local soccer team that I am a part of and those accounts have been important ways we market the team and support our players. Increasingly our players have moved away from twitter and so this app is becoming less and less relevant. Still, it anchors a misfit community of people who love and are interested in lower level Canadian women’s and men’s soccer, and without it at this point there is really no other way to stay engaged.
I never really got into Linked It and it’s yet another algorithm driven networking site. Of late it has been a more interesting place to drop in on because there are some professional communities of practice that exist there. But it’s like going to a job fair to look for new ideas. It is so transactional and I can’t really get the din of hustle out of my ears when I’m scrolling there, so it doesn’t hold my interest. However, I still post links to blog posts there on my page.
Mastodon
I joined Mastodon during last year’s great twitter exodus. I like it a lot. It is now the place that I use as a micro blog, and on and off I will compile links from my Mastodon page and publish them here. It is the closest thing to a 2002 blog I have found and it doesn’t have an important role in my sharing ecosystem. However, not a lot of folks are there, and it tends to be hard to figure out how to use at first. Nevertheless, it is not a corporate-owned site, there are no ads and as a part of the Fediverse (a self-organized network of web sites and applications) it tends to be a much nicer experience than being subjected to content an algorithm wants to feed me.
Bluesky
I just joined Bluesky and this will be my first post there. Because it looks and feels so much like twitter, it may well fill the niche, but I suspect that it is going to be a while until we see something with widespread use acting as a public commons. Apps and sites that run in the Fediverse SHOULD be that commons but I suspect that it will take private capital to scale something that everyone uses so ubiquitously, and that’s not really a commons at all. Private capital eventually wants an ROI so it remains to be seen what that it will be. I do think also, that folks have moved on from twitter like apps and that the way we are all using social media is changing.
Net News Wire
That brings me to old faithful: the RSS feed reader. Since it was invented, RSS has been the bext standard out there for creating one’s own feeds and channels of content. All WordPress and Blogger sites and Substacks and Medium pages are RSS enabled. Using a tool like NetNewsWire to aggregate these sites and create a scroll gives me the best content. If I have time to spend reading online content, I will read my NNW feeds. I have feeds for blogs related to my professional work, to music, jazz guitar lessons, soccer, and critically important, news. With Facebook and Twitter going silent with respect to Canadian news, I get my fix through the RSS feeds that news organizations publish, along with a daily listening to the CBC. I hope that mainstream news organizations will reincarnate their RSS feeds again. It may be a geeky cul-de-sace for us pre-Facebook web users, but nothing has beaten RSS for delivering great content. All that remains is for people to create it outside of the walled gardens. You can subscribe to this site’s RSS feed here.
Everything else
I use Instagram a little to stay in touch with our TSS Rovers soccer players, because that’s what they use. I was too old to get on Snapchat, and I’m not down with any other social media apps. It’s getting to be too much as it is, and I find myself increasingly only publishing to these places and not engaging. THIS is the place to engage.
So if you are out there on any of these sites, or you know some great sites, feeds, pages or accounts that we should all be following, drop them in the comments. I’m curious what you are using these days.
Thanks Chris, great question. I used to be on FB, Instagram and Twitter but I closed my accounts years ago to remove the distraction. I don’t miss them. Fond memories of what Twitter used to be ten years ago. Now I only have linkedin and Substack. I highly value the professional community on LinkedIn but don’t love the platform itself. The algorithm seems to have got worse at gatekeeping me from the content and conversations I’m here for. In contrast, Substack is nice and simple: if you’re interested in something, subscribe to it and you’ll see every new post, every time. Best of all though: real human contact and relationships away from social media.
Yes. Substack is nicely leading the way back to blogging. And it allows for revenue generation without ads for those that choose that. And it publishes RSS feeds which I REALLY appreciate.
Gave up on Facebook, Twitter and the Twannabes years ago, and never regretted it for a moment. Only ‘social’ screen time is spent on email (mailing lists regularly pruned), Zoom, RSS (using Protopage, also regularly pruned) for newsfeeds, and my blog. I’ve concluded that time I spent on any other media was simply ego-stroking, and in the long run a complete waste of time that could have been better spent.
Threads…
Nah. 1. It’s another Facebook product. 2. It needs to be tied to my Instagram account which I only use for a specific purpose.
I deleted all of my social media accounts a while back and don’t miss them. I too use NetNewsWire and RSS and still love blogging as much as ever.
Similar to above (err, below): left all social media – apart from Linked In which is nominally, very nominally, relevant for work, but is increasingly spammed with 3rd party agency pitches: “Hi [FIRST NAME][LAST TIME], love what you are doing… ” [sic]
Instead use time to nurture one-to-one or very small group connection with non-fictional friends on WA.
It would be lovely to play some music together again.
Yes. Was thinking the same. That would also be a great use of time clawed back!
I second your feelings on RSS – it stops me from hopping between websites, gives my newsfeed a uniform look, and my reader (RSS Guard) allows me to filter and highlight what I should(n’t) read, according to my own terms.
With respect to social media, the Fediverse (and especially Mastodon) has taken over my desktop and my mind. What I like best there is that it takes a subtle effort to build one’s circles, an effort that self-proclaimed “refugees” from other platforms won’t invest for long. Those who do put that little effort in ultimately stay, and make the Fediverse a much better environment. What I also like a lot is that house rules a) vary from instance to instance, and b) actually get enforced; this makes “freedom of speech ? freedom a reach” a much welcome reality.
LinkedIn is the only corporate “social” network I’m still on, because it’s an auto-updating address book. From time to time, I politely like contributions of others there, but it’s more like watering long-forgotten plants, out of regret. I stay away from the likes of Bluesky as well, because no matter how nice they look at the beginning, enshittification is guaranteed and I haven’t got the frustration tolerance anymore to conribute, only to watch the inevitable happen.
Great observations.
Thanks for this post. Always interesting to read what others are doing. I deleted all mine now about 18 months ago keeping only my WordPress blog and a YouTube channel that I recustomised by making hundreds of my learning and development videos private and only publicising my book reviews.
Not being on social media has freed up my headspace considerably. I’ve built more in-person connections in my local community which have been real and fun. I’ve read more books than in previous years. I feel calmer and more creative. At times, I do get the odd sense that I’m an “outsider” not knowing what’s happening in the land of social media but in all honesty, it seems like people are just talking about Elon Musk, X, AI, ChatGPT and frankly, it leaves me cold.
I entertain thoughts of getting back on the socials but within milliseconds, I’ve lost interest.
It’s surprising to people when they learn I’m not using them. They think I’ve never used them and that I hate technology. That’s not the case.
Imagine my surprise when I tell them, “no, I used to teach people how to use social media for networking and professional development but now, I simply don’t participate in it anymore and I feel better for it”.
Thank you for this story!
Definitely at good time to take inventory, especially in this TL:DR (too long, didn’t read or watch) era.
I maintain a Facebook account just for family & personal stuff.
Curious about Threads so opened an account because it was easy to do. Also my kids got me into VR gaming so in the Metaverse. Observing more than active.
For professional connections use LinkedIn mainly to monitor weak signals. Find it going a bit sideways since it’s not the best platform for debates.
I have several Slack workspaces but rethinking its usefulness. When their free plan switched to 90 days only postings, their value for tracking history dropped significantly.
I started Mastodon about the same time you did, Chris. But honestly haven’t done much with it.
Instead, I invested my time rewilding my website http://www.gswong.com.
I use a software product called TheBrain to share publicly what’s happening in the professional side of my head. When I chat with colleagues, it’s much easier to share my thinking by sending them a URL.
Part of the rewilding was abandoning WordPress and moving over to Google domains.
I have a Twitter (X) account but really only used it when I ran a WordPress plug-in. X is on the backburner for me now.
A key interest of mine is Geopolitics and trying to make sense of the real world. So I have paid subscriptions with Feedly, Medium, Ground News, Nebula, Curiosity Stream.
Interesting tool you’re using there. I don’t think your site publishes RSS feeds though, or does it?
I don’t think it publishes RSS feeds but I’ll look into it.
My son did all the setting up at Google domains so I’ll ask him.
That would be great. I’m trying to champion tools that release content to the commons. Truly rewilding.
I learned it’s nothing to do with Google domains but with the web host. When I was using WordPress it was able to publish RSS feeds. We switched over to Google Sites which, to this date, doesn’t have RSS capabilities.
The other thing I’m tracking down is if TheBrain software can publish RSS.