I’ve been hanging around internet communities for a long time now. Usenet, Yahoo! Groups, IRC, Livejournal, and all the other places to hang out on the early internet. It’s easy to get nostalgic for those days before we were algorithmically spoon-fed cat videos, cleaning ‘hacks’, and hyper-speed cooking videos ending with an oozing chocolate or cheese ‘money shot’, and conveniently forget the never-ending flame wars and general bad behaviour the internet has always seemed to bring out of the most mild-manner netizen. Those early days were always in flux – whole communities would often up and migrate to the latest thing, usually leaving defunct profiles forgotten and fossilizing until either the site went offline or were transferred to increasingly dodgy owners. People weren’t so concerned about digital footprints and online privacy back then… In the mid-2000s the landscape changed completely with the launch of Facebook and Twitter. Both started life quite small, but soon ballooned, making what was once a niche side of online life mainstream. Twitter, in particular, managed to have an impact beyond its user base, becoming an almost real time feed of what was going on around the world. The trouble is that once online communities reach a certain size, social norms become stretched to the limit, and it is beyond any moderation scheme to balance free-speech v acceptable behaviour. It was inevitable that social media would become a toxic hellscape, which appears to have hastened the polarization of society with information overload, ‘deep fakes’, ‘culture wars’ and the endless need for fact checking… If you’re going to venture into the digital badlands, it’s useful to have a bit of a travel guide…
Facebook is probably the one that started the modern era of social media, and it is showing its age. It’s the site that everyone and their grandparents are on, but hardly anyone posts to. Almost unusable without some way of controlling the ads and recommendations. On the odd occasion something is posted, you can guarantee someone will be negative within 10 comments. Conversation threading is, as is common to most social media platforms, rudimentary at best, which makes keeping track of things virtually impossible. Like all Meta platforms, there’s a lot of overlap with their other products (Messenger, WhatsApp, Threads and Instagram). Honestly, I’m not sure what Facebook is for these days…
Instagram is Facebook’s cooler sibling. Manages to attract a younger crowd than Facebook, but suffers rather from encouraging an over-curated and unrealistic view of life. Morphed from an image centric platform, to more video and ‘reels’ content, presumably with the aim of competing with TikTok (though the conspicuous consumption is toned down somewhat and the more harmful content does seem to get moderated away). The 90-second limit to Instagram videos has led to a very specific style – lots of high speed cooking or gardening pieces with floating captions. Catnip to marketing departments because the algorithm appears to be able to accurately predict the type of content users will engage with.
X (née Twitter)
Twitter has long been a dumpster fire, and Elon Musk’s acquisition seems to have been an exercise in throwing on kerosene because the flames are pretty. The algorithm here seems to be designed specifically to generate outrage under the guise of ‘sparking discussion’. The toxic environment has driven a lot of people away, but somehow it keeps on going…
Bluesky
Touted as a reinvention of Twitter, from pretty much the founding team, but aiming to improve on the original. A decentralized platform (but nothing else uses the protocol yet) with which aims to show users content based on a mix of interests and engagement. In reality, it will, like other platforms, easily lead you down a rabbit hole of similar content. The adult content moderation appears to work quite well (I suspect some machine learning from community moderation is involved), which is fortunate as there are a lot of dick pix! Discovery is horrible – you are very much at the mercy of its ‘Discover’ and ‘For You’ feeds. It originally claimed not to need hashtags, but as most of the users have migrated from Twitter they get used by default and are now properly supported. The community is rather insular, probably due to the invite only beta phase, and does not tolerate violation of unwritten community norms. Block early and often seems to be the general culture, which is odd for a site with little in the way of privacy control.
Fediverse
The Fediverse has been around a while now, with frequent surges in membership whenever X becomes more of a hellscape. It’s very different from other social media as it is a collection of services, some more social-media-like (e.g. Mastodon) and others similar to big services like YouTube (PeerTube). The glue that sticks the Fediverse together is the ActivityPub protocol, which lets users in one platform subscribe to users in a different one. In theory it gives users a lot of control over what content they get – for example you can follow hashtags, meaning if people use them you get a good non-algorthimic way of discovering content, and easily filter your feed based on hashtags and keywords. There is, however, a tendency for the smaller servers to ‘de-federate’ whole servers. Some of these de-federations could be considered perfectly reasonable (Truth Social and a few other far-right networks that have taken advantage of the open-source nature of Mastodon for example), while others are more verging on the censorous (for example a lot of small servers don’t federate with Meta’s Threads or journalist focussed instances). I do think the Fediverse has a lot of potential – the openness means that it isn’t *just* one thing and it’s just as easy to Federate a long form blog (like this one) as it is to microblog on Mastodon (or any of the compatable forks like Hometown) or post videos on PeerTube and for people subscribe to that content.
Final Thoughts
I think the days of centralised Social Media are on the wane. Hopefully The Guardian leaving X is a sign of things to come, but as the landscape becomes more fragmented hopefully interoperable and extensible systems become the norm. Of course the trouble with open systems is that is very hard to monetise them, which means they are unlikely to go mainstream and remain nich community hubs, but one can dream…